SOURCE: "The Great Paraguayan Novel and Other Hardships," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXII, No. 31, September 22, 1986, p. 104-16.

An extraordinary stylist, Updike is one of America's most distinguished men of letters. Considered a perceptive observer of the human condition, he is best known for such novels as Rabbit Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), and Rabbit Is Rich (1981), which chronicle life in Protestant, middle-class America. In the following excerpted review of The Invention of Morel, and Other Stories, he notes the influences of Jorge Luis Borges on the fiction of Bioy Casares.

Adolfo Bioy Casares has been known in the Englishspeaking world primarily as a friend and collaborator of Borges, and the co-author of the ornate literary jokes of The Chronicles of Bustos Domecq (1967). Bioy Casares, however, is a prolific and successful writer on his own, and nearly a generation younger than Borges—he was born in 1914, and Borges in 1899. . . .The...