The Christian Century, February 23rd, 2000
Gertrude and Claudius. By John Updike. Knopf, 212 pp., $23.00.
JOHN UPDIKE'S 19th novel, plotted as a "prequel" to Shakespeare's Hamlet, is a beautifully crafted, captivating story. Updike owes much of his thematic treatment to Shakespeare and to modern Shakespeare scholarship, but it is his own fertile imagination that generates the novel's compelling narrative. This is his best book since The Witches of Eastwick.
Updike brings new energy and creativity to his metier: using the experience of human sexuality as a lens through which to glimpse ourselves as "creatures caught in the light," a...
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