Updike by Adam Begley (Harper Collins)

Beribboned as a chief of staff, prolific as a Mongol prince—beloved, ripened, rich, at rest—John Updike died in hospice near his home in coastal Massachusetts on January 27, 2009. Some nineteen years before, near the end of the Rabbit tetralogy, the work on which his reputation will unquestionably rest, he had his hero muse about an author, recently deceased, who had “joined Roy Orbison and Bart Giamatti in that beyond where some celebrities like Elvis and Marilyn expand like balloons and become gods but where most shrivel and shrink into yellowing obituaries.”

Elvis and Marilyn or Orbison and Giamatti? Hemingway or Howells? By the time of his death, Updike might have suspected how doubtful his case had become. He had been the boy wonder of American letters in the 1950s and 1960s. Hired by The New Yorker practically straight out of college, as Adam Begley tells us in his new biography, he became a mainstay of its fiction section (and the best writer “The Talk of the Town” had ever seen) more or less immediately. From 1959 to 1971, he published The Poorhouse Fair, which won the Rosenthal Award; Rabbit, Run; The Centaur, which won the National Book Award; Of the Farm, a jewel of a novella; Couples, one of the signature novels of the late 1960s; Bech: A Book; and Rabbit Redux, which Begley justly calls his greatest work. He also wrote the lion’s share of the short fiction that, collected decades later in The Early Stories, prompted Lorrie Moore to remark that “it is quite possible that by dint of both quality and quantity,” Updike “is American literature’s greatest short-story writer.” In 1961, he published the first of some 375 book reviews for The New Yorker. In 1964, at the age of thirty-two, he was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters, our American Pantheon.

Yet already by the previous year, dissenters had begun to be heard. Updike’s mind was shallow (he had “very little to say”), his focus was narrow (all he wrote about was sex), his prose opulent, yes, but overripe and facile. He was not just prolific, he was too prolific, unwilling to run the risk of writer’s block by challenging himself. He may have been among the decade’s leading chroniclers, but the shifts in consciousness that we associate with the 1960s, especially the emergence of feminism, did not prove kind. (It didn’t help that he supported the Vietnam war, however reluctantly.) He was conventional, complacent, nostalgic; narcissistic, oversexed, misogynistic. As the country moved on—and with the large exceptions of Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), his work declined in quality if not in volume—he became a figure from another time, another America, out of touch and out of date, his epitaphs already written. To Harold Bloom’s oft-quoted remark that Updike was “a minor novelist with a major style,” David Foster Wallace added another, cited anonymously from a female friend: “a penis with a thesaurus.”

Only time will tell if Begley’s book becomes a final send-off or the start of its subject’s rehabilitation. Neither, I suspect. Updike’s prospects, in the near term, do not look any brighter than they did around the time that Wallace dropped his bomb in 1997 (or than those of Mailer and Roth, the other “phallocrats” he named in his indictment). Our cultural politics are still pretty much where they were at the time: shackled to our identity politics.

But Updike strikes me as the kind of writer who is going to be rediscovered, and who is going to keep being rediscovered. The time will come—in thirty or fifty or a hundred years—when the values of our own effulgent age will seem as odious as those of the 1950s (or for that matter, of the 1850s) do to us today. No one then will care how Updike did or didn’t vote. They will turn to him— readers will, and writers, I think, especially will—for what is permanently valid in his work: the virtuosity of his technique, his ability to craft a sentence, a scene, a story, to calibrate tones and modulate effects; the penetration of his eye, his gift for seeing things and seeing into minds; his brave, honest, unembarrassed frankness; and the sheer aesthetic pleasure of his prose.