John Updike’s Intimate Voice

Seated on his mother’s lap in a 1933 photograph, the infant John Updike already looks like himself, with one cocked eyebrow and the first iteration of that famously unruly hair. Perhaps he already sounded like himself, using compound sentences to request a bottle or nappy change. In any case, the picture, reproduced in the wonderfully copious John Updike: A Life in Letters, seems a handy emblem of the author’s precocity. Updike did everything early: marriage, literature, fatherhood, fame. What’s more, he appeared to carry it all off with such ease as to make his contemporaries feel like late-blooming clods by comparison.