In any case, Wood in his punitive Protestant iconoclasm would of course disparage Updike, since the novelist, as Louis Menand explains, belongs to the Joycean tradition of sacramental poetics from which Beckett was in flight: As James Wood wrote in The Broken Estate, “Updike, unlike Beckett or Bernhard, never appears to doubt that words can be made to signify, can be made to refer, to mean.” I admire Beckett and Bernhard, but I wonder what they would think of how their astringency has been made into a fashion statement by the Anglo-American literati. This facility has also been held against him. Updike, he said, was an American Shakespeare he could write about anybody and anything in any genre. A bias toward contrarianism-or perhaps metacontrarianism-makes me skeptical of the cool-kid consensus against the prodigious man of letters that has extended at least from David Foster Wallace’s overcompensatory try-hard male-feminist routine to Jessa Crispin’s exasperated middle-school “ugh.”Ī decade ago, a distant acquaintance urged me, over the noise of a crowded bar in Central Pennsylvania, to read Updike after I had unthinkingly repeated the cool-kid cliches. As a special feature the volume also presents two short pieces that shed light on the novels and the tale 'Couples: A Short Story,' the origin of the novel of the same name, written in 1963 but deemed unsuitable for publication by The New Yorker.I will confess to wanting to like John Updike.

Written with the grace, verve, and style of one of literature's most sophisticated entertainers, these books not only reveal Updike's genius in characterization and his formal versatility as a novelist but also delve into the complexities of sex and marriage, social class and personal morality, and the difficult quandaries of the flesh and the spirit. Here for the first time in one volume are three of John Updike's most essential novels-the scandalous Couples, the brilliant Rabbit Redux, and the uproarious A Month of Sundays-which together form an unforgettable triptych of the social turbulence that roiled America from the Kennedy to the Nixon years.

Library of America's definitive Updike edition continues with three masterful novels on the joys and the discontents of the sexual revolution

St Joseph's University (Brooklyn Voices Series).