Keziah Weir recently published a piece in Vanity Fair revealing “8 Books We Couldn’t Put Down This Month.” And what better fall reading is there than that Updike fall guy, Henry Bech—Updike’s Nobel Prizewinning Jewish alter ego, who tends to get in the same kind of awkward situations as Larry David?

The “we” includes Pulitzer Prizewinning novelist Andrew Sean Greer, who tells Weir that he “felt a certain kinship with other writers who returned to the same character and voice again and again: ‘Most obviously for me is John Updike, his Rabbit books and his Bech books. Much more the Bech books, because there, John Updike seems to be just having a really good time, and I think those are more successful, looking back, than the Rabbit books, which just seem too misogynous to read. The Bech books are still a hoot.'”

Greer, who wrote Less and the sequel Less is Lost, also talks comparatively about Philip Roth and Updike before adding, “Finding a voice you want to always write in is just . . . You don’t want to let go of that for something else.” Maybe that explains why Updike chose to keep writing Rabbit novels and even a novella after his character’s death, and why Roth wrote about Nathan Zuckerman in “half his books.”

Asking a scholar or avid reader of John Updike to name Updike’s “best” will likely lead to a longer list than any superlative can contain. But Most Recommended Books took on the task, using an intuitive three-step process that involved searching “best john updike books,” studying the top five articles that came up in the search, and adding only books mentioned two times. Then they ranked the results, though we’re not told who “they” is or how they determined rank order. To quote Casablanca, the usual suspects are here, plus a few surprises in this somewhat suspect ranking:

Rabbit, Run
Rabbit Redux
Rabbit Is Rich
Rabbit at Rest
The Witches of Eastwick
The Early Stories
The Centaur
Bech: A Book
The Widows of Eastwick
Self-Consciousness
In the Beauty of the Lilies
Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism
Couples
Bech at Bay

Reading for a hot August? A&E Book Club recommended “two classics and a new bestseller” to read before school starts in order to get you back in an academic frame of mind:

Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell—a fictional narrative about Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway and the death of their son, Hamnet. The 2020 novel won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was a Sunday Times #1 bestseller. Writer Kennedy Moore noted, “With a simple but pristine writing style, O’Farrell approaches this story through a feminine perspective, focusing on the often overlooked figure of Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway—or Agnes, as she is called in the novel. . . . Given the ubiquitous influence of Shakespeare’s plays on modern literature and film, writing anything compelling and original about the playwright or his works is challenging. However, O’Farrell has managed to pull it off in this novel.”

A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving—from the author of The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules. “Irving uses a surreal writing style to underscore a mystical plot and paint a nostalgic picture of childhood innocence. Beneath this nostalgia, Irving dives deep into politics and religion, two ever-present factors of American life. . . . Irving portrays spiritual characters and miraculous events while maintaining a modern liberal viewpoint.

Rabbit Run, by John Updike. “Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is an average middle-class American from a small city in Pennsylvania. He was a high school basketball star, but after a surprise pregnancy and a shotgun wedding, he finds himself in a dead-end job in the town where he grew up. One day Rabbit gets in the car and decides to leave this world behind, wife and children included. 

“John Updike’s Rabbit series tracks this fictional character from his early twenties to the end of his life. Updike wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning series over four decades, authoring Rabbit, Run in 1960, Rabbit Redux in 1971, Rabbit is Rich in 1980 and Rabbit at Rest in 1990. The series is especially relevant today as shifting gender roles, the introduction of the birth control pill, abortion and American conceptions of sexual morality lie at the heart of the story. Rabbit, Run is the most gripping of the four novels and will especially resonate with men in their twenties. Not quite a coming-of-age story, this novel is about a man who feels trapped by his impending career, marriage and commitments.

“Reminiscent of Earnest Hemingway, Updike’s writing is not mystical or surreal but offers gritty snapshots of the world as it actually is. The sheer volume of the series adds to the payoff for the reader. By the end of the four novels, the reader knows each character like an old friend and, like the summer, is sad to leave them behind.”

Ulysses turned 100 this year, and to mark the occasion, The Sunday Times (UK) asked a jury of authors and critics to pick “the finest novels published since [James] Joyce’s classic.” Though Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, it’s Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960) that continues to make lists such as this.

Nine of The Times’ 14 jurists were women. “Between them they have read thousands of books, and their choices reflect this: the oldest book was published in 1924, the most recent in 2009. The list includes writers from Britain, Ireland, the US, Nigeria, India and South Africa, with subject matter just as diverse. You will find scalp-hunting outlaws, organ-donating clones and Wall Street traders.”

Of Updike’s novel, which the jury ranked #43, The Times wrote, “In high school Harry Angstrom was a basketball star. Now he’s a 26-year-old salesman, living in the suburbs with his wife, Janice, and son, Nelson. Bored and unsatisfied, he runs away and shacks up with a prostitute in his home town. The search for freedom is a classic American narrative, and here it’s told with aplomb, in charged, fierce prose.”

Read the full article.

Is Rabbit, Run still relevant today? The people at Noombee.com think so. In fact, they included Updike’s 1960 novel on a list of “Five books you should read this year.”

Recommended are Cormac McCarthy’s The Way, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Updike’s first Rabbit Angstrom novel.

“Only three authors have won multiple Pulitzer Prizes and one was John Updike. Rabbit, Run it is the first in a four-book series spanning Updike’s career. In terms of sheer skill, Updike is the ultimate master of the late 20th century. His sentences are amazingly brilliant and his command of the language is next to none.”

Actually, Updike was one of only four writers to win multiple Pulitzer Prizes in Fiction. The others were Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and, more recently, Colson Whitehead.

But the point is, like the Energizer Bunny, Rabbit keeps running . . . even well into the 21st century.

Here’s an interesting anniversary. Ten years (plus three days) later, this reader’s list surfaced in an Updike search: “John Mullan’s 10 of the best: museums.”

John Keats is here: “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time” at the British Museum.

So is Henry James’ short story “Julia Bride,” which opens on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum.

Thomas Hardy’s poem “In the British Museum” also makes the cut, as does J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (Holden Caufield visits the Natural History Museum in New York City). P.D. James’ The Murder Room (set in a small, family-owned museum on the edge of Hampstead Heath), Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife (with its visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford), Anthony Horowitz’s Scorpia Rising (again at the British Museum), A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (which opens at the South Kensington Museum), China Miéville’s Kraken (and the squid at the British Museum of Natural History), AND . . .

John Updike’s “Museums and Women,” the title story from Museums and Women and Other Stories (1972): “Updike’s story features a man who has always associated museum visits with his attachment to women – from his mother, to the girl with whom he shared school trips, to his wife, whom he met in a university museum. When he has an affair, it is with a woman who works in a museum, and they visit the Frick and the Guggenheim together.”