The arc of literary giant John Updike’s life emerges in these daily letters to family, friends, editors, and lovers—an outpouring over six decades, from his earliest consciousness as a writer to his final days.
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.
