On the letters – Nicola Shulman in TLS:

‘We’d know he was a writer because most of his correspondence is concerned with his writing. The letters are overwhelmingly directed to publishers, to magazine editors at his main outlet, the New Yorker, and elsewhere, and to other writers who have written to him about his own work. Taken together, they provide us with all the details of a writer’s responsibilities in those years when to be such a person was recognized as a position of societal consequence and moral influence. His correspondence defending the inclusion in Rabbit, Run (1960) of “obscene” words, deemed too indelicate for repetition in the letters themselves and referred to obliquely as “certain words”, returns us to that now quaint-seeming era when self-appointed moral warriors such as (in the UK) Mary Whitehouse picked at the cultural productions of the age with obscenity-seeking tweezers, plucking out offending scenes, words and body parts.
From the letters of the early 1960s, fame advances quickly. We’d know he was soon a very successful, important writer, and having to fence with the consequences of that: the interview requests, the invitations to give commencement speeches, write introductions, receive awards and be elevated to the tables of the elect. We see his numerous books fed into the turbine of literary fame and processed into more and ever more books (forty “special” editions produced by small presses and numerous heritage imprints from his mainstream publishers), all of which require his comment and consent. We see what it was to be a prince in the now vanished empire of the printed word, where a man’s “main line … as far as comfort goes”, that is to say, his principal source of income, could be derived from, of all things, reviewing books. It was accordingly a time when reviews mattered, and writers – many of whom now take the public line that they don’t read or consider them – read them and minded. One of Updike’s reviews, of Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock (1993), appears to have accelerated the end of Roth’s marriage and hastened his subsequent nervous collapse. Another “irrevocably pissed off” J. D. Salinger – enough for him to issue a protest from his otherwise sealed hermitage. David Foster Wallace’s critique of Updike’s Toward the End of Time(1997) in the New York Observer left the author aggrieved, as did Gore Vidal’s essay on him in this very paper, which the victim described as “particularly nasty”.’

(…)

‘You must read closely to know what Updike thought about anything beyond the integrity of his texts, the pre-eminence of which comes through loud and clear. The letters show a man of uncommon tact, kind to his children, jocular and polite with almost everyone, principally interested in his literary career and prepared, with only a shade of embarrassment, to adapt his opinions to please whomever he thinks can promote it. His compliments and thank-yous to this end (“I treasured, too, the Bloomingdale’s box”) are splendid, and should really have a book of their own, for the use, like eighteenth-century letter writing manuals, of clueless correspondents who find themselves chewing their pens when faced with this task. Of special interest are his compliments to other writers, which manage to look considered and bespoke while saying what would fit almost any novel by any author. The following could be handy for all your letters-to-writers needs: “Typically [insert surname of writer friend, ie Jones] Jonesian in its clarity, verve, sure-footed phrasing, lurking humor, and dramatic momentum”; or perhaps “[your] irresistible prose style … that moves us rapidly through a great complexity of actions and moods”.’

(…)

‘The fastidiousness and awkwardness infecting his love letters could, perhaps, be read as an expression of the misgivings about these affairs that he articulates elsewhere. But they also demonstrate a quality that exists across the personal correspondence, of parsimony and withholding, strangely at odds with the unstemmed impulse to fill the pages. When you compare almost any one of these to what he is capable of in his professional writing, you get a sense that he’s keeping back the good stuff for his published work, whether that is sentiment, description, insight, passion or the self-knowledge that makes his short stories about the decay of his first marriage, “The Maples Stories” (and particularly the development of Richard Maple, Updike’s vessel for his own thoughts on that unravelling), the place to go if you are interested in seeing his self-preserving stratagems exposed under a raking light. The letters are all efficiency, exclusion and conclusion, answers that show no workings-out. “In conclusion [to Martha]: I think of you constantly, pray for your ease. I am no longer entitled to the gaiety of my Australian letters, and yet do not intend to wallow in sadness either.”’

(…)

‘He knew it, and said as much in an uncharacteristically, for him, tumbledown construction: “I have been honest, by being, in my fiction – it has told things I didn’t admit”. In the letters, not so much. You will not find John Updike here.’

Read the review here.
A novelist should be in his fiction of course.

The irresistible prose style of Shulman moves us through a complexity of moods.

This is one the better hatchet jobs I’ve read in quite some while. Updike isn’t among us anymore, but he would have enjoyed it too, at least that’s what I hope.