Prolific writer's fiction lives after him

John Updike, for my money the best American writer of his generation, has died. Long live Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, Henry Beck and all the other characters Updike created in his 50 (count 'em) books and numerous short stories.

The obituary cites Updike's prolific output over the past half century and the writing prizes he won — two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award and the American Book Award. I opined recently that Updike could have, even should have, won the Nobel Prize. His fiction captured better than anyone's the fits and starts of the American middle class in the 20th century, and his prose was lively, sensory and poetic. His four Rabbit books — "Rabbit Run," "Rabbit Redux," "Rabbit is Rich" and "Rabbit at Rest" — chronicle the changes in the American middle class through the turmoil of the 1960s and '70s and the giddy greed of the 1980s. Each novel is set against the political and sociological changes of its decade, creating a Tolstoyan chronicle of the American century. In "Rabbit at Rest," the protagonist faces his own mortality with the dissatisfying realization of a life with little real meaning. Over a period of years, my wife and I set about collecting the Rabbit books in hardcover from used book stores and library yard sales. The complete collection now rests on our bookshelf, and my wife recently undertook to reread them in chronological order (neither of us had read the books in order the first time around). She found "Rabbit Redux" so painfully depressing that she decided to take a break from the unadmirable life of Rabbit Angstrom. Almost overlooked in the obituaries are two of Updike's best explications of the American middle class and the sexual revolution — "Couples" and "Marry Me." I found them both vivid and disturbing.

My introduction to Updike was in a college writing class, when we read "A&P," a short story that is as lean and moving as anything Hemingway ever wrote. I would recommend it to anyone as a model for a short story.

This morning I realized I had read only about a tenth of Updike's books. I need to read more of them and to go back, like my wife, and read "Rabbit" in chronological order.