In a pre-election piece written for The New Yorker’s Life and Letters section (October 31, 2016), Thomas Mallon considers “2016: The Novel” and mentions Updike in the process.

“In my novel Finale, set during the last years of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency, I never, except for a few pages in the epilogue, entered Reagan’s consciousness, not because I felt there was nothing there but because what was there looked so smoky and unseizable. In John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest, Harry Angstrom muses upon the fortieth President: ‘You never knew how much he knew, nothing or everything, he was like God that way, you had to do a lot of it yourself.’ I decided that Reagan, who had eluded capture by his authorized-access biographer, Edmund Morris, was best approached from the outside, through puzzled observers, both admiring and detracting, from Nancy Reagan to Christopher Hitchens—rather the way Gore Vidal gave us his novelized version of Abraham Lincoln, in 1984.”