For the consistency in describing a changing character, open political discourse given through characters’ conversations, for the fact every act and every depiction has relevance within the book, the literary relevance, while also speaking about the actual world. Love it for the depiction of the characters’ yearning for freedom when caught in narrow roles, for the depiction of characters’ thoughts and feelings, the way they see each other and the world, for the magnificent tragic scene of the drunk mother and also the magnificent mother of Rabbit and Kruppenbach scene, among many others.

Unreliable narrator at its best, creating a middle-class demon of a character and manipulator author also manipulates the levels of narration and there’s an extremely fine intertextuality (connections with not only Hawthorne but with Thomas Mann’s A Magic Mountain, for instance). of Comparative Literature & Theory, University of Belgrade (Serbia)Īuthor: Cartographer of the Modern World: The Novels of John Updike One more from that mid-‘80s first encounter with Updike, and another bright book from a peak period of Updike’s career, which includes Rabbit Is Rich, The Witches of Eastwick, and Self-Consciousness. The combination of computer technology and Barthian theology would have been enough to sustain most novels, but this one also has the Hawthornean ( Scarlet Letter) intertext, making it the most layered and artful of Updike’s novels and a possible precursor to Richard Powers’ The Gold-Bug Variations. This was Updike’s new novel at the time I was discovering Pigeon Feathers and Couples, and so I bought it in hardcover as a college sophomore. Roth, for instance, wouldn’t address the era directly until American Pastoral, which responds to this novel in fascinating ways. It’s remarkable to look back at the high sixties, as John Barth called them, and see how few of Updike’s contemporaries were truly taking the pulse of the times. Replete, lyrical, full of big themes, and yet gossipy and sexy as well, this is the brightest of all his books, I think, and the ur-text of his later adultery novels. The prose in this book was in 5.1 Surround Sound.

As I told my students recently, before I’d read these stories, all the writing I had experienced had been in stereo. This is the one that started it for me, and might be the single book that prompted my career. Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1962).Professor of English, Rhodes College (Tennessee)Īuthor, John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion

John updike rabbit 1971