John Updike’s unparalleled streak of success

“There never was a good biography of a good novelist,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. He is too many people if he is any good.”

More than most, the writer of fiction is keenly aware of the different personalities that uneasily coexist within himself: he may be a regular guy to his neighbors and poker buddies, an icy perfectionist and ruthless competitor to his literary coevals, a needy, neurotic mess to his mate, a bold, ardent lover to his mistress, a remote father to his children.

The novelist’s trade secret is that his fictional characters are often no more than exaggerations of various aspects of his own personality.

Take John Updike, who is the subject of a judicious new biography by literary critic Adam Begley. Updike’s most famous character, the former high school basketball star Rabbit Angstrom, has more in common with his creator than it would seem.

Rabbit is a barely educated washout who lucks into money, an impulsive Middle American redeemed by a capacity for happiness. Updike was a disciplined overachiever blessed with a panop-

BIOGRAPHY: NOVELIST brilliant and comfortable in their own skin, Updike was highly aware of his effect on other people, and enjoyed confounding their expectations of him. Begley says that as a young man, Updike, who came from rural Pennsylvania, liked to play the bumbling provincial to sophisticated New Yorkers.

For those who prefer their literary types on the tortured side— dogged by penury, obscurity, writer’s block, alcoholism, envy and closet homosexuality (more like Updike’s frenemy John Cheever, in other words)— Begley’s biography will be a disappointment.

Updike’s life was an unbroken success story: He received a full ride to Harvard and a book contract when he was still an undergraduate, ascended to the post of staff writer for The New Yorker in his early 20s, became a millionaire in his 30s with the success of his sexually explicit novel “Couples,” twice won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Award, and was effortlessly prolific, until his death in 2009, as a writer of fiction and a poet, art critic and book reviewer.

Updike’s prime not only coincided with the apogee of American power and affluence but with the its high noon of literary culture.