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track record. Between 1961 and 1983, The New Yorker published ten of her short stories. * In 1971, Houghton Mifflin published her novel, Enchantment (actually a series of linked stories, four of which had appeared in The New Yorker ); and a few months after her death in late 1989, The Predator , a collection of stories, six of them from The New Yorker , was published by Ticknor and Fields. * Updike, once he’d gone to work at The New Yorker , was active in helping to get his mother’s stories into the magazine; in fact, it’s very likely that without his help she would never have succeeded. As she told Bill Ecenbarger, with clear-eyed modesty, “I had only a little gift, but it was the only one I got.” She also told him, proudly, “Johnny knew it was possible to be a writer because he saw me trying.” *
    Her published stories are all frankly autobiographical, and almost all set in a farmhouse identical to the one where she was born in Plowville in 1904, the only child of John and Katie Hoyer. Her first book, Enchantment , tells her life story in fifteen overlapping first-person installments: her own birth and childhood, her schooling, her marriage, the birth of her only child (who becomes a famous writer), and so on. It’s the Updike-Hoyer household with a few minor alterations and embellishments and a great deal of spiritual reverb. In some of the earlier stories, when they were published in The New Yorker , the narrator’s name is Linda; the stories were presented, in other words, as the author’s memoirs. When she collected these stories in book form, Linda gave her alter ego the fanciful name of Belle Minuit, which matches her preoccupation with spells and omens, with various forms of “enchantment.” Her second book is about an aging widow with the more plausible name of Ada Gibson; Ada lives alone in an isolated farmhouse in Pennsylvania, visited occasionally by her only son, a celebrated illustrator who draws covers for The New Yorker . You might expect that the various family portraits executed by mother and son would cause some confusion, but actually they tend to corroborate rather than contradict one another. The fictional elements are almost always easy to spot, and the emotional currents (especially between mother and son) ebb and flow in synchronized patterns.
    Did John Updike learn the habit of writing autobiographically at his mother’s knee? She certainly set an example. Her sister-in-law, Mary Updike, who had been Edmund Wilson’s secretary at The New Republic , advised her as early as 1931 (a year before John’s birth) to write “straight fiction” (as opposed to essays) and to use “material from your life on the farm.” Linda took the advice; in fact, she didn’t even bother to change Plowville’s name. Both mother and son reproduced in intimate detail the family’s domestic arrangements. Two years after her death, at a reading in Pennsylvania, Updike noted in a wry tone that “one of the disadvantages of two people writing out of the same household is that you tend to overlap material.” He also revealed that his mother made a habit of showing him her stories. “I was really an editor before I was a writer,” he said, milking the situation for laughs. “From quite young I was asked to read her things and comment on them, a sort of wearisome but awesome responsibility for a child of ten.” He grew up, in other words, with the idea that it was perfectly natural to write stories about one’s family and one’s immediate neighborhood.
    And yet most of his mother’s energies did not go into writing autobiographical fiction. Her magnum opus (“frequently revised and never published,” as her son repeatedly pointed out) was a historical novel about Ponce de Léon. “There was a novel,” Updike recalled, “that slept in a ream box that had been emptied of blankness, and like a strange baby in the house, a difficult papery sibling, the manuscript was now and then roused out of