Updike review Adam Begley has written an 'exemplary biography

Five years after his death, John Updike's life is well told here but the rescue of his literary reputation must wait

This respectful and sympathetic biography of John Updike (1932-2009) arrives just at the time, about five years after his death, when Updike may be most in need of championing. An immediate posthumous decline in revered authors' reputations, once they are no longer around to command reverence, is common. Updike's later work, unlike that of his great contemporary Philip Roth, was not reputation-enhancing: novels such as Gertrude and Claudius (2000) and Villages (2004) fell short of his best and may even have cast retrospective shadows over his more feted achievements.

He never entirely shook off the charge that he was, in the critic Harold Bloom's words, "a minor novelist with a major style", that, in spite of the gorgeous particularity of his prose, he had, as another hostile critic alleged, "nothing to say". Then there was his alleged misogyny. David Foster Wallace called him "a penis with a thesaurus"; Updike's female characters, some feminist critics complained, were merely objects of a priapic male's gaze.

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