Self-Consciousness

After reading this I'm surprised Mr. Updike isn't covered with skin cancer. I've enjoyed most all of Mr. Updike's fictional works. This is my first of his non-fiction. Recommended.

John Updike is arguably, with Saul Bellow, the greatest of living authors writing in English. This volume exemplifies his strengths. His evocation of growing up in middle-America is often quite beautiful. Yet this book is not a memoir in the conventional sense of a chronological account, but more of series of scenes and reflections from a full and satisfying life. Updike's moving account of his struggle with psoriasis and his marital difficulties is personal without degenerating into the narcissism of so much second-rate autobiography, even if he pays slightly more attention to his rakish period in the 1970s than we might strictly wish to know.Updike writes poignantly but with resolution of his lonely status as a liberal writer in the 1960s who did not lose his ideals as a liberal Democrat, in the traditional sense of that term, and thus who abjured the descent into extremism and anti-anti-Communism of many of his contemporaries. To have believed that the Vietnam War was imprudent and prosecuted by morally dubious means, yet known the noble cause that was at stake in it - namely, preventing a country from falling to a ferocious Communist tyranny - won Updike few friends and lost him many, yet his stance was an honourable and principled one. The final chapter of the book is, for me, the best. Updike writes particularly well of his liberal religious faith, which almost amounts to fideism. One can admire his honest wrestling with such questions without sharing his conclusions, and admire even more the quality of writing and personal reflection here expressed.

One of the main regrets of my five years in Shillington (ages 12-16) was that I did not realize that I was walking in the footsteps of one of the greatest authors of all time. John Updike's autobiography, especially as it concerns Shillington, was like reading a bit of my own life. He was an alter boy at the church that is behind my old Miller Street home. I was a busboy at the restaurant that used to be his doctor's office that used to be a house. He used to walk up New Holland Avenue to the cemetary, passing number 39, which would years later be a home (apartment) to me. The hallowed halls of Governor Mifflin Jr. High, where I labored from 7th to 9th grade, were once the halls of the old high school that Mr. Updike once passed through. I wonder if we shared the same locker? The old movie theater, in which I saw my first movie alone, still holds a special place in my history. But through my many walks up and down Philadelphia Avenue, I am saddened by the fact that I was never drawn to number 117. My visits to Shillington in the past decade have been unfortunately too brief, and even before reading Mr. Updike's autobiography I have wanted to return to retrace my old footsteps. However, the walk up and down Philadelphia Avenue will include a stop, a reverential pause, at number 117, the shadow of my life in Shillington.

For those who have always wanted to befriend an author who has brought them much joy, this book is a must. John Updike as honest as a friend can be climbs out of the pages of this book and I feel I know him. Who else would share back seat of car stories with you? Only a friend

If you like John Updike, and want to know more about the author behind the characters, this thoughtful auto-biography will offer you much insight into this outstanding American author. He goes back to visit Shillington, PA and thinks about his childhood and youth, his parents, and the town that seems to have more impact on his personality than subsequent experiences at Harvard, the New Yorker, first or second marriage or fatherhood. His contemplative eye was developed here, and he retains much of the bemused observer of the boy growing up in small town America around the time of WW2. Outstanding book, non-fiction, but filled with Updike prose and thoughfulness.