Introduction

Summary

John Updike … is probably the most significant young novelist in America.

—Peter Buitenhuis, 1963

In any reasonably discriminating age a young man of Mr. Updike's charming but limited gifts might expect to make his way in time to a position of some security in the second or just possibly the third rank of serious American novelists.

—John Aldridge, 1966

In Updike, one sees a certain cultural process in concentrated form: the accumulation of great formal, technical skill at one pole, and the severe weakening of the artist's understanding of history and social organization at the other.

—David Walsh, 2006

John Updike … is certainly one of the great American novelists of the 20th century.

—Martin Amis, 2009

These four statements lay out the central problem I wish to tackle in Becoming John Updike: Critical Reception, 1958–2010. Both early and late in his career, Updike was a controversial figure in American letters: for some, a major voice in fiction, for others a pretentious mannerist who substituted florid stylistic flourishes for substantive insight. A cursory examination of a random selection of reviews listed in Jack De Bellis and Michael Broomfield's John Updike: A Bibliography of Primary & Secondary Materials, 1948–2007 (2007) will confirm these generalizations. Certainly Updike is not the first writer to provoke widely divergent judgments among reviewers and the reading public, but the fact that he was recognized early by the academic community as a writer of some significance makes it worthwhile to see why these divergent judgments existed throughout Updike's career and how they may affect his future reputation.