Time magazine asked “25 literary luminaries to pick one book that they believe reflects where American life is headed or speaks to the present in a meaningful way. Their answers bring together poetry, nonfiction, and fiction from across the nation’s history and beyond its borders . . . . a reading list to match this moment.”
Ron Chernow, who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for his biography Washington: A Life and recently published a biography of Mark Twain, picked the second volume in John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, Rabbit Redux:
“Amid the upheaval of the Trump years, the postwar novel that strikes me as most prophetic is the second book in John Updike’s extraordinary quartet of novels about Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom. An erstwhile high school basketball star in the fictional town of Brewer, Pa., Harry deplores his job as a Linotype operator, which feels like a sad anticlimax after his schoolyard heroics. Once solid and prosperous, his red-brick, blue-collar town now seems seedy and abandoned and he yearns for the supposed simplicity of the 1950s. As a white male who inhabited a once homogeneous town, Harry feels marooned, marginalized by the social and racial turmoil of the late 1960s. A young Connecticut runaway, Jill, and a drug-dealing Black hustler, Skeeter, camp out in his house with explosive results. As they try to educate him about race, slavery, and welfare, Harry feels embittered that the America he has known is slipping away. He has his redeeming qualities, to be sure, but it is hard not to see the embattled Harry as an early forerunner of President Trump’s angry, working-class base.”
Writer Ian McEwan and actor Cillian Murphy have called Updike’s collective Rabbit novels their choice for Great American Novel.
“25 Books That Capture This American Moment,” posted May 12, 2026
“John Updike’s 1960 novel introduced readers to Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, perhaps the most iconic character in suburban literature. Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is a middle-class man who feels there is something missing from his life. The novel follows Rabbit as he flees his suburban responsibilities—his pregnant wife, his job, his entire life—in a desperate attempt to recapture the vitality of his youth. Frank Wheeler, Piet Hanema, Frank Bascombe – these are a handful of the suburban men in the fiction of Richard Yates, John Updike, and Richard Ford. These writers all display certain characteristics of the suburban novel in the post-WWII era: the male experience placed at the forefront of narration, the importance of competition both socially and economically, contrasting feelings of desire and loathing for predictability, and the impact of an increasingly developed landscape upon the American psyche and the individual’s mind. Updike’s genius was in making Rabbit both sympathetic and infuriating—a man whose suburban malaise drives him to make increasingly destructive choices. The novel launched a series that would span four decades, chronicling the evolution of suburban America through one man’s journey.”
Writing for Festivaltopia, Fritz von Burkersroda recommends 
Coming in at #2 was Donald Sassoon’s Becoming Mona Lisa, which traces the path to superstardom of Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous subject/painting—a study that Brown said “suggests that, contrary to popular and scholarly belief, posterity is a peculiarly fickle thing.”
“The third installment of John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ series finds Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom finally comfortable—or at least financially secure—amid the tumultuous backdrop of 1979’s oil crisis and stagflation. ‘How can you respect the world when you see it’s being run by a bunch of kids turned old?’ the narrator observes, capturing the novel’s eerie contemporary resonance: interest rates and real-estate climbing skyward—and staying there—and a gnawing certainty that the next generation won’t have it quite so good. Updike’s prose transforms the mundane rhythms of middle-class life into something approaching poetry as he excavates middle-class anxiety and success. Rabbit’s car dealership is printing money thanks to the Japanese vehicles he sells, even as his own prejudices and racial anxieties bubble beneath the surface. His son Nelson is adrift, the world seems to be coming apart at the seams and Rabbit’s own biases reflect the tensions of a changing America. The novel won Updike both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for its devastating precision in capturing what it means to ‘make it’ while watching the ladder get pulled up behind you.”