CBR14Bingo – Body Rabbit is Rich – 4/5 Stars All the Rabbit novels are squarely about two main things: the lives that bodies live and the eclipsing of the white man (according to the white man himself) in American society. In this third novel, which I find to be the most unpleasant of the four (and all are at least mildly unpleasant), Rabbit is around 45 and he’s been working as the manager and head salesman at his now-dead father in law’s car dealership. It […]

The Centaur 5/5 The Centaur is John Updike’s novel follow up to Rabbit, Run, and if you’ve read that novel, and any of the subsequent ones, you’d recognize just how much of a departure (in some ways) this novel is from those. But John Updike has always had some experimental elements in his fiction, even if it doesn’t permeate all of his fiction. In any given story collection, you’d find a few “out there” stories. Taken purely on plot, this novel is not all that […]

The Poorhouse Fair – 3/5 Stars This is a reread for me separated by about 15 years or so. This is John Updike’s first novel, and feels like it in a lot of ways. It also feels like a kind of drawer novel that came out after finding some experience with short fiction and poetry. The novel is short, broken into three chapters with some small section breaks within it. It takes place over the course of a weekend in a “Poorhouse”, a state-run old […]

This is the second novel of the Rabbit Angstrom series by John Updike. I was born the year the third book came out, and the last book, plus the novella followed up 10 and 20 years later. This expansion can give a false impression that the books were always designed as a series. It may well be that that was what John Updike planned all along, but I am not certain of it. This book gives the clear impression of what he’s thinking though. Rabbit […]