Where to Start with John Updike: A Reading Guide
Where to start with John Updike — whether to begin with Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Is Rich, or The Witches of Eastwick. A complete reading guide.
John Updike (1932–2009) is one of the most celebrated — and most debated — American novelists of the twentieth century. A Harvard graduate who spent most of his life in Massachusetts, he published twenty-seven novels, more than a dozen short story collections, poetry, criticism, and memoirs over a career of five decades. He is best known for the Rabbit tetralogy — Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Rabbit at Rest (1990) — which traces the life of Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom from his late twenties to his death in middle age, using one ordinary American man’s experience as a lens through which to examine American culture across four decades. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice (Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest) and was one of the most technically accomplished prose stylists in American fiction. His reputation has been complicated in recent decades by feminist criticism of his treatment of female characters.
Where to Start: Rabbit, Run (1960)
The essential starting point — the novel that introduced Harry Angstrom and established Updike’s claim to be the chronicler of middle-class American life. Harry was a high school basketball star in Brewer, Pennsylvania; now he is twenty-six, selling kitchen gadgets door to door, married to the alcoholic Janice, the father of a toddler. One evening, returning home from work, he gets in his car and drives south, heading nowhere in particular.
Updike writes Rabbit, Run in a driving present tense that gives Rabbit’s restlessness an almost physical force — the novel pulls you forward the way Rabbit runs, without quite knowing where he is going. The novel is about the American promise (you can be whatever you want, you can always move on) and its failure (there is nowhere to go that is not still America, no self to become that is not still Harry Angstrom). Its ending — after Janice’s drunken drowning of their baby daughter, after Rabbit runs again — holds its judgment in suspension.
Rabbit Is Rich (1981)
Updike’s most technically accomplished novel — and the one that most fully demonstrates what the Rabbit sequence can do over time. It is 1979, the oil crisis; Harry is now fifty, runs the Toyota dealership he inherited from his father-in-law, and is wealthy and comfortable and vaguely dissatisfied. His son Nelson is coming home with a pregnant girlfriend; Jimmy Carter is giving speeches about national malaise that Rabbit finds weirdly comforting; America is declining, and Harry is declining with it.
The novel’s surface is comic and its depths are elegiac: Updike renders the texture of American middle-class life in 1979 with extraordinary precision (the cars, the brand names, the golf clubs, the suburban dinner parties), and within that texture traces how Harry has been shaped by the decades he has lived through. Won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award.
The Witches of Eastwick (1984)
Updike’s most unusual novel — a comedy of female power and male threat set in a small Rhode Island town in the late 1960s. Three women (Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie), all divorced or separated, have developed magical powers: Alexandra moulds clay figures that sometimes come to life; Jane plays the cello and can make it rain; Sukie shapes events. Their comfortable coven is disrupted by the arrival of Darryl Van Horne, a wealthy, physically repellent man who takes all three of them as lovers and eventually marries a younger woman.
A departure from the realism of the Rabbit novels, it shows Updike’s range and his willingness to work in a different register. Best read after the Rabbit books.
Reading John Updike
Updike’s fiction is built on the conviction that ordinary American life — the suburbs, the cars, the anxious middle age, the Protestant sense of sin and the Protestant incapacity for faith — is a worthy subject for serious literary attention. His prose is one of the most celebrated in American fiction: dense, sensuous, precise about the physical world. Begin with Rabbit, Run for the most immediate and visceral introduction to his world; read through the Rabbit sequence in order for the most comprehensive portrait of American life across four decades; approach The Witches of Eastwick for a different and more playful register.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with John Updike?
Rabbit, Run (1960) is the best starting point — the novel that introduced Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, the former high school basketball star whose adult life in a small Pennsylvania town cannot match what he was at eighteen, and whose attempt to escape his marriage and its responsibilities sets the Rabbit tetralogy in motion. It is Updike's most immediate and most visceral novel, written in a driving present tense that makes Rabbit's restlessness and confusion urgently felt. Rabbit Is Rich is the best alternative for readers who want Updike at his most technically polished and his most comic — the Pulitzer Prize-winning third novel in the sequence.
What is Rabbit, Run about?
Rabbit, Run (1960) follows Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, a twenty-six-year-old former high school basketball star who sells kitchen gadgets in Brewer, Pennsylvania, and whose marriage to the alcoholic Janice is suffocating him. One night he gets in his car and drives south, aimlessly, before returning to Brewer and taking up with Ruth, a part-time prostitute. The novel tracks his flight — from Janice, from his baby, from the life that has closed around him — and its consequences: Janice, drunk, drowns their infant daughter in the bath. The novel is about the gap between who Harry was at eighteen and who he is now, and about America's incapacity to provide its people with something to run toward as well as something to run from.
What is Rabbit Is Rich about?
Rabbit Is Rich (1981) is the third Rabbit novel, set in 1979 during the oil crisis. Harry is now fifty, wealthy from his Toyota dealership, and comfortable — which doesn't suit him. His son Nelson is about to bring home a pregnant girlfriend; his mother is dying; the country is in a mood of anxious decline that mirrors Harry's own diminishment. Updike's prose is at its most technically accomplished here — dense, allusive, and precise about the texture of American middle-class life — and the novel's portrait of a man who has everything he was supposed to want is one of the most honest accounts of middle-age in American fiction. Won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and American Book Award.
Do the Rabbit novels need to be read in order?
The Rabbit novels — Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Rabbit at Rest (1990), and the novella Rabbit Remembered (2000) — are connected and Harry Angstrom's life accumulates across them. They can be read independently (each novel provides enough context to follow), but they are richest read in sequence. Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest are generally considered the two finest; Rabbit, Run is the most immediate and visceral starting point. Each novel is set in a specific historical moment (the late 1950s, the 1960s and Vietnam, the oil crisis, the late 1980s), and reading them in order gives a comprehensive portrait of American life across four decades.
