Nine ways to understand John Updike
The poet of suburban, small-town America, John Updike marked out his territory in a spot of Pennsylvania. Few writers have caught the play of light and shade on life and land in such astute prose verging on the poetic. But Updike was importantly the chronicler of smaller people coursing through history, without always knowing it. And yet, it isn’t easy to tie Updike down to period motifs. A keen observer of human and other natures, a master of the metaphor, Updike gave the great American suburban middle class a narrative of their own. With his death on January 27, the old school of American letters is closer to its end.

Rabbit, Run (1960) — The first book of Updike’s defining Rabbit cycle, it created the legend of Harry Rabbit Angstrom, a high-school basketball star who became a car salesman and went astray as a husband. Rabbit, Run spans five months of the protagonist’s life at 26, with his attempts to escape the boredom and frustration of small-town America. Angstrom, in an inflated sense of self-importance, would come to see in America’s decline his own fall from fortune’s promises.

The Centaur (1963) — The title refers to one of the most memorable Updike motifs about human potential. An unparalleled portrayal of high-school life in the 1950s, but not the best treasure in the Updike canon.

Couples (1968) — Updike’s classic contribution to the changing socio-sexual mores of the 1960s. Couples is a poet-observer’s interpretation of the new energies in life around him.

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