6/19/2023 0 Comments S. by John Updike![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Through all this she has pushed to be here, in his lap, his hands, a real presence hardly weighing anything but alive. But it’s hard to carp when Updike can sum up Harry Angstrom’s ambivalence to domestic life as beautifully as he does in a few words right at the end of Rabbit is Rich, when he holds his daughter’s daughter in his arms for the first time: I enjoyed the first and last books best – Rabbit, Run and Rabbit at Rest – but you only get to the end by reading the middle two as well – Rabbit Redux and Rabbit is Rich, which for me had their ups and downs. And it’s some mass: the four books weigh in at 1,700 pages (and there’s another 200 pages in ‘Rabbit Remembered’, the story – I call that a novel – published in the collection Licks of Love). John Updike is one of what I think of as the big three American mainstream novelists of the late 20th century – Roth and Bellow the others – yet he is so strongly associated with the four Rabbit books, about the skittish Harry Angstrom, that most of his other novels are in shadow under their mass. Clever of them to do that, because it is, by Updike’s standards at least, a stinker.Ī word first about my other experiences with him. Always keen to read more John Updike after the Rabbit series, I struggled to decide which of his many novels to take away next, and ended up plumping for the one with the nicest cover. Penguin Modern Classics have had their revenge on me at last. ![]()
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