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Updike, John

Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest, [47] 27; Couples, [84] 30

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20241118122358 John Updike, Couples

Stiff Martinis and Bitter Marriages

Felicity James on John Updike, Couples

I was an innocent when I first read Updike, and I can still remember those late teenage afternoons when, in an agony of tedium, I haunted the aisles of second-hand bookshops and Manchester Central Library, reading feverishly, hunting for sex. Moll Flanders promised much but remained, finally, coy. A copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, bought furtively from a basement bookshop in Charlotte Street, proved a great disappointment. No sooner had a glance been exchanged than the scene faded away into modest ellipses . . . it was only embarrass­ingly late that I realized it was a pre-1960 edition. But John Updike’s Couples (1968) was very definitely a product of the Swinging Sixties. ‘Welcome to the post-pill paradise,’ Georgene Thorne tells the main character, Piet Hanema, as we embark on the first of very many couplings in a novel where the sex is mostly adulterous, sometimes loving, always luxuriantly described. Wide-eyed, I fell into the featherbed of Updike’s post-lapsarian prose.
20150901170021 John Updike photograph (B&W) - Justin Cartwight on the Rabbit novels

The American Dostoevsky

Justin Cartwright on John Updike’s Rabbit Novels

I have read so much Updike, so many articles, so many collections of his criticism and journalism, and virtually all his many novels, that I sometimes think I know more about his thought processes than I do about my own. In his introduction to The Early Stories, 1953–1975, John Updike speaks candidly about his professional life. His inspiration, he says, has been drawn from life; he has always believed that ‘out there was where I belonged, immersed in the ordinary which careful explication would reveal to be the extraordinary’. And this, I think, gave him the leitmotif of his writing life and made him the writer he became.

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