John Updike’s best books – Ranked!
Inspired by and drawing on three British novels (HG Wells’s The Time Machine, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Henry Green’s Concluding), Updike’s debut imagines a near future where the residents of a care home stage a revolt in which two antagonists, John Hook and Stephen Conner, struggle for supremacy.A curio.Updike tropes Religion, deathOver the course of a single day, 79-year-old painter Hope Chafetz endures the determined attention of Kathryn D’Angelo, a young, ambitious art journalist.Updike had by this point been on the receiving end of many such encounters and the novel, told almost entirely from Hope’s perspective, bristles with resentment at the presumptions and blind spots inherent in the situation.Updike tropes Art, religionAn epistolary novel that draws on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 19th-century story of adultery and hypocrisy, The Scarlet Letter, to ironise faith and fidelity in the 1980s.
As revealed in her letters and tapes, Sarah Worth has abandoned her family to find herself in an Arizona ashram led by the guru Arhat Mindadali.The form allows for a fragmented narrative in which the facts Sarah conceals from her husband and daughter are as telling as the facts she details.Updike tropes Sex, religionA prequel to Hamlet that focuses on the tangled love lives of the prince of Denmark’s father, mother and uncle stops short before Shakespeare’s bloody denouement.Gerutha (Gertrude) is married off in her teens to the coarse Horwendil (Hamlet senior) while harbouring a reciprocated passion for Feng (Claudius).The omens are not good.
As with Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the deeper your knowledge of Hamlet, the more you will enjoy Updike’s embellishments.Updike tropes Sex, familyThe reader will learn very little about Gerald Ford, the 38th president of the United States, from this novel.James Buchanan, the 15th president and something of a minor obsession for both Updike and his narrator Alfred L Clayton, is given slightly more room but what concerns Clayton most is his overboiled erotic memories.Clayton is a history professor well aware that there is no correct interpretation of the past.Clayton’s account of his infidelity and the failure of his marriage is appropriately partial, misleading and self-regarding.
Updike tropes Sex, familyChiron, the wise centaur with a fatal wound, stands as an allegory in this novel for the teacher George Caldwell,His son, Peter, recognising his father’s suffering and frustration, determines to escape a similar fate through art,Updike himself achieved the escape that Peter dreams of but, as this early novel demonstrates, he would mine the memory of small-town life for the rest of his career,Updike tropes Religion, familyAdapted into both a film with a stellar cast (Cher, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jack Nicholson) and a successful musical, the novel is strong enough to stand apart from those glitzy distractions,The arrival of Darryl Van Horne in a tight-knit New England enclave stirs diabolical feelings in Alexandra, Jane and Sukie, the eponymous sorceresses.
Fatal mayhem naturally ensues,With its gossipy tone, the story doesn’t take itself too seriously and neither should the reader,Updike tropes Sex, deathThe publication of Updike’s immaculately crafted fourth novel served notice that a once-in-a-generation talent had arrived,Joey Robinson brings his new wife and her child from a previous marriage to the Pennsylvania farm where he grew up to meet the matriarch who struggles to manage the place alone,Through a painstaking accumulation of telling details Updike reveals the tensions between the three adults and the inexorable reality of change.
Updike tropes Sex, familyThis edition gathers together short stories – Bech: A Book (1970), Bech Is Back (1982) and Bech in Czech (1987) – featuring peripatetic Henry Bech in a fictional mashup of Jewish writers Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer (with a dash of Waspish JD Salinger).Our antihero lives in the shadow of his own celebrity, gives speeches behind the iron curtain, accepts awards at prestigious universities, and spreads the message on the “Cultural Situation of the American Writer” to readers in Ghana, Korea, Venezuela and elsewhere.The irony is that such far-flung adventures are inimical to the writer’s creative process, generating existential anxiety.Updike carries off the satire with a light touch, affectionately sending up literary squabbles and personal rivalries.Updike tropes Religion, sex, deathThis is the novel that made Updike rich and famous and put him on the cover of Time.
Readers who look into it hoping to find graphic depictions of middle-class adultery will not be disappointed, but they will also get beautifully wrought accounts of religious doubt, vivid descriptions of commonplace life and sharp observations of social mores in early-60s America.The plot involves the tortuous romantic machinations of 10 couples.At the heart of the action is Piet Hanema, whose need for extramarital sex is matched by his desire for communion with the divine.His life will be shattered by both.Updike tropes Sex, religionWhen this novel was published, its premise that the existence of God could be proven through a computer programme seemed cutting edge.
If that now strikes the reader as quaint, the author’s virtuoso upending of his reputation for social realism remains enthralling,We are trapped in the head of Roger Lambert as he obsessively conjures an affair between his wife and a young student, describes his own scandalous relationship with his half-sister’s daughter, and proudly displays his familiarity with the Latin scholarship of the early Christian theologian Tertullian,How much is real and how much can we rely on the omniscient voice of Roger? Updike tropes Sex, religion, adulteryThe author’s supreme achievement – if you have never read any of these novels, jump right in at the start and work your way through to the heartbreaking finale,To rank each work in turn, they go: Rabbit at Rest (1990), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Rabbit, Run (1960) and Rabbit Redux (1971),A separately published novella, Rabbit Remembered (2001) , is a disappointing misfire.
Taken as a whole, the tetralogy offers an unforgettable portrait of the life of the white middle-class American male in the last century,Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is priapic, patriotic and prone to bouts of religious introspection,When we first meet him, he feels trapped in a stale marriage, his days as a feted high-school basketball player behind him, long years of existential emptiness ahead,Those years will cover the counterculture explosion of the 1960s, the monied excess of the early 1980s and the bitter realisation by the close of that decade that unbridled materialism has poisoned the body corporeal and politic,Updike’s gifts for vivid description and apt metaphor have never been surpassed.
Updike tropes Sex, religion, death This article was amended on 22 December 2025.An earlier version said Harry Angstrom was a baseball player; this should have said basketball player.
Welsh first minister vows to keep Labour ‘most successful democratic party on the planet’
The first minister of Wales has said she is determined for Welsh Labour not to lose its crown as the world’s most successful democratic party, despite warnings it could be relegated to third place in May’s elections.Polls suggest Reform UK and Plaid Cymru could win more seats than Eluned Morgan’s party in the Seneddelections next year, ending 100 years of dominance for Labour in Wales.Morgan said: “Of course I feel the pressure but I’m also determined to turn this round. We’re the most successful democratic political party on the planet. It’s a long winning streak
U-turn on inheritance tax for farmers ‘snuck out’ to avoid scrutiny, say Tories
Ministers “snuck out” the announcement that they had decided to U-turn on inheritance tax for farmers, the Conservatives have said after the government revealed the move in a press release two days before Christmas.The shadow environment secretary, Victoria Atkins, accused the government of trying to dodge scrutiny of its latest policy reversal, under which the threshold for taxing inherited farmland will rise from a planned £1m to £2.5m.The move was announced on Tuesday in a press release from the environment department after months of pressure from farmers, campaigners and some Labour MPs.Atkins told Sky News on Wednesday morning: “This being snuck out the day before Christmas Eve means that, of course, we haven’t had chance to scrutinise this properly in parliament
Keir Starmer encourages Britons to ‘reach out’ to others this Christmas
Keir Starmer has called on Britons to show kindness to struggling friends or family this Christmas, saying being in touch with those in need can make a big difference.Starmer, whose brother died last Boxing Day, said people should channel the spirit of the many volunteers and public sector workers who are on duty this Christmas by resolving to get back in touch with those who might find the time of year difficult.“Some truly special people will be pulling on their uniforms and heading out to work,” he said. “Many volunteers will be out there as well. Serving food
Ministers raise inheritance tax threshold for farms after backlash
Ministers will increase the threshold for taxing inherited farmland from £1m to £2.5m after months of pressure from campaigners and MPs representing rural areas.In a statement slipped out just before Christmas, the environment department announced the U-turn, which will apply from April when the tax kicks in.Plans to tax inherited agricultural assets worth more than £1m at a rate of 20% were announced in Rachel Reeves’s first budget last year.The change reversed tax relief that has existed in its modern form since the 1980s
Deputy leader Lucy Powell says Labour must ‘stick to manifesto’ over EU customs union, in implicit rebuke to Streeting – as it happened
In an interview published at the weekend, Wes Streeting, the health secretary, suggested that he would like Britain to join a customs union with the EU. This is not government policy, and it is a proposal that Keir Starmer has ruled out. But Streeting would like to be PM himself one day and the interview was interpreted as his (latest) attempt to ensure that he is well positioned in case there is a leadership contest before the next election.No 10 largely played down the significance of Streeting’s comments yesterday.But Lucy Powell, Labour’s deputy leader, has delivered an implicit reprimand to the health secretary
Reform council’s plan to shut eight care homes ‘a betrayal of local people’
A Reform UK-led council plan to shut eight of its residential care homes has been condemned as “a betrayal of local people”.Days before Christmas, Derbyshire county council announced that the homes would have to close after a proposed sale fell through.The closures have prompted a backlash and have echoes of the furore in Lancashire where the Reform-led council is planning to close five care homes and five day centres and move residents into the private sector.Mick Coppin, a regional organiser of the GMB union, said the Derbyshire plans put vital services and more than 200 jobs at risk.“These closures are nothing short of a betrayal of local people and staff,” Coppin said
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