This summer I’m reading Adam Begley’s Updike. I find it addictive. Begley’s biographical readings of
Updike’s work are fascinating. For example, in his early chapters, he shows how
immersed Updike was in his beloved Pennsylvania geography (Plowville,
Shillington, Reading). He says of Updike’s great “The Happiest I’ve Been” (The New Yorker, January 3, 1959), “The
farm, the town, the city – when an adult John Nordholm looks fondly back on the
events of that night, Updike is taking us on a pilgrimage to all three of his
holy sites.” Updike, in his “On Literary Biography” (Due Considerations, 2007), described George D. Painter’s masterly Marcel Proust as “a way of
re-experiencing the novel [Proust’s Remembrance
of Things Past], with a closeness, and a delight in seeing imagined details
conjured back into real ones, that only this particular writer and his vast autobiographical masterpiece could provide.” Begley’s Updike
works the same way in relation to Updike’s writing - mirroring the fiction back into reality. I’m enjoying it immensely.
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