A Review of Selected Letters of John Updike

Selected Letters of John Updike. Edited by James Schiff. New York: Knopf, Oct. 21st, 2025. 822 pp. $50.00. ISBN-13: 978-0-593-80155-0.

Long before I wrote My Iliad Odyssey, I wanted to be a novelist. A big reason I wanted to be a novelist was the work of John Updike.

My decade of Updike obsession started in 1999 when I picked up a used copy of Rabbit, Run after a decade of reverence for the modernists that extended back to college. Updike’s prose magically made mundane, middle-class American life into something transcendent. He seemed to love the world he was born into, which struck me as unique among the writers I’d enjoyed to that point. Updike could use words to reveal how lucky we all were, how smiled upon. From his prose, I gathered that to continually spin about what’s wrong with the world is just another way the world is wrong. Perhaps our pleasures and contentments can be seen as something of an argument for our way of life, ends in themselves and not endless reasons to tear down what is clearly not meant to be horrible. In short, maybe life is beautiful, and God wants us to like it here.

This break toward the celestial is on full display in this massive collection of letters spanning Updike’s life from childhood in small-town Pennsylvania in the 1940s to his death on 2009. I doubted my own sanity when requesting the advance reader copy. Its 822 pages made late summer trips to the beach a little more cumbersome.

Any trepidation at its size quickly melted away when I was under the throes of Updike’s gift, such as his chronicling of when his first child was born:

There, in a little crib all wrapped up with the head sticking up like a small grapefruit, was my daughter. I scarcely know how to begin a description. The enclosed sketch, made on the spot, skillful as it is, gives no notion of the radiance of the complexion, the peculiar intricacy of the nose, or the extraordinary flexibility of the mouth, which registers, rapidly and with much saliva, pleasure, serenity, disgust, fury, and other emotions too numerous to mention.

It seems a shame every young family doesn’t have a John Updike to sit in and describe the moment-by-moment treasures. Four Updike children followed in quick succession.

Updike had a sense of his literary purpose at a very young age. As an 18-year-old, in a letter to his family, he wrote something of a manifesto for his own approach to writing. “[W]e need not a man of great courage, willing to accept the scorn of society for his art (sic Joyce) but a man who will consciously and undeviatingly strive for the approval of his age, and, by doing, not define or criticize his age, but fulfill it.” Updike never saw himself as some kind of outsider in the mold of Joyce et al. whose job was to challenge his audience. Updike didn’t want to tear down his world. He wanted to use the talent and good fortune he was given and take it as far as it would go. He did that better than anyone.

After a brief stint as a “Talk of the Town” columnist for his beloved The New Yorker, Updike took his small family to Ipswich, Massachusetts, to live in the suburbs where he continued to write. His characteristic lyrical style is always there in his letters. He found nothing mysterious about his approach, as revealed to his writer mother in one of his frequent letters home. “Forget style. Any person expressing himself sincerely has style. Style is the syntactical arrangement a person’s way of looking at things compel him to take—no, not the way, the things.”

Updike’s own distinct prose style came as natural to him as falling out of bed. Anything but pointing out through words the things he loved was a pose. Staying true to that principle made him a gorgeous writer. What is linguistic mastery without a soul that cares about its subject?

Updike cared about far more than language. He loved his family, but he also loved other women. After a decade or so of something of an open marriage with his first wife Mary, he fell in love with Martha, and over the course of a few years, he divorced and remarried.

One of the perks of being a lover of John Updike was his ability to write a good love letter. In one such letter to Martha, he describes the shock of rereading his old letters to her as “a look at myself through a camera I didn’t know was taking pictures.” (456). If Updike wrote, as estimated by the book’s editor, 25,000 letters in his life, a good portion of them went to the romantic interests of his life. He eventually settled down with Martha in Massachusetts and kept out of trouble writing books, stories, reviews, and essays.

All of the usual complaints against Updike are fortified by this collection. He could be self-indulgent. One letter has him going over three versions of his signature, discussing the qualities of the various iterations. He could be politically incorrect. For a time, his letters featured the c-word to describe women’s anatomy. He had a knack for hanging on to his cat-bird position at The New Yorker, which paid well and could dictate writing careers. His letters to several different editors of that magazine span over 50 years. What I think people found most galling, however, was the fact that Updike wrote more beautifully about mundane American lives—their lives—than anybody who ever existed. Yes, his work appeared everywhere important for several decades—his byline as ubiquitous as a house fly. Even worse, he may have deserved it.

Such a blessed life eventually winds down, and Updike waxed nostalgic as the years passed. His letters (still on paper sent through the mail) started to emphasize all that was missing from contemporary society. “My impression,” he writes in 1994, “is that there is almost no sense, in writers under forty-five, of there having been a religious upbringing or that there is anything of a religious question hanging over human existence.” Religion was rarely at the forefront of Updike’s work, but the cosmos always had some role to play in the circumstances of the characters. God wasn’t the point, but God was there. When a story lacks that presence, how can it not feel less important? Updike needed that presence in the things he read, and he couldn’t avoid it in what he wrote.

For a guy who always seemed curious about this or that cultural event, Updike had no tolerance for the internet. He never sent an email, and he carried a jaundiced opinion of the mode’s effect on literature. “The Internet,” he writes in 2007, “is characterized by imprecision and groupthink—an illusion of fellowship is created without the reality of physical presence and copyeditors. It seeks the end of authorship.” What a threat to someone who’d spent 60 years amassing more printed matter than seemingly anyone in human history. The people of contemporary society now loved things he didn’t love—or worse, they didn’t love anything. He died in 2009 from lung cancer, griping about his “wretched writing” in the last letter of the collection.

Updike appreciated the role he got to play as America’s man of letters for the latter half the 20^th century. He knew how lucky he was, and he didn’t want to squander it. He recognized how he’d failed as a family man, and he did what he could to redeem himself to his ex-wife and children. He loved being American, and he struggled to tolerate those who could find nothing good to say about their shared homeland. He was happy enough much of the time so long as you didn’t bring up a negative review of his work. He was gifted, worked hard, and was rewarded at the level of literary king. I’m tempted to believe he’s the last person who will get to live such a life, but I’m not going to go there. If I did, would his writing have taught me anything?