In “11 Pieces of Literary Proof Marriage Has Never Been Easy,” posted on the blog Signature: Making Well-Read Sense of the World, Lisa Rosman creates a list of 11 that probably could have gone well into the 30s. Updike, of course, makes her list, along with Ovid (Metamorphoses) and Virgil (The Georgics), William Shakespeare (Macbeth), Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina), Gustav Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence), Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway), Edward Albee (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf), Alice Walker (The Color Purple), Stephen King (The Shining), and Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).

Of the Updike selection, Too Far to Go, she writes,

“I’d be remiss if I omitted something by Updike, who captured the sensual disarray of mid-twentieth-century couples like nobody else. People tout his Rabbit chronicles but it’s in this tale of musical chairs-style couples that he best distills the sweet, slow longings of middle-class married life.”