Major works:
Rabbit, Run • Rabbit Redux • Rabbit Is Rich • The Witches of Eastwick • Rabbit at Rest • The Centaur • Couples • “Pigeon Feathers” • “The Happiest I’ve Been” • “A Sandstone Farmhouse” • “A&P”
“In a way, what Melville did for whales, Updike did for upper-middle-class life in suburban America: He produced partly allegorical realist novels containing an encyclopedic array of the thousands of facets of human experience, all collected with loving attention to his subject matter.”—Orhan Pamuk, The New York Times Book Review
The Egg Race
John UpdikeThe stratum of middle age has its insignia, its clues, its distinguishing emotional artifacts: the glaze of unreality, for instance, that intervenes in moments of what formerly would have been rapture. The middle distance blurs, and the floor appears to tilt, as if in unsteady takeoff toward some hopelessly remote point. New glasses help. The axis of astigmatism is rotating, the world is turning, the soul finds itself locked in a house with smeary windows. Contrariwise, the mail, once so pregnant with mysteries and stimulations, can now be read without opening the envelopes: photographs of the maimed and starving, angry petitions for justice, comradely appeals to the alumni, proceedings of learned societies, advertisements for undesired treasures, scholarly offprints, photocopies of photocopies. Into the wastebasket it can go unopened, cleanly posted to the void.
