It can be the artifice of form, which may be why he does so well with his short stories. What Updike requires to counter what one might call his fictional over-hospitality is something that will provide constraint or urgency. It can appear that a character is unable to rush across town in response to a midnight call for help without recalling his associations with each building along the way, or attend a midnight tryst without pondering the provenance of the furniture. Or maddeningly undiscriminating with a sensibility that makes an epiphany of each suburban minute and twinge. He believes that there is a Silly and Imperfect Middle or Upper Middle Class Mid-Century American That Ought to Know Better archetype, and he writes about it with a brilliance and devotion inspired by the perfection of every one of its imperfections. Only, for instance, he does not believe that there is an archetype of Man and Woman, to which a middle- or upper-middle-class American of the mid-20th Century is a silly and imperfect approximation that ought to know better. Updike is our Lutheran Platonist he believes in archetypes and tries to write them. Updike, that almost-heart-breakingly reasonable writer-sometimes to his own harm-would perhaps agree as Nabokov, all the opposite, would certainly not have done. It is necessary to laugh at Updike in order to take him with all the seriousness he deserves, just as it was with Vladimir Nabokov. “Rabbit at the Seashore”? “The Rabbit Omnibus”? The titles in John Updike’s proliferated series-”Rabbit, Run,” “Rabbit Redux,” “Rabbit Is Rich” and now “Rabbit at Rest”-had begun to sound like the Bobbsey Twins.

John updike rabbit at rest