What an enormous and beneficent bounty these letters are for anyone who cares about this country’s literature during the last half century ... Because they are so approachable, are not a bad introduction to his work for a young person who has not read him. I liked them for the opposite reason ... It’s always memorable when this well-disposed man shows a bit of fang ... You may wonder what possibly there is left for him to say. The answer these letters provide is, well, almost everything.
We experience Updike himself with even more candor than he displayed in his first-person essays ... The letters illuminate the consistency of Updike’s fiction aesthetic ... We find acrimony aplenty during the move from one marriage to the next, yet Updike’s tenderness, a natural instinct for conciliation, always re-emerges ... As these letters make plain, this ability to marvel and thank was anything but a hindrance to greatness. As much as anything else, it was Updike’s willingness to take America to his bosom...that guarantees his permanent place in this country’s literature.
Updike’s letters could constitute the outline for a never-published Updike novel. The writing is variously winking, earnest, desperate, oversexed, and ambitious ... Updike is, as ever, captivating on the page ... His letters to Mary in this era are silly, intimate, and affectionate—bittersweet to read now, with the knowledge that their relationship was doomed ... John Updike was a writer, one of the all-time greats. That’s all he ever wanted to be. But first, and forever, as Selected Letters makes clear again and again, he was a reader.
At the outset, one feels a sense of fatigue and even dread about the climb ahead. By the middle, I was engrossed. And as I came to the last pages, I was surprised to feel a welling up of grief ... After 800 pages of chattering life with its sunny days and setbacks, closing the volume brings on a sudden quiet. As with his novels, the experience takes time to cohere, but when it does, one realizes Updike has built, line by line, an enclosed world. In these letters, as in his fiction, he never stopped trying to make life look composed, even as it came apart.
A prime motive for perusing the letters of a famous literary person is to see what that person had to say about—or had to endure from—his contemporaries. Here Updike does not disappoint ... The final twenty or so pages of these letters are harrowing ... Precise and moving.
Such a lord of language was he that even the notoriously grudging Vladimir Nabokov afforded him a meed of praise ... From the start he was incapable of writing a bad sentence, although the jaunty tone and frequent longueurs of the early letters do test the reader’s patience ... Towards the end he made a glum self-assessment: 'I have fallen to the status of an elderly duffer whose tales of suburban American sex are hopelessly yawnworthy period pieces.' Perhaps so; but he wrote such prose as to make the envious seraphim sigh.
John Updike: A Life in Letters, seems a handy emblem of the author’s precocity ... Updike simply had it: an instinctive feeling for the shape of American sentences, for the murmuring music of nouns and verbs and the way they could pin reality to the page.
It is almost a relief...to read [Updike's] letters and find that things weren’t that easy for Updike, that he was just as beset with struggles, anxieties and insecurities as other writers ... Hefty ... It is brilliant: riveting and essential for anyone remotely interested in Updike; shockingly salacious enough to enthral the remotely curious; and cleverly annotated for easy reading ... Blush-makingly explicit and silly in the daylight of print ... It feels painfully intrusive to be reading these raw, often desperate letters ... The best letters are those to his wives in the 1970s, where you realise that Updike’s greatness as a writer lies...in his ruthlessly honest psychological acuity.
The tone of voice in which these letters are written is singularly overriding; because of it, regardless of the content or the recipient (whether young or old, famous or obscure), they all sound pretty much alike. As the years went on, this voice achieved ever greater ease with itself. It became open, amiable, self-assured, wonderfully lucid, and brilliantly organized; it was also emotionally impenetrable. At almost no time, in reading these letters, do we stumble on a risky bit of soul-searching, a disheveled piece of self-knowledge, an inappropriate confession. At all times, we are in the presence of a writer who never loses sight of his gift for composition ... Updike’s pose of self-assurance, from an astonishingly early age, is really remarkable. Sometimes it makes him wise; mainly it makes him pompous ... Updike often said that, like most people, he wanted to know himself more openly and honestly than he did, but in fact, again like most people, it wasn’t true ... To the very largest degree, there isn’t a sentence in these letters that couldn’t be read from the steps of City Hall ... The bloodlessness—that is, the lack of felt life—that characterizes Updike’s New Yorker stories and suburban novels disappears in the Rabbit books, and the writing sinks to the level required for literary depth. Selected Letters of John Updike needed more of Harry Angstrom and less of William Dean Howells to become memorable.
