Product Description
The third and fourth novel in John Updike’s acclaimed quartet of Rabbit books–now in one marvelous volume.

RABBIT IS RICH
Winner of the American Book Award and
the National Book Critics Circle Award

“Dazzlingly reaffirms Updike’s place as master chronicler of the spiritual maladies and very earthly pleasure of the Middle-American male.”
–Vogue

“A splendid achievement!”
–The New York Times


RABBIT AT REST
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and
the National Book Critics Circle Award

“Brilliant . . . It must be read. It is the best novel about America to come out of America for a very, very long time.”
–The Washington Post Book World

“Powerful . . . John Updike with his precision’s prose and his intimately attentive yet cold eye is a master.”
–The New York Times Book Review ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

A Stunning Literary Accomplishment
A remarkable pair of novels.You will care for Rabbit deeply by the end of the series, despite (or perhaps because of) his relatable faults.Updike paints such a detailed picture of Rabbit's life, but somehow the story transcends the details and speaks of American Life in general.Truly mesmerizing prose - get ready to underline a lot of passages and dog ear a lot of pages!

Rabbit wasn't particularly loveable, but I'll miss him
The third and fourth books in Updike's series of books tracing the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom are probably the best of the bunch, with the final, "Rabbit at Rest" being the most engaging of the four. In them, Rabbit experiences the satisfaction of having "made it" in his forties, comfortably relaxing with his new country club buddies and swinging lifestyle (though the world and the people around him continue to flummox and puzzle him). In book four, he's in his mid fifties and feeling tired and adrift. He feels that death looms around the corner, just over the horizon. Loved ones die and his own shiftless child discomfits him. The reality of life's finality soaks his thoughts and stalks him. Things aren't helped by a body that seems to be turning against him. There are a lot of melodramatic elements to the final novel, some that startle or shock and some that made me yell at the characters in mid-dialogue. (Guess that's how you know when a book has grabbed you.) At the end of Rabbit's life (and four books), what did it all mean? Answer that, and you've delivered the punchline that authors of great fiction have always striven to reveal.

A Long Diary of a Nobody.
This is another Mr Pooter type story, although Rabbit is no Charles Pooter. I waded through all four books just because I am a big fan of John Updike. His descriptive writing has no equal in modern literature, he could even describe watching paint drying on the wall and make it sound interesting, but Harry Angstrom is not worth writing about. A completely useless character with his brains in his genitals which the author describes, along with other genitals male and female throughout the quartet in minute detail. Others have outlinedthe story such as it is, so I won't go into that; basketball hero at school is the protagonists only claim to fame, then car salesman, marries bosses daughter, one living child a useless drug addict; plain, considered cerebrally slow wife who outshines him in the end; gradual decline into ill health and death. His life does not make a ripple like millions of others. Depressing, definitely not uplifting books in any way. The nostalgic trips down memory lane through the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties may be entertaining for some, I just found them even more depressing.

John Updike's writing as usual scores high marks for his keen observation and ability to put every strand of hair, its length, thickness, quality, color, brilliance, health, age, tractability, durability, its relation to other hairs, and its owner into words. As I have indicated in another post, the world lost a master when he died, but these four books were a drag for me simply because I disliked and was not in the least bit interested in the man the books are about, or his family. I am giving the book four stars for the writing but only two for the story.

Masterpiece(s) ...
I reread Rabbit Run and Redux after 25+ years and was so glad I did.I remembered enjoying them way back in college, but probably didn't "get" them the way I do at age 51.I've since been reading all of Updike's novels and short stories ... he's an American master and the Rabbit novels more than prove it.

God's Gift to Humankind
These Rabbit books may not rank by academic standards with the likes of James Joyce or Marcel Proust, but by any other standard, they may be said to be the absolute best there is. Updike can be unsatisfying - there are pieces that I have had trouble getting through, but one comes to accept the fact that writers run in streaks like baseball players. In this series, Updike was having one of those incredibly productive 'seasons', and as a result we have this rich, hilarious, moving set of books which improve from volume to volume. By the time one gets to "Rabbit Is Rich," Updike is writing at his best. What is so great here is that one can live in Rabbit's world with him, especially if you remember the Carter years, the arrival on these shores of Toyota, and the odd sense of anxiety that grew in the land as a result of that and other signs of national decay. Updike sees it all. Rabbit is rich, but Rabbit is not happy. His sex life isn't what it used to be, but he still gets a kick out of looking at women's breasts, enjoys contemplating the color of a stranger's body hair, can't help noticing little perfections and imperfections on his daughter-in-laws legs. His disappointments preoccupy him, but his memory of moments of happiness is keen, so we bask in his nostalgia. Rabbit is especially hilarious on the subject of America's youth, especially that of his son, who has bad taste in just about everything. Rabbit plays the maimed hero, triumphant yet oddly unmanned. ... Read more

Product Description
This collection includes 32 interviews given by John Updike to critics, scholars, talk-show hosts, reporters (national, international and local), a religious journal, a school student, and many more. They all combine to form a portrait of a novelist, short story writer and poet. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Fascinating Book
This is a great book for gaining insight into the writing of John Updike. Collected is a series of interviews over a thirty year period. Updike might bemoan being interviewed, but he usually provides a gem everytime. I highly recommend this book.

Wonderful insights into the mind of America's finest writer
This lively collection of short interviews, magazine and newspapers profiles gives us an even deeper picture into Updike's art. But more than peeking inside his head, we also watch him grow from a callow youngnovelist and short story writer to our nation's most senior man ofletters.

Like his novels and stories, this interview collection is worthre-reading. Buy it now. ... Read more

Product Description
These 23 essays on traditional and modern art show John Updike at his most eclectic, entertaining, and enlightening. Originally published in 1989 and until now unavailable in any edition, Just Looking had become one of Updike's rarest and most sought-after titles. It collects the best of the novelist and critic's multifarious musings on art and artists, museums and popular culture, the lives behind the works and the ways in which these works have informed his own life. Included here are pieces on Vermeer, Erastus Field, Modigliani, the major Impressionists, New Yorker cartoonist Ralph Barton, children's book illustrations, Fairfield Porter, and Jean Ipousteguy, among others, as well as extensive reflections on John Singer Sargent and Andrew Wyeth, a critical examination of writers' art, and a long essay on his impressions of the Museum of Modern Art. Featuring a new introduction by the author, this edition of Just Looking-the first ever in paperback-brings back into print a key work of art criticism by one of the most respected and accomplished writers of our time and is the first in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's new reprint series. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

12 Extra Pages
I have a copy of this book but there is a binding error.
Pages 109 to 132 are repeated. Are there any other books like this or is this possibly the only one?
How does this affect the value?

A Delightful and Beautiful Book
In the 23 essays in JUST LOOKING: ESSAYS ON ART, John Updike is a delightful guide and insightful companion as he reviews art across the centuries. Throughout, Updike's voice is totally engaging, informed but never pedantic, respectful but not reverential. Here is a sample:

o "From his art, we might imagine him [Renoir] a plump, rosy, placid man, but in fact, he was bony-faced, nervous, reactionary, and restless."

o "This painting of Wertheimer tells us what we have been missing in even the more admirable of Sargent's portraits: an at-ease emotional possession of the subject that enables him to concentrate on making a painting. Where no warming familiarity exists, a certain distancing finesse takes over."

o "In 1944, Robert Motherwell wrote of his friend Jackson Pollock, `His principal problem is to discover what his true subject is. And since painting is his thought's medium, the resolution must grow out of the process of his painting itself.' Three years later, in sudden full stride, Pollock could state, `When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing.' Pollock painting is the subject of Pollock's paintings."

o "[Modigliani] ...drank while he painted and liked to complete a canvas in one sitting."

o "As his eyes increasingly dimmed, Degas perforce experimented with roughness of execution, never losing his underlying integrity of drawing."

o "Faces gave [Fairfield] Porter a lot of trouble and his paint thickens as he worries over them."

JUST LOOKING: ESSAYS ON ART is also beautiful book with great reproductions. These tie seamlessly to Updike's commentary and enable the reader to fully appreciate his wonderful insights.

If you can't get to your local museum to visit the Vermeers (thank you, New York), this book is a superb alternative.

A Fine Art Critic Too!
Painting is to Updike what music was to Anthony Burgess: not so much asecond love as a parallel infatuation. One always knew it from his prose:from the references to painters and painterly styles, and from theconspicuously visual quality of his description. It is good, then, to havethis collection of the writer's thoughts on selected artists and art-works.He is neither too academic nor too personal in his opinions, and speakswith authority but without jargon. Of the longer essays, 'SomethingMissing' struck me as particularly good - a tentative, penetrating, carefulpondering about what it is in John Singer Sargent's work that misses themark of great art. The shorter pieces offer bite-sized reflections onsingle paintings or objects: 'Some Rectangles of Blue' discusses anabstract work by Richard Diebenkorn in such a way that one not only feelsenlightened about the particular work but about abstract paintinggenerally. As a critic, Updike has a refreshing freedom from academicorthodoxy - 'We are on the verge here of poster art', he reflects on someof Renoir - and as a (verbal) artist himself has licence to entertain aswell as instruct with his prose. The book is lavishly illustrated withuncompromising colour reproductions and, of all his books, the mostpleasant simply to hold in the hands. ... Read more

Product Description
A born-again computer whiz kid bent on proving the existence of God on his computer meets a middle-aged divinity professor, Roger Lambert, who'd just as soon leave faith a mystery. Soon the computer hacker begins an affair with professor Lambert's wife -- and Roger finds himself experiencing deep longings for a trashy teenage girl.


From the Paperback edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (12)

Remember the '80s?
It was Ian McEwan's piece on John Upike in the New York Review of Books that made me finally take "Roger's Version" off the shelf.An Updike acolyte, I had yet to read this book, but as McEwan focused on Updike's vision of a `dead spot' at the center of America, a recurring theme in Updike that McEwan notes in "Roger's Version," I knew it was time to crack it.McEwan notes that in this book `that dead spot was the ruined inner city of `Roger's Version,' a spoiled landscape through which a divinity professor takes a thirty-page stroll - one of the great set pieces of the entire body of work...'

Indeed."Roger's Version" is a book that is loaded with landmines - lines, sometimes paragraphs, that a casual reader might quickly gloss over (and there are so many).But it is here that Updike is really making his points.

His uncanny, unsparing and totally accurate rendering of the inner city `hood is certainly a Boston area locale, but Updike is eerily prescient in that his description of a place that is very similar to Lowell, Mass., down to a multi-level that has survived a fire: `On this same corner a building, its lower floor reshingled in stylish irregular shades, had survived a fire in its top floors, which had left charred window frames empty of sashes; but the bar downstairs continued open, and sounds from within - the synthetic concussions of a video game. . . indicated a thriving business, well before the Happy Hour though it was.'

This is an exact description of the Rainbow Café, (a Kerouac haunt) though the fire did not happen until years after "Roger's Version" was published.

Here are some other landmines:

On Christianity:`How did those Israelites get their hooks into us so deeply, sticking us with their frightful black Bible and it imprecations while their modern descendants treat the matter as a family joke, filling their own lives with violin music and clear-eyed, Godless science? L'Chaim! Compared with the Jews we protestants do indeed dwell in the valley of death.'

On racial relations in America in the `80s, as he describes the guests at a faculty cocktail party, noting an African-American couple in attendance: `... and the Vanderluytens, to give our gathering the factitious jolly racial mix of a Coca-Cola commercial on television...'

And Updike's rendering of a night spent crunching code in a (very 1980s) university computer lab is stunning. `Vague sounds from elsewhere in the building - elevator doors opening and closing, cables singing in the black shaft, surges of humming on the floor below - indicate the presence of either of other night workers or else of automated workings, of timers and thermostats inflexibly sending their signals.'

As was his habit, Updike populates this book with topical references to when it was composed (the mid-`80s).There is Cyndi Lauper's `Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' as well as President Reagan's `Bonzo Goes to Bitburg' moment.And here Updike's bedrock conservatism is laid bare (as well as a gift of prophesy):`And yet it seemed to me that we all existed inside Reagan's placid, uncluttered head as inside a giant bubble, and that the day might come when the bubble burst, and those of us who survived would look back upon this present America as a paradise.'

Most commentators have referred to "Roger's Version" as one of Updike's lesser accomplishments.But to this reader Updike is as on top of his game here as he is in the Rabbit books.There are so many gems, so many brilliant observations, in this book.

But ultimately "Roger's Version" is about God and about life and about death - and Updike is unsparing in his assessment of the Big Questions:
`There are few things which, contemplated, do not like flimsy trapdoors open under the weight of our attention into the bottomless pit below.'

And the clincher:

`What was this desolation in Dale's heart, I thought, but the longing for God - that longing which is, when all is said and done, our only evidence of His existence?'

Religion, computers, astrophysics, and adultery
"A born-again computer whiz kid bent on proving the existence of God on his computer meets a middle-aged divinity professor, Roger Lambert, who'd just as soon leave faith a mystery. Soon the computer hacker begins an affair with professor Lambert's wife -- and Roger finds himself experiencing deep longings for a trashy teenage girl."

That's what the marketing department of Ballantine Books says Roger's Version is about. And, really, that description does summarize the high points. Surprisingly, they've left out the fact that the "trashy teenage girl" is the daughter of Roger's half-sister. Wouldn't that little taste of partial incest bring in a few more readers? At least, the ones who are already familiar with author John Updike's specialty: what I like to call "the dalliances of adulterous suburbanites."

Only this time, Updike also adds in discussions about religion, computers, and astrophysics culled from the best minds in these areas (check out the Acknowledgments page for credits). In addition, also talked about freely are politics, economics, and modern music (the book is practically soundtracked to Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual).

In this way, Roger's Version is like an undergraduate-level class on these subjects delivered with Updike's typically gorgeous prose -- and peppered with illicit trysts to keep the reader's interest. Reader Michael Prichard is the perfect audiobook reader for Updike's work. His nearly flat tone gives equal gravity both to lengthy passages on erudite subjects and to nearly pornographic sexual situations (including a description of one character's erect member so detailed that the listener could practically draw it from memory).

Wow!Updike swings for the fences . . .
Which contemporary author would dare to wrestle in one novel with themes of science vs. faith; computer technology; theology; infidelity; doubt; pain; loss; family struggle?Updike masterfully takes on each of these themes and left this reader breathless in admiration.Perhaps one of Updike's more suspenseful novels (not an adjective often used of his prose), I found the last third of the novel unbelievably compelling reading--the characters are real and deeply flawed--just as we are.An ambitious book that makes one better after reading it than before.

A worthy novel from a living master
I am an avid reader of John Updike, but I sometimes have trouble relating to some of his characters.

This novel centers around the theme of faith versus science in the world of divinity professor Roger Lambert, who is aging and questioning many things these days.When confronted by a faithful computer science student who believes he can use computers to prove the existence of God.Lambert is attracted to the idea and the debate but is, ultimately, intent on discouraging or discrediting the students efforts.

As is always the case, the book is about much more than the theme.Updike captures the mood of the Reagan era, the environment of a decaying Northeastern city, and the attitudes and changes that come with aging like no other author can.This book shows, yet again, why Updike is a modern master of fiction.It is intellectual and engaging.

Science Vs. Religion at a Harvard/Boston Like Community..
Reading this finally convinced me that Mr. Updike really is a true master of the language! It seems impossible to top this as purely imaginative, yet true to life commentary on 1984-85 America, written in 1986. When a 29 year old computer Grad Student approaches Roger, the ex Methodist Divine, now Theology Prof, about a Grant which the young man hopefully pursuesto prove (?) the existence of the Deity through Computer Technology, we're off to a great start in world of Academia, Theology and Scepticism, Family History, Friendships, Race Relations, Medicine, Evolutionary Science, Computer Science (hard to follow, even if dated!), City Neighborhoods of all kinds, not to mention author's usual reflections on adulteryand stale marriages. Note how Mr. Updike smoothly switches between 1st and 3rd Persons, which is probably Roger's dream version of his wife's seamy escapades. The very last sentence seems strange, but throws another loop into this fine and seamless story! ... Read more

Product Description
The richest and most sensual novel in years from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Rabbit series. Two young, beautiful lovers, a black child of the Rio slums and a pampered upper-class white girl, endure privation, violence, and captivity to be together. "Steamy . . . breathtaking".--The New Yorker. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (34)

Just a summer book to read
These It's Like Romeo And Juliet Brazilian , But is nice to know more about places and culture.

Updike Reads Updike on Brazil
Updike reads his own inimitable prose in a story about two lovers in Brazil.Don't turn this one on with your kids in the car - it's full of explicit sex, but beautifully-written sex it certainly is.The story shows a panoramic view of modern Brazil, from its huge cities to its wild west.The two lovers make their way through this landscape in a sometimes-unbelievable fashion.But with Updike, believable or unbelievable doesn't really matter all that much.

I am an Updike fan, but...
This couple enjoys intense and non-stop love while being brutalized for years, but then they change skin color (he becomes white and she turns black) magically and the world becomes friendly and they prosper materially.But now he feels lost as a white person and walks out of the book in the last pages.The reversal of fates and feelings is based on racial identity...somehow this is thin gruel even for a fable.This novel is not recommended for first time Updike readers.

This book is wasted on the first world.
This book is wasted on people that only want to live in the first world; with their defined lives and refined views (refined to a pen-prick of possiblities). If you don't want to open your vision, put this book away and read the latest N. Sparks...

Updike knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote this book! After living in his apartment off Avenida Paulista, in Sao Paulo, with the taste of naked samba dancers and the world of fantasies and Carnival swirling his imagination, he wrote a beautiful Brazilian love story!

Everyone with a negative view of this book--you have my sympathy. You've never loved Brazilian style!

Rewriting classics
Tristan and Isolde is boring and you might think you know all about them. But John Updike showed us the new recipe to cook the oldies. So take two soak in Rio between favelas and Leblon, until they become cariocas, add feijoada, spice all with a bit of sliced saudade and you get something special. You can see Updike did his homework. He knows what is saudade,who is morena, and why the lower and middle classes do not mix.The love of those two is pitiful, the ending is powerful ... very in Russian style. Will I read it again? well, NO ... I don't like this kind of endings ... it's like if you have waited for Sunday to play outside, and instead of it, you have to go in and do homework ... disappointing. What this kind of literature is good for is that it makes you think. Too bad that modern people does not fancy doing it anymore. ... Read more

Product Description
Nothing in his previous life could have prepared Colonel Hakim Felix Ellelou for his new role as the President of Kush. Neither the French army nor his American university provided a grounding in the subtle skills of revolutionary dictatorship. Still less did they expect him to acquire four wives. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (11)

Style over substance.
Hakim Felix Ellelou is the ex-dictator of the African country Kush (which kind of resembles Sudan). This book is his memoir, not just of his time as a national leader, but of his whole life - his education in Wisconsin, his wives, his politics, etc.

Here's what Anthony Burgess wrote about it in 99 Novels, 'There is a large lyric love of the surface of the world, in which accurate visual notation conjoins with a great verbal gift.' Very true. Updike has a lush, clever, poetic writing style. You might say it's Nabokovian. There are many impressive, well crafted images. The guys got some chops.

That said, I didn't read this book with a lot of pleasure. I didn't buy Hakim. I thought he was a caricature. The attempts at humor were forced and un-funny. Worse than all that is that Updike ignores the story. There's alot of backflashing. The scenes jump around willy nilly. Background information is skipped (too mundane for the author). There's zero dramatic tension. Towards the end I had to force myself to finish the thing. I didn't care what happened. Nothing mattered. It was tiresome.

I was surprised how little I liked this book. I remember liking Roger's Version and various short stories by Updike. He whiffed on this one though.

Just a bit too clever for its own good
Sometimes there are novels that are almost too clever, too sophisticated, and too worldly. This is one such novel. Updike weaves African colonialism, Islam, the cold war, socialism, capitalism, and exploitation of every variety into a novel with a few too many characters that are explored just enough to make them into 2 dimensional cartoons of real human beings. Now that you have heard the worst, let me tell you why I gave it 4 stars.

Updike does not really explore character in this novel but rather explores the role of a fictional African president in a fictional African nation caught between the United States and the Soviet Union in a cold war satire.Felix, the President, has the 4 wives allowed by Islam, and a section of the book devoted to each wife, as well as an upwardly mobile mistress, characterize various aspects of African development and cultural change. Felix, a brilliant man who was educated in the United States, returns to Africa with a radical wife in full rebellion against her conservative parents, and continually carries a chip on his should comprised of resentment at the marginalization he felt by being a black man in the United States. But despite Felix's desire to rule over a pristine African state, free of the influences of the United States and capitalism, it keeps creeping back in to infiltrate the nation.

Possibly the most insightful and valuable aspects of the book were the opinions of the United States held by and voiced by many of the main characters. Updike tries to give us a quick view of our selves as Americans. Is some ways the book was a political satire, exploring how power is transferred in other cultures. Felix is a bruised idealist. His pride has been hurt and he seeks solutions in Islam and socialism for the ills of his country. Updike shows that capitalism and the consumer culture that arises from capitalism is indeed a mighty foe when compared to Islam and socialism.

There are a few wonderful scenes in the book including Felix's first meeting with his white future mother-in-law and father-in-law in the United States; or the discovery of the head of the past monarch speaking from a cave to pilgrims while being manipulated by the Soviets; or Felix's return to anonymous status as a cook in a diner while hiding behind the new name of Flapjack.

I found the book to be witty with impressive use of the English language. Yet it never was poetic. I found the characters to be developed only to the level where they were allowed to make commentary for Updike but never developed to the point where there was any emotional connection between these characters that seemed like suspects in a 1960's version of a detective show on television. I found I read the book with a smirk on my face from all the tongue-in-cheek international political commentary that may or may not have really be reflective of African reality.

Diary Of A Madman?
This is a fascinating book told (switching seemingly at random between third and first person) of a character quite literally torn in two.The other reviewers here seem, almost to a one, to be transfixed by puzzling out whether Updike has caught what the "real" Africa is like, whatever that might mean.This question is by-the-bye.The pertinent question is whether Updike has accurately captured the soul of the "unhappy" Felix Ellellou (as Updike wryly dubs him). "Felix" is Latin for happy.I think the answer is, on the whole: Yes, quite well.

There are actually two coups here.The first occurs when Ellellou beheads with a scimitar the king and former father figure to him.The decapitation, described by its perpetrator, is a wonder in slow-motion, hallucinatory prose, of which the following is an example:

"I lifted the sword high, so that the reflection from its flashing blade hurtled around the square like a hawk of lethal brightness,slicing the eyes of the crowd and the hardened clay of the facades, the shuttered fearful windows, the blanched, pegged walls and squat aspiring minaret of the Mosque of the Day of Disaster." P.72

And it goes on.The second coup occurs at the end, where Ellellou himself is deposed rather than beheaded, pensioned off to France to write his memoirs, which, of course, comprise this book.

The pith of these memoirs occurs when Ellellou, with one of his wives, takes a harrowing trip to the northeast of his country.Here we learn, in flashbacks, of his upbringing: His stint in the French Army during the French-Indochina War (which, for those unaware, marked the beginning of the Vietnam War) to his study at an American college in Wisconsin where, much to his chagrin, he was Americanised more than he wants to admit to himself.What occurs during this trek is the final break-up of any sort of self-identity.He is torn between African animism and Islam (to which he was converted in America), between French military esprit de corps and individualistic Western notions, between the integrity (as he imagines it) of his native Kush and the irruption of oil-greedy Americans into it. I can't put it better than those seeking his downfall put it into the mouth of the stolen skull of the decapitated king in a rather macabre episode:

"...his political war, which causes him to burn gifts of food and assassinate those functionaries who bring these gifts, is in truth a war within himself, for which the innocent multitudes suffer." P.212

So, the prospective reader is thinking, another mad African dictator, why should I bother? For a number of reasons, I should say, but primarily because you'll come to understand what makes them mad and even sympathise with them.You will actually come to see a bit of you in them, or at least the one depicted here.As Felix poses it:

"But who, in the world, now, does not live between two worlds?"p.62

Who indeed?

Getting to know a Marxist, Islamic dictator in Cold War Africa
In this dry, black comedy, Updike dares to try to make us sympathize with a Marxist African dictator - and is largely successful.Talk about chutzpah!Colonel Felix Hakim Ellellou, U.S.-educated, Islamic, and rabidly anti-American, is the self-appointed president of the fictional country of Kush, which has been suffering from drought ever since his ascension to office.By allowing Ellellou to tell his own story, Updike makes it easy for us to relate to him, even as we marvel at the depth of his follies.The story begins with the decision to execute the deposed king, which pays off later when Ellellou goes off on a quest to find the king's severed head which is supposedly fomenting revolution in a remote cave.In between, we find out some things about the man behind the uniform.

As allowed by Islamic law, Ellellou has four wives: the older woman he married in his youth, the white woman he brought back from his schooling in America, the more modern, athletic woman of his maturity, and a stunning beauty of a trophy wife.The scenes in America that describe his courtship of wife #2 are incredibly awkward and funny, and are more representative of what we normally expect from Updike.The other major source of humor is Ellellou's mad-dog hatred of western culture.He even goes so far as to immolate a foreign aid worker bringing foodstuffs to alleviate the famine that has struck the land, believing it better to let his people suffer than to accept help from the evil West.Of course Updike intimates that Africa's steaming jungles and desiccated deserts are the real enemy, and puny mankind needs all the help he can get if he is to survive there.Ultimately Ellellou is betrayed by the people he trusts, but they prove far more forgiving of his failures than he was of others'.

This was an interesting read, perhaps more due to the unfamiliarity of the subject matter than any special empathy on Updike's part, although it is beautifully written.In many ways the book leans toward fable rather than realism.Updike's standard suburban neurotics are replaced with figures of legend, almost of myth, so rather than develop these characters, he chooses just to reveal them in all their frailty.So don't read this book expecting a serious treatment of life in contemporary Africa, but rather to get a peek at an American intellectual's perception of Africa during the Cold War, for whatever that's worth.

An excellent example of an Updike tragicomedy
I read this book years ago when it was new, but it jumped back into my head the other day and I decided to write my thoughts on it.

I think this novel stands among Updike's better works and I wonder if it might resonate again in today's world.This novel was written after a decade of unrest in Africa when the dictators and coups were a semiannual occurence.Well, unfortuately, the world is starting to look like those days again.

Updike's genius in this novel was that he distilled the characters down to the essential elements necessary for the plot.That is would makes this novel comic at the same time it is about violence, corruption and oppression.Many people will find the character treatment to be thin.I believe the characters read like people in a news artcile on purpose.To keep the reader from identifying too closely.

I have always really liked John Updike and I think this is an excellent, and different, example of his work.I highly recommend it.
... Read more

Product Description
Since tales of his exploits began appearing in The New Yorker more than thirty years ago, Henry Bech, John Updike's playfully irreverent alter-ego, has charmed readers with his aesthetic dithering and his seemingly inexhaustible libido. The Bech stories—collected in one volume for the first time, and featuring a final, series-capping story, "His Oeuvre"—cast an affectionate eye on the famously unproductive Jewish-American writer, offering up a stream of wit, whimsy, and lyric pungency unmatched in American letters.

From his birth in 1923 to his belated paternity and public apotheosis as a spry septuagenarian in 1999, Bech plugs away, globetrotting in the company of foreign dignitaries one day and schlepping in tattered tweeds on the college lecture circuit the next. By turns cynical and naïve, wry and avuncular, and always amorous, he is Updike’s most endearing confection—a Lothario, a curmudgeon, and a winsome literary icon all in one. A perfect forum for Updike's limber prose, The Complete Henry Bech is an arch portrait of the literary life in America from an incomparable American writer. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

The type is a bit small
Plenty of much better writers than me have written about the literary merits of John Updike's fiction, so I'm not going to even attempt that here, nor do I think it necessary to offer a synopsis. Many years ago I read "Bech: A Book," and "Bech is Back" and found them quite amusing , and I wanted to read the last couple of works in this series. I find with all anthologies that the type is a bit small, but it quite crisp, and seems to pretty newly composited, (unlike say their version of "Bleak House" which is clearly old,) and the pages, although thin, are not of parchment-like thinness of the valuable yet punishing "American Library."

The Complete Henry Bech
Henry Bech, a Jewish writer who has been unproductive for well over a decade, finds himself continually offered free trips to obscure Eastern European countries.Academics from minor American universities call to offer him accommodation in return for a trip around the lecture circuit.Magazines and newspapers publish, every now and again, short articles entitled 'Whatever happened to Henry Bech?'.Once an up and coming novelist and now just an author who doesn't write, Bech lives the meaningless jet-set life of the author who has attained distinguished writer status simply by virtue of not having written a word in years.For John Updike, protestant where Bech is Jewish, productive where Bech is silent, this 'alter-ego' allows him to explore, with satire, wit and often, tedium, the celebrity life an author sometimes finds himself living, without ever really knowing how it all happened.

'The Complete Henry Bech' published by Penguin - and more on that later - contains two novellas and a short story.Bech: A Book is primarily concerned with Bech's adventures around the world, which essentially gives Updike an excuse to mention that countries major writers and to make allusions to them throughout the text.Bech is Back is the most entertaining of the trio and deals, in part, with Bech finally publishing after fifteen years silence, his often-referred to but never really worked out novel, Think Big.In between, he is married, divorces, and has plenty of literary discussions with young female editors, typists, fans, reviewers - all of whom seem remarkably enamoured with the author.Finally, there is Bech in Czech, a very short story which returns to the main conceit of Bech: A Book which, by now, has become somewhat unnecessary to the needs of the character.Rather than continuing to reveal the comic adventures of the novelist, Updike trots Bech around Czech, then ends the story.Certainly the weakest of the three.

What this collection does have going for it is the character of Bech.Like Harry Angstrom from Updike's remarkable Rabbit series, Bech has an active internal life, and is capable of describing the world around him in a way that, when it works, speaks of poetry, and when it does not, devolves into yet another comparison to sex, or sex organs - female, usually.Bech is much more literary than Harry, and refers either by name and title to other author's works - Roth, Mailer, Bellow, Salinger, Lewis, Dreiser, Vidal.These references work because Bech is an author, because he is supposed to know about writers, but a lot of the drug and women scenes ring with a hollow tone, because we have seen them elsewhere by Updike, and they were better.Bech, when he sticks to his strengths - parodying awards ceremonies, the reputation of an author, declining literary stardom, rising literary stardom, reviewers, editors, star-struck fans, greedy fans, nonchalant socialites, publishing conglomerates - works remarkably well, because the reader can't help but be aware that Updike, who himself has won many awards and has been a writer for his entire adult life, knows enough about the process and the fakery to be able to satirise with the honesty of information and sharpness of intent to really take a bite.

Some scenes are very funny indeed.For his entire career, Bech has had an admirer, Federbusch, who has tirelessly stayed by his author, collecting every edition that comes out in every language, and posting, with reply paid envelopes, to Henry Bech to sign.Bech is touched by this, so touched that when he is in the neighborhood - Cedar Meadow, Pennsylvania - he decides to pay his fan a visit.To his horror, he finds that his books are not in fact proudly displayed on Federbusch's bookshelf but instead, 'The books were not erect in rows but stacked on their sides like lumber, like dubious ingots, in this lightless closet along with - oh, the treachery! - similarly exhaustive, tightly packed, and beautifully unread collections of Roth, Mailer, Barth, Capote...' Poor Bech learns the hard way that fans cannot always be trusted, that the right reader may never be found.Later Bech is informed that a new edition of his books are to be printed by 'Superbooks', which is owned by a vast conglomerate.He is to be paid $1.50 for every piece of paper he signs for the company, for a total of twenty-eight thousand five hundred pieces of high-rag-content paper.He is flown to the Caribbean along with his wife - the company recommends a puller for maximum efficiency signing - and they spend two weeks signing and signing and signing. Bech's obsession with his own signature provides a lot of laughs, and shows again the strength of a writer parodying writers.

But a lot of the work comes tumbling down.When Updike sticks to writers, he is untouchable with Bech's touchy, arrogant, sensitive, misunderstood, concerned, literary, anxious, aged character packing all the punches and pulling none.But that other great theme of Updike's oeuvre: adultery, sex, the female body, is used far too often in a series that really doesn't need it, and can only be harmed by its addition.This creates a spotty effect for the novel, because the character of Bech can't quite succeed in the sometimes fragile, sometimes blunt ruminations on carnality for which Harry was so admired.

The Penguin edition of The Complete Henry Bech is, unfortunately, not complete.It is missing a few other Bech titles, which leaves the appreciation and criticism of the entirety of Bech an impossible feat.For all the misgivings I felt while reading about Bech, I also felt much affection for his wry speech, his witty thoughts, his complete disregard for his fans and friends.There was a lot to love, but also a lot to dismay the Updike faithful among us.I shall leave with one last question - Why make Bech a Jew?It seems to add nothing except a perfunctory trip to Israel and a few fairly standard Jewish jokes at Bellow and Roth's expense.And, given that most of Bech was written in the '70s and '80s, and set in Europe, it would be assumed that the Jewish situation there would be handled with more delicacy than it is.A confusing aspect to Bech's character, but it adds to the overall unevenness of the work - why couldn't Updike stick to his strengths for the whole work?This collection works in patches.

Updike is better than Bech
Updike's Jewish alter ego is an extension of his imagination and identity. He recognizes and absorbs the ' identity ' of his major rivals of the time Bellow and Roth and shows he also can be them and be that. But a projection however clever does not in this case have the power of what is closer to him, with him. And there is greater authenticity and strength in the 'Rabbit Books'.
I have I think also an objection which only a minority of readers will share. Bech is a pasteboard Jew who has no real deep Jewish knowledge or identity. This does not mean characters like him do not exist, or Updike had no right to create him. It does mean that those of us looking for some depth when they meet a Jewish intellectual or cultural figure are quite disappointed.
In any case it is clear that for Updike Bech is just a sideshow, one of the many that constitute parts of the complex identity of this very remarkable American writer.

Updike's best fiction, with one large caveat
I've always considered Updike much more valuable for his superlative book reviews than for his, to my mind, more-sizzle-than-steak fiction. (If you dig past the nostalgic plethora of period detail in the Rabbit books, there really isn't a great deal there.) But 20 years after accidentally discovering Henry Bech on the shelves of the public library (just as Updike has said he likes to imagine people encountering his books), his hapless exploits with women and the Muse continue to provide me with unfailing pleasure. It's a fine service to American literature to have them all - including the previously uncollected story "His Oeuvre", one of the best - gathered together between one set of hardcovers.

There is however, I'm sad to say, a big ugly boil on the butt of this otherwise handsome volume: the semi-infamous "Bech Noir", in which Updike, seemingly grown disgusted with the continuing durability of his character, jerks him through a sour ludicrous pantomime - the sheer awfulness of which makes it almost impossible to look at him the same way again. .... It's as if Frank L. Baum, around the fourth or fifth Oz book, had Dorothy move to Los Angeles where she became a crack whore. After that, the valedictory tale in which Bech most implausibly receives the Nobel Prize comes across as simply another gesture of contempt - whether towards the Swedish Academy, for honoring the even-less-qualified Toni Morrison rather than himself, or towards the reader, I can't say. All I can tell you - strange advice, I know - is to skip those two stories if you haven't been contaminated by them already.

"Must" reading for all John Updike fans
Henry Bech is John Updike's playfully irreverent alter ego and has charmed readers with aesthetic dithering and a seemingly inexhaustible libido. Now all of Updike's Henry Bech stories have been compiled in one volume, including the final, series-capping story "His Oeuvre". This outstanding Everyman's Library edition of The Complete Henry Bech is "must" reading for all John Updike fans and a very highly recommended addition to school and community library literary collections. ... Read more

Product Description
In a small New England town in the late 1960s, there lived three witches Alexandra Spoffard, sculptress, could create thunderstorms. Jane Smart, a cellist, could fly. The local gossip columnist, Sukie Rougemont, could turn milk into cream.

Divorced but hardly celibate, content but always ripe for adventure, our three wonderful witches one day found themselves quite under the spell of the new man in town, Darryl Van Horne, whose hot tub was the scene of some rather bewitching delights.

To tell you any more, dear reader, would be to spoil the marvelous joy of reading this hexy, sexy novel by the incomparable John Updike. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (34)

No need.
This is a book in which characters look in the mirror to see how good-looking they are (particularly to admire their voluptuous breasts, or the breasts of their friends). It is also a book in which John Updike tries to write feminist characters but succeeds only in building up a group of women who hate each other, who hate their children, who hate other women, and who are idly superior to the men.

Ugh.

horrible, horrible
This was probably one of the worst books I've ever read; it doesn't even deserve 1 star!Well, I actually couldn't even force myself to finish it.Updike goes on and on and on with pointless descriptions, making it hard to get interested in the book.There really is no plot.He jumps all over the place making things hard to follow.There was also too much crazy sex scenes for me!I would definitely not recommend this one.

The Original Charmed Ones!
The Witches of Eastwick is another example of a great book being turned into a less than stellar movie. If you're familiar with the movie, there's a lot in this book that you'll find familiar as well. Unlike the movie which was set in the late 1980's, the book takes place in the fictional town of Eastwick, Rhode Island at the time of the Vietnam War. The story mainly concerns Alexandra, an artist; Jane, a cellist; and Sukie, a columnist. They are in the primes of their lives, each having either left, or been left by, their respective husbands.

Following the void left by their husbands, the women find an inner power they each posses...the power of witchcraft. These witches, however, are a far cry from the an it harm none variety with which many modern readers in the know are familiar. No, these witches are promiscuous, spiteful, vindictive, and they're not above putting a hex on their enemies.

Enter Daryl Van Horn. Summoned to town not by the witches magic, by rather by a desire to escape a past life and possibly numerous creditors; Daryl promptly takes possession of and begins remodeling Lenox Manor. One by one, the witches are seduced by Daryl who each takes him as their lover. In the mean time, the witches have conjured a cookie jar in such as way as to cause their enemy (and most outspoken opponent) Felecia Gabriel to vomit all manner of feathers, dirt, pins, etc...which ultimately leads to her murder by Felecia's husband, who goes on to commit suicide.

Following the death of Felecia and Clyde Gabriel, their children Chris and Jenny return to Eastwick to settle their parent's affairs. Finding the girl to be sweet, innocent, and accommodating and perhaps even out of a sense of guilt, the witches invite Jenny to participate in their activities with Daryl. However, Jenny proves to be too accommodating and accepts Daryl's proposal for marriage. It is then that the witches conspire to punish the girl they believe stole their shared lover for herself.

The remainder of the story examines the lives of all those involved as the witch's curse takes its toll and we are able to also see the consequences of the magic they invoked. In the end, it seems that everyone's relationship suffers. Will the witches be able to undo the damage they have done? Will they be able to heal the rift that has come between them? Will anything ever be the same?

Prudish types may find the frank and sometimes descriptive depictions of the witches sexual encounters unsavory. I personally did not like the slurs the witches use when referring to men they suspect to be gay. However, as a gay man myself I am not unaccustomed to such prejudice and I chalked it up to the women's generation.

I really enjoyed the depictions of the witches flavor of witchcraft and found their use of common household items in their spells an excellent example of Kitchen Witchery. At roughly 300 pages Witches isn't a quick read, as it is filled with a great deal of detail that the author is famous for. Some may feel that the story branches off from it's self in a few places but it only adds to the overall story, as Witches isn't just about three women, it's a story about an entire town and the effects of gossip, scandal, and magic run wild.

Some good aspects
On occasion, I felt myself getting into this story and shocked by the actions of the characters.Most of the time I was annoyed.These women running around girl-hating with the thought that they are liberated.It's an annoying story of feminism gone wrong.

A Kindle edition NOT available in the US?
The one star is because this is a Kindle edition, yet I can't purchase it for my Kindle. ... Read more

Product Description
This novel by John Updike tells the story of Sarah Worth - "S" - who joins the Ashram Arhat. Famous for his transcendent wisdom and divine immobility, the Arhat has transferred his Ashram from India to Arizona, where he and his entourage are attempting to make the desert fruitful. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (16)

A true writer
After only a few pages, I had to back up and say..."damn, that Updike can write."

Perhaps not Updike's best but so much better than most of the stuff in print that it's worth reading.

S. is a Parody of Herself and Her Times
This may be the only book by John Updike that I really like.Usually, I abhor his writing and his themes.This book is an extraordinarily literate account of feminism, religion and yuppieness.The novel is partially modeled on the Oregon Swami sex commune.

It is the story of a shallow woman who leaves her physician husband to join a commune. The plot is relayed through letters and tapes that she mails to family, friends and business acquaintances.In these mailings she discusses her old and new life and one winces at the awful lack of her insight and depth of any sort.The irony of it all is that she thinks she is truly a soul-searching ever-sensitive pilgrim on life's true path.

When I'd think that Updike had dealt the final blow and had shown what a truly despicable person and circumstance was in front of me, he'd just be rounding a corner and would throw another dart zeroing in at another abhorrent character flaw or circumstance.His writing is wonderful and his characterization and sense of place and person perhaps the best I've ever encountered.His juxtaposition of eastern and western religions, feminism and dependency, and his examination of values in several contexts makes this book a real gem.

Nutty, intelligent, impressionable woman kept me entertained
If I'd read a review that said "flaky society woman juggles marriage, divorce, life on a commune, Eastern religion, isolation, sexual experiences, driving others crazy..." I'd have not bothered reading "S" as I'd figure that this kind of story could only be hatched in some flaky grocery checkout counter tabloid. Problem: I've gotta tell you that this book was one of my most enjoyable reads. In "S"John Updike crams so much humor, wit, knowledge, speculation, wisdom and surprise into every paragraph that I couldn't put the book down. The wacky S -- Sarah -- hurls herself into situations that normal people wouldn't even think of doing. Book is also a depiction of Indian "religion" at its worst.

One woman's supposed search for spiritual awakening
_S_ is a series of letters by Sarah Worth, the wife of a philandering doctor, to her husband, her daughter, her mother, and others.Sarah even sends taped messages to her friend, Midge, not realizing that Midge was less than trust worthy.Sarah is bored with her sterile marriage and plans to seek solace and spiritual renewal in an ashram in Arizona, but discovers that life there is no different from her upper middle class life in New England.The people in the ashram are just as false, belligerent and mercernary as those on the outside.Even the Arhat, the spiritual leader with whom she invests much trust and admiration, and with whom she has an affair, is phony.By the end of the novel, Sarah becomes totally disillusioned.

_S_ is supposed to be a satire on Hawthorne's _The Scarlet Lettet_.Updike alludes to various charaters in _S_ and those in the Hawthorne classic.I suppose that Sarah's "scarlet letter" is the blame she will incur as the villainous wife who deserts her husband.Although Updike's book has some occasional humor, in as much as Sarah's self-discovery is unexpected and somewhat ironic, I found the book replete with with cliched situations and one-dimensional characters, none of whom I particularly cared for.That we read the novel only from Sarah's point of view is not necessarily a bad thing, if only Sarah were not such an insipid character.

Updike- The Master of Ridicule
One theme shines throughout Updike's novels- ridicule.The author has a gift for being able to expose the weaknesses, faults and insecurities of people, and he does it in a very comical way.In this novel, the main recipient of ridicule is a New England woman in her 40's going through some sort of midlife crisis.Though the main character gets her fair share of mockery, none of Updike's characters escape in a positive light.Each character is entertainingly scoffed at through the clever style of writing.The new age, Eastern religious cult which the main character joins, is shed in a light that is not only negative, but likely very accurate.The way the book was written was truly creative, with the entire bulk of the book being in the form of letters written by the main character.It would be hard to put together a decent story completely from only one person's perspective, especially when told through the written letter.Expect a creative, enjoyable smear campaign against every character and every belief.This scorn produces a good read. ... Read more

Product Description
Winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Ten years after RABBIT REDUX, Harry Angstrom has come to enjoy prosperity as the Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors. The rest of the world may be falling to pieces, but Harrry's doing all right. That is, until his son returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to his lot....


From the Paperback edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (31)

Potshots At Shallow-Minded Snots
It's understandable why learned Pulitzer members awarded the truly gifted writer, Mr. Updike, their prize. They probably could relate to Harry Angstrom and the other people who inhabit "Rabbit is Rich." It's putting it mildly to say that deep introspection isn't these character's strong suit. This book successfully depicts the zeitgeist of middle-class America. The scenes take place in 1979-1980 just prior to the Reagan Revolution, but easily could be applied to today's mindset. Rabbit is a complex character, but not the brightest bunny in the world. Sometimes I felt sorry for him and other times there was a massive urge to smack him aside the head with a two-by-four in the hopes of knocking some sense into the muddle-headed layabout. The superficial nature of this group's middle-aged existence is consumed with postering, sex (or lack of variety thereof), drinking, money, as well as silently fantasizing about other people's lives and how it might be greener on the other side of the fence. It's difficult to like any of the characters. Heck, I KNOW people who live this kind of life. It isn't necessary to have read the two prior installments, "Rabbit, Run" and "Rabbit Redux," but it does help in some of the references to what has happened in the past. Mr. Updike's book resonanted much more than the previous two works probably because I'm 49 which is the same age range as Rabbit. Man, it's a very good read but a real downer.

Outstanding Work (4.5 Stars)
I've now finished the first 3 Rabbit novels and think that Rabbit is Rich is definitely the best of those 3.I've just started Rabbit at Rest.

This is a more mature work than its predecessors.Rabbit has matured and so has Updike.

This is a fascinating series as Updike is approximately Rabbit Angstrom's age as he wrote each book and the maturity level matches.

In Rabbit is Rich, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom has achieved a very comfortable life and has found some peace.He's learned to accept his wife and their country club life together.He owns and runs a Toyota dealership and is generally satisfied.He is less desperate than at other points in his life.

Despite this, he is still the same Rabbit, always longing for something else.He lusts for his friend's young wife.He struggles to come to terms with his son.He is haunted by the thought of his daughter from another marriage.This is a fascinating period in Angstrom's life and the reader feels as if they are really "in" his life.It is uncomfortably voyeuristic at times as there seems to be unfettered access to Angstrom's thoughts which are often sexual and sometimes very ugly.

This is an excellent novel.If I had one criticism, it would be Updike's tendency to overdescribe scenes and objects.He is a wonderful writer and his descriptions are usually interesting but he goes to the well a few times too often.I found it a little distracting in the end.

3/4 of the way through the series, I can say that the individual novels are very strong but that the whole series is greater than the sum of its parts.

I highly recommend the novel and even moreso, the quartet.

Social historian
Rabbit is selling Toyotas.He owns Springer Motors with his wife andmother-in-law.Rabbit sees himself as a big, bland, good guy.Harry's, Rabbit's, rival, Charlie Stavros, works at Springer Motors.(Later, Rabbit is shocked that the two women, who out vote him, are willing to let him lay off Charlie in order to give his son Nelson a job.)Harry's son, Nelson, who is supposed to be working in Colorado, arrives home.

The death of a great American writer causes one to reconsider his oeuvre.Some commentators have stated that Updike arrived at a position of being a great writer without having written a great book.Others have suggested that some of the later novels have not gotten their critical due.The Rabbit books, since there are four of them, are in the running for being deemed Updike's substantial contribution to literature.

Actually I don't think they, the Rabbit quartet, really make the cut, although the writing is of the highest order.The problem is subject matter.There is something light weight about a former high school basketball star selling cars and achieving success through the luck of having married into a family business.Whereas the rendition of a superficial life is carefully wrought, it isn't sufficiently tragic or glamorous to merit serious attention.It is a comic turn by an incredibly gifted and hard working novelist.Updike, perhaps fortunately, could not summon the cynicism and the anger of a Sinclair Lewis to make Rabbit's portrait significant.

The maximum allowable stars are granted because this is, nevertheless, a jewel of a book.Rabbit is prosperous in this installment.He goes on vacation with other couples, has a new house, and revisits some relationships.It is a case of John Updike, master writer, doing his magic.

"Let me tell you something about Toyotas"
Another decade has passed in the lives of the Angstrom family, so it must be time for a crisis of Sturm-und-Drang proportions. Fortunately, in the third (and best) installment of Updike's series, the calamities rely on a lot less Sturm and a little more Drang. Although he is occasionally haunted by ghosts from past catastrophes, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom has grown comfortably wealthy in his middle years and the ills that afflict him--his persistent paunch, his defiant son, his rarely sober wife, his far-too-small home that he shares with his dominating mother-in-law--all are more suitable to the American Everyman he is meant to be, a patriot whose intellectual depths can be found in back issues of Consumer Reports. Meanwhile, the world around him seems to be falling apart--there are lines to get gasoline, there are hostages in Iran, there are Russians in Afghanistan--problems that seem remote indeed to a Toyota dealer in suburban Pennsylvania.

So when life's predicaments intrude, Harry sees them sometimes as opportunities, sometimes as annoyances. The gas shortage, a burden to everyone else, is a windfall to Harry's car business; one of the book's recurring gags is his near-religious belief in his own dealership spiel. The fluctuation in gold prices motivates him to buy krugerrands (a transaction that results in one of the book's most hilarious scenes). Even the discovery that he may or may not have a grown daughter living in the suburbs is a source of curiosity and nostalgia rather than distress.

In the annoyance column, however, is surely his son, dropping out of college, returning home with two girlfriends, one of them pregnant, and demanding a place in the family business. The love-hate relationship between Harry and Nelson is perhaps Updike's finest prose portrait; like most fathers and sons, the warring pair are grotesquely incapable of seeing their similarities and have become expert at amplifying their differences.

It wouldn't be a Rabbit novel without a trendy sex scene appropriate to 1979--spouse swapping, in this case--although here it's a source of whimsical longing rather than marital angst. And, like Philip Roth's Mickey Sabbath, Rabbit maintains both a libido that swerves to every attractive young woman whose wake he crosses and an immature lack of decorum that allows him to paw through his friends' intimate belongings. But these are just flashbacks to youth in a comfortable middle age. Rabbit has mellowed; he has learned to resign himself to the downsides of life's upsides. Even the grandchild "he has been waiting for" is just "another nail in his coffin."

Updike's Brilliant and Fun Look at 80s America
The third in the series of Rabbit books, Updike has glorious fun with Rabbit as the prosperous owner of a Toyota dealership. Flush with money, Rabbit navigates the world of upper-class America in his usual bumbling and yet insightful way. Updike has lots of sly fun with 80's style Reagan values of "greed is good." A classic.

Donald Gallinger is the author of The Master Planets ... Read more

Product Description
On September 28, 1960-a day that will live forever in the hearts of fans-Red Sox slugger Ted Williams stepped up to the plate for his last at-bat in Fenway Park. Seizing the occasion, he belted a solo home run- a storybook ending to a storied career. In the stands that afternoon was 28-year-old John Updike, inspired by the moment to make his lone venture into the field of sports reporting. More than just a matchless account of that fabled final game, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu is a brilliant evocation of Williams' competitive spirit, an intensity of dedication that still "crowds the throat with joy."
Now, on the 50th anniversary of the dramatic exit of baseball's greatest hitter, The Library of America presents a commemorative edition of Hub Fans, prepared by the author just months before his death. To the classic final version of the essay, long out-of- print, Updike added an autobiographical preface and a substantial new afterword. Here is a baseball book for the ages, a fan's notes of the very highest order. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

The praise is deserved but a word of reservation
I have read Updike's essay many times. It is as all agree, a masterwork. For many it is the beginning of a new kind of sportswriting , more personal, literary, metaphoric. Updike went to bat only one time as a sportswriter and hit the homerun of homeruns.
I have some reservations however about the piece, and the whole take on Ted Williams. For Updike Williams was a consummate, dedicated artist, a man of singular devotion and ability. But Baseball is different from Writing. Baseball is a Team Game.
For Williams whose team was in eighth place in an eight- team league when he hit the homerun in his last time at bat the accomplisments were often solely for himself . For his rival Dimaggio the accomplishments were for a team on the way to winning the pennant. Moreover in the commonplace comparison of the time Willimas went six for six when theRed Sox won 14-3 but Dimaggio went one for four when that one was the winning hit in a key game. There was always the comparison of Williams who did not hit in the clutch the way Dimaggio did.
In other words ,Updike's essay focuses not on the whole story of Williams but rather on his singular accomplishments and virtuoso greatness.
That said it is still a wonderful read done with that Updikean metaphorical precision, that style which seemed to cram each sentence with detailed perception and often beauty.

The Godliness of Ted Willams as Portrayed by his Disciple, John Updike
For any baseball aficionado, but especially for Boston Red Sox fans, the Library of America has just published a sacred tomb:a reprint of John Updike's famous New Yorker article on Ted Williams' last game for the Boston Red Sox.

Updike's reporting on Williams and his love-hate relationship with Boston, its sportswriters and Red Sox fans is a classic.

Even better, this edition also includes some nifty footnotes by the late Updike, written only months before his death last year, as well as excerpts from an article Updike wrote on Williams for Sport Magazine in 1986 and the obituary Updike wrote for the New York Times Magazine, marking Williams' death in 2002.

Updike's writing on Williams is a treasure trove for baseball fans that could be reasonably described as a holy grail on one of the greatest baseball players of all time.This is a book that should sit on every fan's bedside table to be read and reread even as baseball battles its drug addictions and overpays its current stars. It restores one's faith in the national past-time. Williams was, quite simply a classic. As is this book.

Williams & Updike Go Back to Back
I heard Updike's famous essay read before I read it myself. I listened to it again on the day Updike died. Thank God he was there at Fenway that day when Williams exited the stage of baseball. His account of the game is sheer poetry; a simultaneous dissection of the psyches of Williams and his fans. And now at last it is bound and covered as it should have been long ago. I already regard my copy as an heirloom, a memorable summary of the day when the paths of an MVP and a Pulitzer Prize winner crossed forever.

Ted Williams at bat: "expectation, intention, and execution"
"Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" is John Updike's loving tribute to the character and craft of Boston Red Sox slugger Ted Williams.First published in The New Yorker magazine a few weeks after Updike sat in the stands of Fenway Park watching Williams' final at bat on September 28, 1960, the essay has over the years attracted the highest praise from trustworthy observers. Some of these accolades appear in the Editorial Reviews section above. The praise is accurate and deserved.

If you follow baseball and care about its storied past, or admire the writing of John Updike, then you will enjoy reading this piece. If you happen to belong to both camps -- if you're an Updike fan AND a baseball fan -- then put this at the top of your list of must-reads.

The question is whether you should spend your money on this particular setting of"Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." The article is available online where it can be read for free on several websites, including that of The New Yorker.In book form the piece has been much anthologized. It appears alongside contributions from the likes of William Carlos Williams, Don DeLillo, and Stephen King, in the elegant 721-page hardcover volume, "Baseball: A Literary Anthology." It can be found in "The Greatest Baseball Stories Ever Told: Thirty Unforgettable Tales from the Diamond" (paperback), edited by Jeff Silverman, where it hides amongst 30 fiction and nonfiction pieces from a motley crew of writers such as Doris Kearns Godwin, Pete Hamill, Ring Lardner, P.G. Wodehouse, Vin Scully (on Sandy Koufax), and Abbott and Costello (whose "Who's on First" comic routine is gloriously reprinted in its entirety). The essay joins a broader array of sports pieces recently assembled in "The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker," where Updike shares space with Malcolm Gladwell (who writes about failure in sports), Martin Amis (on tennis personalities), and John McPhee (on Bill Bradley's basketball career).

The answer to why you might choose to buy this latest issuance of John Updike on Ted Williams comes down to personal preference, convenience, sentimentality, maybe even aesthetics.The essay has a special-ness to it. Its pages offer a sharp character study, a lyrical capturing of a moment of grace, and an essential moral lesson.It is, to use the corny metaphor, a small gem.Think of Duke Ellington's description of Ella Fitzgerald: "beyond category." The quality-conscious publishers at The Library of America respect good writing and have taken care to design the book, simply as a physical object, to be a pleasing product to hold in your hands.

Three photos of Ted Williams grace the book: one is in color on the jacket (you see it pictured here on Amazon, above). The second, in black and white, is used as the frontispiece and shows the slugger ascending to the Fenway field on his final day.The third photo is near-sepia in color and is spread horizontally across the front and back boards, freezing in time his celebrated swing -- and making this hardback look just as fine with or without its jacket.Inside, the main essay from 1960 (with a dozen fact-laden footnotes Updike added a few years later) is, of course, the big draw.This text (33 pages in this wide-margined edition) is flanked by a three-page Preface, written only weeks before Updike died in 2009, and a meandering nine-page Afterword that served as an obituary for the ballplayer who died in 2002.The preface and afterward may strike you as workmanlike exercises -- common stones wildly outshone by the diamond at the center of the book.

Bottom line: if you're looking for a gift for someone open to the call of baseball and its emotional and intellectual appeal, this is a good choice.The book would also be a classy gift for a reader who's read Updike's novels and short stories but is unaware that the author penned, at the start of his career, one of the best nonfiction essays ever written.

Addendum: A 34-second video of Ted Williams' last at bat at Fenway Park on September 28, 1960 is available online (Google the words, YouTube last at bat). If you watch it, pay special heed as Williams rounds third and heads for home. At that moment the cameraman pans up to show the crowd in the stands behind third base, the very section where John Updike was on his feet joining in the stadium-wide "beseeching screaming." The tape is too pixilated for us to spot him. But Updike's there, absorbing the moment -- and starting work on his own piece for the ages.

(Mike Ettner) ... Read more

Product Description
John Updike's short story collections are occasions for celebration -- the pleasures to be found in them are great indeed. This marvelous volume contains one gem after another, stories to be savored one at a time and returned to again and again.

Here is trust betrayed -- and fulfilled. Here are parents struggling to maintain that fragile claim on their offspring's childish awe....Here are husbands and wives as only Updike knows them, leaving each other, loving each other, often at the same time. Here are passion ignited and quenched, absurd hope, regret at the last minute. Here is life as we live in it, in twenty-two stories of uncommon beauty and pathos from a master storyteller at the peak of his brilliant career. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

AT CHEEVER'S LEVEL
Trust Me shows that Updike deserves his place among the true greats, such as Cheever.Each story in Trust Me works, although some more than others (a few go on longer than they need to).Updike has a fine ear for the malaise of the middle-aged, middle-class man or woman who is mostly past being particularly enthusiastic about life's possibilities.Updike doesn't have contempt for his subjects, but neither does he have a lot of sympathy.This is a beautifully crafted set of short stories.There is often a slyness to the phrases and sentences, such as is found in his classic short story, A&P.

Typical Updike
Updike can write splendidly. However, he cannot be compared favorably to even good past or great contemporary authors. In this book Updike is more of the same labored almost beautiful writing. I found Trust Me to be much of the same.For a good short story look elsewhere. However if you are interested in Updike read his earlier books. It seems that as his career lengthened he changed his writing to try and leave a more refined and antiseptic waft in the readers mind, perhaps he had thoughts of stuffy British grandeur.

Review of Trust me by John Updike
The audio casset version of this book is outstanding and is read by the author, which is always a great asset. The short stories are artful character studies that vividly describe the souls of your neighbors, your friends, or yourself in a modern setting.The details are so charming you'll want to listen to it over and over to pick up all the nuances.

A Good First Choice for the Updike Reader
Men, women, what works and what does not - this seems to be the centraltheme of Trust Me.This was my first Updike book and as a collection ofshort stories, Trust Me represents a wise choice in this regard.Thereader gets a taste of the Updike style in several short works which,despite being rich in detail and innuendo, are easily consumable -especially if read from start to finish without any long breaks.

Trust Updike
What, really, can one say against John Updike? Where, in these stories, can he be faulted? Well, the question need not be so rhetorical. One might, for example, consider the charge that his material is relatively unvarying.Time and again in his short stories Updike returns to the same territory:the white, middle-class couple caught up in the flux of an extra-maritalaffair. This is the central theme of no less than six of these twenty-twotales, but it touches the edges of many of the others too. And of theseothers all are confined to the same domestic and social milieu - from'Killing', in which a daughter must cope with her father's death fromAlzheimer's Disease, to 'The City', in which a salesman unexpectedlycontracts appendicitis while on a business trip. Where is the broadervision - the black characters, the homosexuals, the political radicals?They are absent from Updike's vision. And yet, if this artist paints on arestricted canvas, it is the detail and style of the brushstrokes thatredeems his art. 'Trust Me' is as reliable - as trustworthy - ademonstration as any work in the Updike corpus that the man's linguisticstyle is extraordinary. Central to it is an astonishing facility formetaphor; no less characteristic is his ear for the musical, his facultyfor critical analysis, and a taste for symbolism that is at onceunobtrusive and yet deeply satisfying. With such an abundance of stylisticgifts all working simultaneously, the unchanging world of Updike'scharacters remains fresh and, in 'Trust Me', fresher than ever. ... Read more

Product Description
"Some of the most beautiful writing in contemporary American literature is between the covers of this book . . ." BOSTON HERALD

The triumphant collection of short stories by America's most acclaimed novelist.


From the Paperback edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

Bringing life to the mundane
Updike's abilities as a short story writer are best exemplified in _Pigeon Feathers_. His narratives often focus on the philosophies of the protestant middle class, in which the protagonist struggles to either accept or escape from the shackles of religion and society. Updike's narrative voice is so strong in these stories that the reader has the feeling that each one is in a sense autobiographical.

There is a lot of variety in these short stories. Seven of these stories take place in the fictional Pennsylvanian suburb of Olinger, in which Updike pays homage to his adolescence. While each story in this collection is unique and special in its own right, there are some that I found to be particularly strong:

"A&P": This is one of the shortest and straightforward stories in the collection, but was my favorite. Sammy is a 19-year-old cashier working at the A&P when he becomes infatuated with three girls who come into the store wearing bathing suits. When the manager scolds the girls for being indecent, Sammy is brought to a moral crossroad of conformance or to reject the values that A&P represents.

In "A&P," the manager is the voice of parental authority (friend of Sammy's family), pastoral authority (Sunday school teacher) and a business leader. Sammy represents the middle class conformist, who works behind the third register eating HiHo crackers. The girls represent the unattainable, with their sexual promiscuity and Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks. Great symbolism and struggle is packed into this condensed narrative that is truly rewarding.

"Flight": Allen Dow's mother predicts that her son will fly -- escape the destructive hold of ordinary life that has plagued their family. When Allen develops a relationship with the Olinger girl Molly Bingaman, this prediction is compromised and the relationship between Allen and his mother soon changes. "Flight" is about relationships and the conflict of deciding between young love and the yearning to escape.

"Pigeon Feathers": The title story reflects on David Kern, who is approaching his fifteenth birthday and ponders on death and theology. He is in search of reassurance in God's existence and eternal life, but is continually misdirected, and is even discouraged by his minister when he inquires in Sunday School. Later in the story, David is asked shoot the pigeons in the barn so they will not harm the Olinger furniture that is stored in there. Through this experience, David comes to terms with God, creation and death.

"Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, A Dying Cat, A Traded Car": This story seems to be a favorite by many readers. For me, the structure was a bit loose; however, the story and prose still show why Updike is one of the more talented writers in recent history. "Packed Dirt. . ." continues from "Pigeon Feathers" with David Kern as an adult. His struggles with faith are looked at from a different perspective as an adult in four episodes. He receives news that his father is ill and returns to his home. The traded car that David will soon exchange becomes representative for his writing and life itself, which is "dismissed without a blessing, a kiss, a testament, or any ceremony of farewell." This story is fittingly placed at the end of the collection and strongly represents Updike's views.



For any fan of John Updike or for someone interested in getting a taste of his writing, this collection is strongly recommended. I do not place these stories as highly as I place the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, but from what I have read of Updike, they stand the closest.

Updike is always a pleasure to read.
I love great literature, and bold and intricate thoughts expressed with wit and insight.Updike never fails.His short stories are a pleasure. He never ceases to catch me off guard and appreciative of his fine writing style.

A collection of Updike's short stories
Powerful words from a master of literature educate and influence his audiences across the boundary of time and location. This is a collection of Updike's short stories that for sure makes your leisure reading a enjoyable moment of the day.

Incredible!
This is an incredible book, which features many of Updike's earlier stories.The title story is amazing in its meaning and moral complexity. FIVE STARS!!!

Is there a better book of stories anywhere?
If there is, you have my attention. Maybe Isaac Babel's Collected Stories orFitzgerald's Selected Stories. I've been writing for 27 years; I may have written three sentences that compare with the average in an Updike story.In "Flight" he captures more in several sentences about family than I've disentangled through an entire career. Sorry for being self-referential; it's a measure of my awe. Updike's magic is that he can tell a story in a single sentence. If you only know Updike through his novels, you're in for a treat. By my lights, this is one of the greatest living story writers and this is the book that made that clear. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

So-so
I really wanted to like this book, which takes Shakespeare's story of Hamlet and focuses primarily on the lives of Gertrude and Claudius. The book describes Gertrude's upbringing, marriage to her first husband, and secret affair with Claudius, chronicling the events through the king's death and Gertrude and Claudius's marriage. Although the book is very interesting, it's also very densely written, which makes it drag and drag and DRAG. I wanted to like it more, but the writing style prevented me from doing so. ... Read more

Product Description

JOHN UPDIKE IS "A STYLIST OF THE HIGHEST ORDER, capable of illuminating the sublime in the mundane, thereby elevating all of human experience."--Chicago Tribune

Toward the End of Time "is the journal of a 66-year-old man, Ben Turnbull . . . [which] reveals not only the world but the wanderings of his wits. . . . So what if he jumps from a United States in the next century, disintegrating after a war with China, to ancient Egypt, or to virtual reality? So what if characters appear and disappear like phantoms in a dream? . . . Turnbull's journal is like Walden gone haywire. . . . If Ben's ruthlessness is evenhanded, so is his alarming intelligence; it falls on every scene, person, object, and thought in the book, giving it an eerie ambiance."
--The New York Times Book Review

"A BOOK AIMED NOT TO RESOLVE BUT TO AROUSE A READER'S WONDER . . . Vintage Updike: marital angst worked out against the chilly backdrop of privilege, rendered with a lyricism and insight and eye for detail reminiscent of the work of Jane Austen."
--The Miami Herald

"WONDERFUL RUSHES OF NEAR-MELVILLEAN PROSE . . . Toward the End of Time has a force that gets under your skin."
--New York Review of Books

A Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club
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Customer Reviews (55)

Weird, Intriguing and Ultimately Interesting
As the title implies, this book is about nearing the end of time--in two realms. First the end of a man, the protagonist, Ben Turnbull's life, and the end of life in this country as we known it, the end of the United States' dominance as a world power.

Set in 2020 after the fairly, but not totally, destructive Sino-American war, life goes on in a greatly changed United States. And life as Ben has known it is ebbing away, too, to old age, remembrances of life that once was and to delusions some of which make up a major part of the book.

A book about change and about aging. A somewhat weird, but intriguing and ultimately interesting book.

Sex, real or imagined, makes up a major part of the old's man's thinking, causing the reader to wonder and perhaps even ask their aging friends, "Do old men really think about sex this much....."

In the end, the reader may finish the book wondering what was "real" and what was imagined. But that's part of the book's intrigue.

A haunting & beautiful novel
This novel deals with aging and our own sense of mortality. The world Updike describes, as well as his main character, are both groaning under the strain of age and decay.In this dysfunctional (yet realistically drawn) future, Updike allows his magically realistic imagination to float free.Not really science fiction--although the background is a not too distant future.More of a philosophical and thoughtful novel that looks at our broken humanity from several different vantage points and carefully, wonderfully, and somewhat terrifyingly looks at the moments leading up to our decay and ultimate end of life.

a vastly disappointing read
wow... just finished it, and can i just say that this is one of those books i have finished out of spite alone, so i can say the book didn't get the better of me.
i have heard john updike described as "a penis with a thesaurus", and i can tell you this book illustrates that comment perfectly. if you are not averse to reading pages devoted to golf games, or accounts of an aging man doting on his penis for paragraphs on end, read this book because it delivers. there are short bursts of beauty, but it is all so incredibly brief and so quickly disregarded that it is irritating more than engaging. so self-indulgent, so crass - - i have also heard it said about the author, concerning his overexposure in the literary world, that "the new yorker seems to publish everything but his income taxes". i think he pieces together a few things, throws it all into a manuscript and says "here you go", evidenced by the great ideas he presents, and does nothing with. For example, FedEx taking over the government, a moon-sized manned satellite abandoned by the people on earth, the fallout after a "sino-american conflict"... a more competent writer could work absolute wonders with these ideas i feel, and he just seems content to mention them in passing and describe ad nauseam his long-term trist with a foul-mouthed crack whore, or his second wife's flower beds over and over and over and over again. john updike is written proof that if you are a sexist, classist prick with a single influential novel, a big vocabulary and a bit of money, you can turn out endless amounts of crap and people will eat it up.

Flora and Fauna can make a man yawn-a
While the book is a brilliant work of sexagenarian introspection and obliquely described dystopian SF and the prose is lyrical, the dense descriptions of flowers, trees, birds, leaf shapes which serve as prologue to each chapter and section are stultifying.After about the 10th round of these long passages of horticultural effervescence, I found myself skimming over them to get to the story.

A similar but milder impatience with all the descriptions of sexual acts and their accompanying odors and effluvia.It all gets a bit boring without some story to propell the book forward.And there is a story, and it's a great story, but the book could have been about 50 pages shorter.

Not among his best
Set in the near future (c.2020) in a semi-rural area not too far from Boston in the aftermath of a nuclear war with China, this basically unsatisfying novel is the ruminations of main character Ben Turnbull as he contemplates the world around him - one in which law has just about ceased to exist and extortion has taken its place. His domineering wife has gone away on a trip - or perhaps he's killed her - it's hard to say. Turnbull meanwhile appears barricaded in his house dealing with a gang of extortionists who live in the woods on his property. Not a whole lot happens in the book, though central to the story is Updike's criticisms of a world ruled by technology and a lack of any kind of moral stamina. Turnbull seems trapped between the barren, mechanistic world outside his window and his nostalgic recollections of the pop culture he believes has defined him as a person. It's a sad book, saturated with a feeling of hopelessness and life not worth living. I consider myself a great admirer of the works of John Updike (I believe that 50 years from now his books, especially the Rabbit series, might be the only fiction from our time period still being read), but I find this novel among the least satisfying of his books.
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Product Description
Twelve poems follow a family and their friends through the seasons. A Caldecott Honor Book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (15)

An Excellent Poetic Observance of the Year
This collection of modern-day poems convey the experiences of one year, with one poem for each month.Written skillfully in a gentle rhyming rhythm, and full of tactile, aesthetic details that will resonate with children, this is a fine way to observe the turning of the calendar's pages.Some children have difficulty with the compressed meaning of well-written poetry, but Trina Schart Hyman's award-winning artwork helps supply visual interest while interpreting the poetry so that younger listeners can understand the sense of each poem.Her pictures feature a secure, loving interracial family in scenes which are richly beautiful, yet candid enough to be approachable.

Some parents will wish to be alerted that the month for October features a traditional trick-or-treating scene, with children dressed as monsters and witches, and cheerful jack-o-lanterns lighting a wooden front porch.On the December page, some parents will be disappointed that the holiday scene features a small Santa Claus but no creche, and the "miracle" the shepherds and kings await is explained to be "another year" rather than the Christ child.Similarly, July's Independence Day celebration contains no historical background: the fireworks and parade "makes us think/ of hot dogs, fries,/ and Coke to drink."One might expect that such significant celebrations would evoke more serious reflections, but the focus is on concrete details of each experience, leaving interpretation to others.

The book is not transcendent in its mood, but it is especially good at capturing the details of life on earth.It's best suited for an elementary audience.

Charming
I've long been a fan of Updike's fiction, so when my wife and I had our son, I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon this while looking for children's books. A charming little book of verse that should please the adult reader as much as the child.

Delightful Poetry and Multicultural
The poems are simple yet create vivid pictures in your mind. My 2 year old is just beginning to understand seasons and months, and this is a fun way to help him imagine the different times of year. Additionally, the illustrations are very representative of our family (black/white/jewish), and that is rare enough to cherish.

Hate the poems, hate the illustrations
I don't know why this won a caldecott honor medal. The pictures are depressing. The children and adults depicted are never shown smiling, they always look unhappy! The poetry is not much better, it is not enjoyable to read and most of the rhyme seems forced. I wish I would have looked more closely at this item before purchasing.

"A Child's Calendar"
I'd recommend John Updike's "A Child's Calendar". Many readers associate Updike with his award-winning "Rabbit" series, which is not about cute little bunnies. Nevertheless, Updike scores big with this lovely collection of poems for children. Each month has a beautiful illustration and a timely poem.

Author of "Hobo Finds A Home", Editor,"Of A Predatory Heart" ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

unusual and exciting and absorbing John Updike novel
I like this book very much. It helped me to understand the other works and outlook on John Updike. His style of writing is not complicated for foreign readers, and here in Ukraine, this novel is very popular ... Read more

Product Description
"It is, quite simply, Updike's best novel yet." NEWSWEEK

A deftly satirical portrait of life and love in a suburban town as only Updike can paint it.


From the Paperback edition.Amazon.com Review
Updike's eighth novel, subtitled "A Romance" because, he says,"People don't act like that any more," centers on the love affair of amarried couple in the Connecticut of 1962. Unfortunately, this is acouple whose members are married to other people. Suburban infidelityis familiar territory by now, but nobody knows it as well as Updike,and the book is written with the author's characteristic poeticsensibility and sly wit. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Marry Me



I requqested the audio version and was sent the hardcover.

eh! rehash of couples -- foxy and sally = the same character
i have recently re-read both books back to back and almost felt as if one were a continuation of the other. i must admit, i am drawn to updike's works and even though i dont think he's the best writer in the world, i do appreciate his insights into anything he choses to write about,i.e the building trades, the art world, the financial world, the beach, suburban life, women etc, he always nails it. the characters,though interesting, are always extensions of previous characters, i.e. angela(couples)=ruth(marry me) the voluptuous, maleable,harried,out of touch wife; foxy(couples)=sally(marry me) the cynical,mannish, flat-footed, posteriorly deprived, selfish blond adulteress, who both piet(couples) and jerry(marry me) are fascinated by. the male characters have a bit more dimension, but are basically re-written as well, it just depends on which one is the protagonist. updike is always readable, if not brilliant.

A tad dated
I wont rehash the story here as other reviewers have done a good job. I enjoy Updike and if your're new to him, I recommend starting with his short stories or the Rabbit series rather than with "Marry Me". The good points of the novel were the descriptions of life in Connecticut and DC in the early 1960's, the Updike style (descriptive and introspective),the quick page-turning quality and the insights into happiness and married life. The novel is the story of marital infidelity and its effects on two families. It was probably very insightful when first published in 1970 but this is a field that has been well plowed since then. The stories of John Cheever come to mind.I agree with the reviewers who noted some scenes verged on tediousness. Probably the best drawn aspect in my view was how the relationship between Jerry and Sally was so strongly based on feelings and how evanescent strong feelings can be. Not something you want to base major life changing decisions on. Or do you?

Spolier alert:
I don't really understand the ending. Or rather, I understand it all except the Wyoming part. I gather that part never really happened.

Sally and Jerry, Jerry and Ruth, Ruth and Richard, Richard and Sally
In the Updike oeuvre, MARRY ME is not unlike Couples and even Villages, as it explores infidelity and the search for happiness in Northeastern commuter towns. Like COUPLES, MARRY Me features thirty-somethings with young children who gather for weekend drinks and weirdly ecstatic volleyball. Like VILLAGES, it has a selfish and unfaithful male protagonist and even a wife in car accident. These books, like the RABBIT novels, share a lot--in this case, a sensibility, a suburban setting, and an underlying social vocabulary. They are somewhat different looks at the same jewel.

In MARRY ME, there are many fine sections. For example, in the second chapter, "The Wait", Updike perfectly captures the frantic helplessness of trying to get on successive planes as a standby. Likewise, in the third chapter, "The Reacting of Ruth", there is an absolutely pitch-perfect picture of a family in crisis.

But within these two chapters, there is also what I experienced as two mediocre plays. In "The Wait", this is the snippet conversations between the lovers Jerry and Sally. These alternate between confusion (deliberate by Updike) and empty rhetoric about love and fate (also deliberate). Likewise, in "The Reacting of Ruth" there is brilliant dispute between Jerry and Ruth, his wife, with Jerry often making exactly the perfect point to further or justify his position. But for me, these conversations were unreal in their hair-splitting precision.

I'm not a professor. But it's my impression that in the mid-seventies, when MARRY ME was published, Updike, Roth, and other literary authors employed such dialogue. Here, these authors would create realistic social settings with believable dynamics between the characters. This was real. But then, their characters were mouthpieces, not for ideological purposes but so that the author could identify the subtleties in their actions and beliefs. Even now, some of Philip Roth reads this way, with Roth, basically, holding your face to his conclusions. What I'm saying is that this is a literary style that, in retrospect, doesn't look too successful.

Similarly, the fourth chapter of this book, "The Reacting of Richard", also has the elements of a bad play, but for different reasons. In this case, Updike unwinds an affair, showing its angry consequences. Here, his story and interaction seem absolutely true. But this chapter is also only about this unwinding, with Richard, the cuckold, ranting, and others adjusting to his fury. In this case, the chapter has all the qualities of real life--that is, a situation dominated by a loud bore. After a while, it gets tiresome.

Nonetheless, MARRY ME is an engaging book. This is because narrative is an art and Updike is definitely a master at involving his readers and getting them to turn pages. Actually, this is an attribute of Updike's work that I depend on. You see, whenever my reading is stalled, I pull a Flashman novel or something by Updike off the shelf. Somehow, Fraser and Updike renew my pleasure in reading and I'm ready for more.

Admittedly, MARRY ME is not Updike at his best. But it's as good, if not better, than most of the highly hyped new novels that publishers say show the promise of greatness. With Updike, even in his lesser work, greatness is always apparent. For example:

"Beyond the green railing of the promenade a beach curved into a distance where what appeared to be a fort of a fragile pink overhung the glistening steel of the sea; the beach was entirely of pebbles, loose washed pebbles in whose minuscule caves and crevices the ocean musically sighed as through the gills of an organ."

Or...

"The clouds materialized earlier than usual; little upright puffs at first, like puffs of smoke from a locomotive starting its run around the horizon, then clouds increasingly structural and opaque, castles, continents that, overhead, grew as they moved, keeping the sun behind them..."

Updike has faults. But, how can you not like the guy?

Marital dilemma (4.2 *s)
This book is remindful of the author's earlier "Couples," which too involved adulterous relations among suburban couples. However, the focus of this book is far more narrow involving only two families and is much more dialog intensive giving a clearer window into the full range of emotions experienced by these people.

Jerry and Ruth Conant and Richard and Sally Mathias are thirty-something's with three children in each family. The focus of the book is the affair of Jerry and Sally. At times they seem certain of their love and eventual marriage. Yet others are involved for whom genuine affections exist and doubts continually arise, not only as to practicalities but also as to understanding their true and long-term feelings. Some of the scenes are lengthy and it is fair to say can be tedious. The dialog seems endless and repetitious, constantly reviewing the same points and feelings - and it all seems very realistic. The dialog really draws the reader into their dilemma.

The book is really quite insightful concerning marriage in so far as it goes, but it is inconclusive. What to do when a seemingly better marital fit arises after many years is a subject far larger than one novel can solve.
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Product Description
Now in paperback, John Updike's dazzling collection of poetry--as varied as the 40 years in which they were written--including nearly every poem from his five previously published collections, and more than 70 new poems and his light verse. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Upright Updike
A poem is a poem is a poem, right? Wrong. At least to me poetry is something that comes from within, something that's born perfect, something that doesn't need the craftsman. I know I'll draw a lot of criticism from the school of thought that swears by crafted poetry, but no, that's not mycuppa.

John Updike has always passed this touchstone test of mine, moreso in this collection. True, not all pieces in this volume are spontaneous,but thanks to his respect for poetry, he has segregated his poems from his"light verse." In his own words, "In making this collection,I wanted to distinguish my poems from my light verse.My principle ofsegregation has been that a poem derives from the real (the given, thesubstantial) world and light verse from the man-made world of information -books, newspapers, words, signs. If a set of lines brought back somethingto me something I actually saw or felt, it was not light verse. If it tookits spark from language and stylized signifiers, it was."

The factthat Updike understands the thick line between poetry and prose in verse,doesn't make his poems and verses any less interesting. In fact, it adds totheir character.

A wonderful collection with diverse style and subjects
I really love the variety in this collection.He writes about science, travel, nature, and much much more.Each poem is quite different from the others.This variation makes each poem unique and very interesting.

Everyman's Poet
John Updike has accomplished a great deal in his career, but his poetry cuts to the heart of his obessions/teachings/observations on life.What a wonderful collection to behold.He makes one appreciate how poetry canonce again speak to the heart as well as the mind.I highly recommend thisexcellent collection for poetry lovers and non-poetry lovers alike. ... Read more