The Coup: John Updike's Modernist Masterpiece
John Updike, critic, poet, and one of America's most prolific and important writers of fiction, has been justly celebrated for his evocations of middle-class American life. Novels such as Couples and Marry Me recreate a rootless, moneyed suburban milieu, and his two books that follow the life and loves of Henry Bech carry the reader into the world of the urban Jewish intelligentsia. Updike is perhaps most famous, however, for his three "Rabbit" novelsÂ—Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, and Rabbit Is Rich, which follow the career of Harry Angstrom at ten-year intervals from the frightened and alienated young husband of the Fifties to the portly and prosperous latter-day Babbitt of the Seventies. Updike's many critics have generally either lauded his elegant prose and his sensitive evocations of ordinary life or disparaged his "limited" vision and what they see as his failure to move beyond an outmoded realistic tradition in the novels following The Centaur, an early portrait of Updike's father set within an elaborate mythological framework. Whereas postmodernist writers such as John Hawkes, John Barth, and Thomas Pynchon attempt to evoke the chaos and anxiety of post-World War Two America through a fiction that is not only nonrealistic but antirealistic, Updike has remained for the most part fairly strictly within the confines of realism, increasingly incorporating topical events and