In the following essay, Wilson examines elements of social drama, historical consciousness, and tension between the desire for isolation and integration in Updike's Rabbit tetralogy.

In the following essay, Leckie examines the social, literary, and philosophical significance of marriage and infidelity as presented in Marry Me.

In the following essay, Fleischauer examines the language and syntax of Updike's prose, particularly aspects of irony, symbolism, and literary detachment evoked in his use of descriptive vocabulary and imagery.

In the following essay, Lasseter examines elements of naturalism, literary realism, and deterministic philosophy in Rabbit Is Rich. According to Lasseter, “The theme of entropy which dominates Rabbit Is Rich can be understood in terms of the naturalistic trap. This is a novel about limits, energy crises, hostages, and death.”

When Updike publishes a novel or a collection of tales, most major journals and many general readers respond. Such is not the case with his poetry. Only literary specialists know that Updike's first book is a volume of poems, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (1958), and that it is the first of, at this writing, his four poetry collections. The dust jacket blurb announces that the volume "charts a nice course between playfulness and sobriety." The book does just that. An anti...

In the following review, Hardwick provides an overview of Updike's fiction and thematic preoccupations, and praises Self-Consciousness.

In the following essay, Epstein provides an overview of Updike's literary career, fiction, and critical assessment. According to Epstein, Updike's fiction is undermined by the author's preoccupation with prose style and the subject of sex.

In the following review, Boyers gives an unfavorable assessment of Toward the End of Time.

The interest of Updike as a moral fabulist is that his judgments are never univocal. By his own avowal, he has too much tenderness for his characters to condemn their follies. On the other hand, his sense of humor and his ethics do not permit him to let their foibles go unnoticed. He himself acknowledges this duality when he affirms that all his work says "Yes, but." We find the same ambivalence in the definition he gives of the people he considers as spiritually alive: "I feel that to ...

In the following review, Scott offers a positive evaluation of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

In the following review, Bayley offers a tempered evaluation of Brazil. “The hazards of the wilderness,” writes Bayley, “do not suit the genius of suburban America.”

Back in the second decade of this century, Herman Hesse remarked that "Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap."… In the figure of John Updike, Hesse's crisis of culture attains what we might call a culminating expression. Unwilling to exorcise the dilemma by making a game of it, in the mode of black humor widely prevalent among his contemporaries, Updike has confronted the problem of belief as directly as did Tolst...

In the following review, Gilman provides a negative evaluation of S.

In the following review, Pollitt strongly criticizes Updike's portrayal of women and contemporary gender stereotypes in The Witches of Eastwick.

My consideration of Faulkner and Updike together is not arbitrary. Despite the differences in their generations and background, there are many surprising similarities in their work—one of these is particularly relevant to the future of the American novel: each author produces work which shows the contrary pulls of structure and the absence of structure. By this I do not mean that each writes some books which are structured and some which are not; I mean that repeatedly one encounters in their novels ...

The novels of John Updike have spawned a criticism rather remarkable in its contentiousness. His books have evoked critical outrage, bewilderment, condescension, commendation, and an enthusiasm approaching the fulsome. The same novel might be hailed as a major fictional achievement and dismissed as a self-indulgence or a failure. And evaluations of Updike's importance in the realm of contemporary American literature reflect a similar truculent diversity. However, a careful review of the commentary on...

In the following review, Donoghue offers a positive assessment of Self-Consciousness.

In the following review, Parini offers praise for The Afterlife and Other Stories.

In the following review, Amis offers a positive assessment of Odd Jobs.

In all the [Rabbit] novels, it is suggested—Updike is too canny to insist on it—that Harry, resolutely commonplace in most other ways, has a special spiritual gift, however poorly he understands or articulates it, a persistent sense of what William James in A Pluralistic Universe wittily called "a more": "the believer finds that the tenderest parts of his personal life are continuous with a more of the same quality which is operative in the universe outside of him and whic...

In the following review, LeClair offers a positive assessment of Toward the End of Time.

In the following review, Atwood offers praise for Toward the End of Time.

In the following review, Shapiro offers a positive assessment of Bech at Bay.

In the following review, Searles offers a positive assessment of Rabbit at Rest.

In the following review, Godwin praises Updike's prose and wit in The Witches of Eastwick, but faults the novel for what she perceives as a lack of intellectual depth.

In the following review, Barnes offers a positive assessment of In the Beauty of the Lilies.

In the following review, Kingsolver offers a positive evaluation of Brazil, but objects to racial stereotypes and elements of misogyny in the book.

Updike has been a professional writer for two decades. His first decade's work, for the most part, records the strife, observation, and feeling of that pre-twenty year old wherein nostalgic recollections of boyhood are transmuted by an adult's imagination and youthful autobiography is altered into art…. [His] youthful memory informs almost all the fiction of [the] 1955–65 decade. Updike wrote [the] Foreword to Olinger Stories in 1964 with the intention of saying farewell to Penns...

What [Updike] has to say [in The Coup] is mordant, outrageous, and bitterly self-mocking, a lengthy monologue that really is a coup of sorts, constituting Updike's most experimental novel to date. Kush is Ellelloû's fiction just as The Coup is Updike's fastidiously circumscribed fiction, a country set in an "Africa" of words. And what a virtuoso display Updike gives us! Not even [Nabokov's] Pale Fire, another inspired work by another displaced "ruler,&...

In the following review, Enright offers a positive assessment of Roger's Version.

John Updike [in his "Problems and Other Stories"] has some questions to put to us; "problems" to pose, as math teachers used to use the word, not in the contemporary, fallen sense of "Don't mind John Updike, he's just having problems at home." The problems concern divorce, the guilt of divorce, childhood memories, the guilt attaching to certain childhood memories, lust, the guilt that follows hard upon lust, and the fate of American Protestantism. (p. ...

In the following review, Abbey gives a laudatory appraisal of Roger's Version.

Updike was in Africa in 1973, one of the years of the great drought that reduced the always barren country around the Sahara to an absolute waste land. Out of what he saw, out of many books, and out of his own head he has made the nation of Kush [as the setting for his book, The Coup]. It is an audacious creation and there must have been some magic in it too because the entire nation is there in all its splendor, farce, and misery. With much nerve and surely with some luck, Updike invented his Africa not th...

The variety of subjects [in Assorted Prose] is impressive; Russia's first moon shot, a dinosaur egg, style in sports writing, the quiz show scandal, the assassination of President Kennedy. There are also obituary notes on John P. Marquand, Grandma Moses, and T. S. Eliot. Two longer pieces, one on pigeons and one on Antarctica, show how well Updike could handle a New Yorker research job. Among his other apprentice works were several parodies…. Whether or not Updike is, or someday may be, a grea...

In the following review, Quinn offers praise for Rabbit at Rest.

The Coup attracted my interest because of its subject matter. Writing about the Sahel, I thought, might help transform the muffled glories of Updike's ornate prose into something leaner, or lend a gravity to his religious impulses that neither Skeeter nor the author's suburban adulterers had ever done. At times in The Coup that almost seems what Updike himself has in mind…. Nobody would deny Updike's expository gifts, despite the occasional sentence that defies understanding. Whe...

So many of John Updike's characters seem to inhabit the suburbs of Splitsville and to toy with infidelity as soon as the shower presents are unwrapped that one things of them as naturally polygamous…. [It seems odd] that the gracenote of Updike's fiction should be optimism—a radiant box of corn flakes in the kitchen mess, a cascade of Calgonite offering an epiphany in the dishwasher, and so forth—because his people are not so much learning marriage as pondering a way out o...

At least five out of the 23 stories [in Problems and Other Stories] rivet: "Transaction," "The Egg Race," "Separating," "The Faint," "Daughter, Last Glimpses Of." But Updike can be portentous and pretentious in his short-shorts, which, while dealing summarily with the same subjects as his full-bodied stories (separation, divorce, grieved children, living alone, middle age), are built upon arty structures and laced with significant quotes&...

John Updike is an éminence grise of the short-story form. I imagine him writing them almost in his sleep, determined to retain a scrap of dream even as he dreams it. In Problems … Updike once again demonstrates how circumscribed his world is and how good he is within its limits. Updike's style—his finicky choice of words, his love of adjectives—is a linguistic fence. The very mastery of it insures order, guarding certain subjects and keeping others out. Guilt, for instance...

"The Coup" is a comedy of racial and cultural incongruities; but whereas Waugh and Theroux use a white protagonist … to clear a path for us into the Dark Continent, Updike has the fictional audacity to project a black among blacks, a militant and culturally, though not sexually, puritanical Marxist-Muslim, the redoubtable Col. Hakim Félix Ellelloû, as the commanding figure and voice of his novel. (p. 1) [Ellelloû] is an extraordinary tour-de-force of a character, an...

After the glittering and extravagant landscapes of The Coup, we return in [Problems and Other Stories] to more familiar domestic terrain—gas stations in Nevada, church basements, motels, subways, bathrooms. We are back in the world of Everyman's everyday suffering and everyday grace…. Heroically mundane, still desperately hopeful, their minds echoing with quotations from Blake and St. Augustine and esoteric scraps of information about extinct ungulates, Updike's characters stumbl...

The stories [in Too Far to Go] are consecutive,… and the same characters, Richard and Joan Maple, and the same themes—love, domesticity and infidelity, permanence and evanescence, blood and death—appear throughout. Together the stories form a single unit, rather like an Updike novel, rather like the Maples' marriage, a luxurious slow slide from grace, a 20-year trajectory from innocence to decadence. The Maples begin, certainly, in innocence…. But they end, like the studen...

Kush, an imagined sub-Saharan country in Africa, a poor peanut-producing territory once ruled by the French under the name of Noire, is the improbable setting for John Updike's uncharacteristic new novel, "The Coup" …, and he has taken immense pains to make the territory tangible in some dazzling passages of physical description and recreation. "The Coup" is really more fable than novel. At first reading, it seems to be a number of books in one, and veers abruptly f...

Seventeen of the stories in [Problems and Other Stories] first appeared in The New Yorker, and they have upon them the white, bloodless thumbmark of that publication. They do not bleed or cry, they do not hurt us in the chest or the throat; they are, instead, the work of a fine craftsman in cool, classic stone. Simple, directly written, they are pleasantly wry and often intelligently ironic. The plots are thin, clear, almost translucent…. In such tales as "Here Come the Maples," "...

[Problems and Other Stories shows once again that John Updike] is pre-eminent among contemporary writers of the short story, once thought the most American of literary forms. It is not that he has moved the form forward, as, for example, Hemingway did by forcing it into a new idiom, but that he has brought the dominant type of today's story—the New Yorker story—to its highest excellence. The type is characterized by sophistication, texture, smooth craftsmanship, and, on occasion, ingenu...

Compelling and revealing and brought off with superb control of language and theme, [Problems and Other Stories] confirms Updike's growing position as the foremost master of the genre in our time. The stories … appear in chronological order and together form an unusually lucid record of many of the social themes and influences of the decade just past. From the smooth perfection of the television commercial to the increasing gains of the psychoanalyst as the mythical father of being for the mod...

[While] Updike is gifted at everything he puts his hand to, he is not equally gifted. Thus, although he is a first-rate miniaturist (his short stories are usually flawless, and his criticism can be truly remarkable …), he has failed to attain major status as a novelist. Perhaps his is a case of talent spread too thin to sustain the rigors of full-length fiction. Or perhaps something less tangible and more complicated is involved—a subtle clash between artistic ability and artistic inclination,...

[In Problems and Other Stories] divorce is like a more profound kind of marriage. The relationship is purified by distance, ennobled by nostalgia. It becomes a tragedy, instead of a comedy of errors. Divorce releases a desire for the former husband or wife that can be neither defined nor satisfied. Someone said about James Joyce that he gave up his religion, but kept his categories. Mr. Updike's husbands and wives keep their categories, too. Their future is framed by their past. They struggle to find...