Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Updike, John (Vol. 139) - Denis Donoghue (review date 5 March 1989)

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Denis Donoghue (review date 5 March 1989)

SOURCE: “‘I Have Preened, I Have Lived,’” in New York Times Book Review, March 5, 1989, p. 7.

[In the following review, Donoghue offers a positive assessment of Self-Consciousness.]

When a memoir by a writer as well known as John Updike appears, it inevitably arouses curiosity. But this is not a tell-all autobiography. It consists of six discontinuous chapters: total recall is evidently not proposed. Mr. Updike's method is Lytton Strachey's in “Eminent Victorians” to intuit a life by taking samples of it, making forays into its hinterland and asking the reader to assume that gaps between the specified items could readily be filled by more of much the same substance.

John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pa., of parents neither rich nor poor but Depression-shadowed enough to construe life mostly as difficulty. His father taught unhappily in the local high school and...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Joseph Epstein (essay date January 1983)
   2. Gail Godwin (review date 4 June 1984)
   3. Katha Pollitt (review date 23 June 1984)
   4. D. J. Enright (review date 2 February 1987)
   5. Edward Abbey (review date 28 March 1987)
   6. Richard Gilman (review date 20 June 1988)
   7. Denis Donoghue (review date 5 March 1989)
   8. Elizabeth Hardwick (review date 18 May 1989)
   9. John F. Fleischauer (essay date Summer 1989)
   10. Victor K. Lasseter (essay date October 1989)
   11. George J. Searles (review date 1–15 October 1990)
   12. Anthony Quinn (review date 26 October 1990)
   13. Barbara Leckie (essay date Spring 1991)
   14. Matthew Wilson (essay date Spring 1991)
   15. Martin Amis (review date 10 November 1991)
   16. Barbara Kingsolver (review date 6 February 1994)
   17. John Bayley (review date 12 May 1994)
   18. Jay Parini (review date 6 November 1994)
   19. Julian Barnes (review date 28 January 1996)
   20. A. O. Scott (review date 12 February 1996)
   21. Margaret Atwood (review date 12 October 1997)
   22. Tom LeClair (review date 3 November 1997)
   23. Robert Boyers (review date 17 November 1997)
   24. James Shapiro (review date 25 October 1998)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. John Updike