Where to Start with John Updike: A Reading Guide

John Updike (1932–2009) is one of the most celebrated — and most debated — American novelists of the twentieth century. A Harvard graduate who spent most of his life in Massachusetts, he published twenty-seven novels, more than a dozen short story collections, poetry, criticism, and memoirs over a career of five decades. He is best known for the Rabbit tetralogy — Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Rabbit at Rest (1990) — which traces the life of Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom from his late twenties to his death in middle age, using one ordinary American man’s experience as a lens through which to examine American culture across four decades. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice (Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest) and was one of the most technically accomplished prose stylists in American fiction. His reputation has been complicated in recent decades by feminist criticism of his treatment of female characters.

Where to Start: Rabbit, Run (1960)

The essential starting point — the novel that introduced Harry Angstrom and established Updike’s claim to be the chronicler of middle-class American life. Harry was a high school basketball star in Brewer, Pennsylvania; now he is twenty-six, selling kitchen gadgets door to door, married to the alcoholic Janice, the father of a toddler. One evening, returning home from work, he gets in his car and drives south, heading nowhere in particular.

Updike writes Rabbit, Run in a driving present tense that gives Rabbit’s restlessness an almost physical force — the novel pulls you forward the way Rabbit runs, without quite knowing where he is going. The novel is about the American promise (you can be whatever you want, you can always move on) and its failure (there is nowhere to go that is not still America, no self to become that is not still Harry Angstrom). Its ending — after Janice’s drunken drowning of their baby daughter, after Rabbit runs again — holds its judgment in suspension.

Rabbit Is Rich (1981)

Updike’s most technically accomplished novel — and the one that most fully demonstrates what the Rabbit sequence can do over time. It is 1979, the oil crisis; Harry is now fifty, runs the Toyota dealership he inherited from his father-in-law, and is wealthy and comfortable and vaguely dissatisfied. His son Nelson is coming home with a pregnant girlfriend; Jimmy Carter is giving speeches about national malaise that Rabbit finds weirdly comforting; America is declining, and Harry is declining with it.

The novel’s surface is comic and its depths are elegiac: Updike renders the texture of American middle-class life in 1979 with extraordinary precision (the cars, the brand names, the golf clubs, the suburban dinner parties), and within that texture traces how Harry has been shaped by the decades he has lived through. Won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award.

The Witches of Eastwick (1984)

Updike’s most unusual novel — a comedy of female power and male threat set in a small Rhode Island town in the late 1960s. Three women (Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie), all divorced or separated, have developed magical powers: Alexandra moulds clay figures that sometimes come to life; Jane plays the cello and can make it rain; Sukie shapes events. Their comfortable coven is disrupted by the arrival of Darryl Van Horne, a wealthy, physically repellent man who takes all three of them as lovers and eventually marries a younger woman.

A departure from the realism of the Rabbit novels, it shows Updike’s range and his willingness to work in a different register. Best read after the Rabbit books.

Why Rabbit, Run Is the Ideal First Book

For a reader new to John Updike, Rabbit, Run is the ideal first book because it is the opening of his celebrated Rabbit novels and the fullest expression of his distinctive gifts, the dazzling prose, the acute observation, and the unflinching engagement with ordinary American life. Rabbit, Run follows Harry Rabbit Angstrom, a former high-school basketball star dissatisfied with his ordinary adult life, as he flees his responsibilities, in a richly written, closely observed, and morally complex novel. As an entry point it is ideal, for it launches his most celebrated work and a perfect introduction to his dazzling, observant, American fiction. It welcomes the newcomer with its dazzling prose, its acute observation, and its compelling, flawed protagonist, drawing the reader into his distinctive vision. It begins his finest sequence and best represents his gifts, so the new reader meets his most famous character where his story begins. For the newcomer, then, Rabbit, Run is the natural and ideal starting point.

What to Expect as a New Reader

As a new reader, you can expect Rabbit, Run to be a richly written, closely observed, and morally complex novel. You can expect dazzling prose, for Updike writes with extraordinary verbal richness, precision, and beauty. You can expect acute observation, for Updike renders the textures of ordinary American life with remarkable closeness and detail. You can expect a compelling, flawed protagonist, for Harry Rabbit Angstrom is a vivid, frustrating, deeply human figure. You can expect engagement with ordinary American life, with marriage, restlessness, and dissatisfaction. You can expect moral complexity, for the novel refuses easy judgments of its flawed hero. You can expect emotional and psychological depth beneath the everyday surface. Expect, in short, a richly written, closely observed, and morally complex novel, a superb introduction to Updike’s gifts.

Going Deeper After Your First Book

Once Rabbit, Run has introduced you to Updike’s gifts, the natural next step is to continue the Rabbit novels, which follow Harry Angstrom across the decades of American life, returning to him roughly every ten years in a series widely regarded as one of the great achievements of American fiction, including two volumes that won the Pulitzer Prize. The series is best read in order, for it follows Rabbit and America across the second half of the twentieth century. Beyond the Rabbit novels, the reader who has enjoyed Updike’s gifts can explore his many other novels, his acclaimed short stories, and his essays and criticism, which display the full range of his dazzling prose and acute observation. His characteristic strengths run through his vast body of work. Building your reading journey through Updike is a matter of continuing the Rabbit novels and exploring his wider fiction and nonfiction. The reader who begins here and continues will find one of the most dazzling prose stylists and chroniclers of American life.

Reading John Updike

Updike’s fiction is built on the conviction that ordinary American life — the suburbs, the cars, the anxious middle age, the Protestant sense of sin and the Protestant incapacity for faith — is a worthy subject for serious literary attention. His prose is one of the most celebrated in American fiction: dense, sensuous, precise about the physical world. Begin with Rabbit, Run for the most immediate and visceral introduction to his world; read through the Rabbit sequence in order for the most comprehensive portrait of American life across four decades; approach The Witches of Eastwick for a different and more playful register.