As Hermione Lee pointed out in the New Republic, in Updike's work, everything becomes a metaphor: every ordinary object and event can be seen as signifying something else, often a larger truth. "This is the most metaphorical writing in American fiction, except for Melville's," she wrote. Rabbit sees everything as meaningful but also as strange. Lee commented on Updike's comparisons of Rabbit's heart to many things: it's described as "a fist, an amphitheater, a drum, a galley slave, a ballplayer waiting for the whistle." In Updike, she noted, "no object, no creature, is too ordinary or too technical to be subjected to metaphor."
Updike's work is notable for its rich, precise, and accumulated detail of ordinary life. Lee quoted other reviewers, who loved Updike's "meticulous taxonomy" of "the.....
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