John Updike did not "advance" the novel, and he was not an experimental writer; he was innovative more in what he wrote about – sex in particular – than in any technical sense. Yet he was a prolific writer on a Trollopian scale, his stylistic mastery the more remarkable for its abundance. And the bestof his novels, which appeared overthe course of six decades, make him one of a handful of American writers whose work in the second half of the last century will be read in the second half of this one.

Paradoxically, given his intense intellectuality and mandarin prose, Updike wrote his best work about ordinary life, especially in his tetralogy about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Updike's own background, at least superficially, was itself "ordinary". He grew up in eastern Pennsylvania, 100 miles from New York City, but in cultural terms a backwater. His parents were educated people – his father taught high school maths; his mother had an MA – but of modest background, and though not straitened, the family's circumstances, particularly during the Depression years of Updike's boyhood, were lean.
An only child, Updike spent much of his childhood in the company of adults – his maternal grandparents were very much around – and the solitude he felt was reinforced when the family moved from town to a farm when he was 13. His isolation was increased by a childhood stutter that made occasional appearances throughout his adult life, and by the skin affliction psoriasis, a complaint which seems mild only to non-sufferers. Neither popular nor unpopular among his peers, he was average at sports and unprecocious with girls, but he liked to read and draw from an early age.
A taste for the mysteries of Ellery Queen and Erle Stanley Gardner seems at odds with the expansiveness of his own adult work, but Updike later noted that it "did give me some lessons about keeping a plot taut." A more sophisticated literary palate was developed by a near-addiction to The New Yorker, for which a kindly and more sophisticated aunt annually bought a subscription for the family.
As an undergraduate at Harvard, Updike did very well indeed (graduating summa cum laude). He later attributed this to arriving at college as something of a tabula rasa on which the lessons of his Cambridge, Massachusetts instructors could be received without the impediment of premature opinions. He also joined and eventually became editor of the famous Harvard Lampoon, the comic paper of the university which itself later spawned its famous eponymous descendant, the National Lampoon. He wrote poems, sketches, stories, and drew cartoons; by the time Updike had graduated, both a story and a poem had been accepted by The New Yorker, then beginning its post-war ascent.
Attending the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford for a year, Updike (newly married to Mary Pennington, a fine arts major from Radcliffe College) was visited by Katharine White, the legendary fiction editor of The New Yorker (and wife of one of its most famous contributors, E.B. White). After this anointment any indecision about a future as a writer or one as an illustrator was resolved when he was offered a writing job at the magazine by its legendary editor, William Shawn. Living on Riverside Drive, Updike proved an adept writer of the short pieces that fill the Talk of the Town section at the front of the magazine, and he began regularly to place short stories as well. But after two years he'd had enough:
I felt oppressed by New York. I attended a party... attended by a lot of old New Yorker hands, all grizzled and old and hard-drinking. I looked at them with my naïve provincial eyes and thought, do I want to wind up like this? I thought not.
He moved to Boston's North Shore, no longer a member of the magazine's staff. It was a risk of sorts, for had he stayed Updike doubtless would have risen in the ranks of editors/contributors at what was becoming America's pre-eminent cultural magazine. Yet leaving freed Updike to focus on the fiction he wanted to write, and it freed him, too, to return to the background of his youth as a subject – the background that was to provide him with his most famous character, Harry Angstrom, the eponymous Rabbit.
Yet his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), was a mild, polished piece of work. Set in the future in an old people's home in New Jersey, it seems designed to show off the precocious facility of its young author's prose. In its muted comedy quite similar to Memento Mori by Muriel Spark, a writer Updike admired, it is none the less an apprentice work. Another early novel, The Centaur (1963), reads like an intellectual exercise, its straightforward plot of the relationship between a father and son needlessly complicated by an allegorical scheme that makes the father a modern-day Chiron and his son Prometheus. It exasperated many critics, including the New York Times lead reviewer, Orville Prescott, who found it "lost in a maze of pretentious experimentation."
The self-conscious artistry of these early works was curiously similar to the very early novels of his contemporary, Philip Roth, and of Saul Bellow a decade before. If he did not share their sense of ethnic exclusion, Updike, for all his WASP-ness, was also an outsider, the product of small town and farm America, who seemed keen to show that he was now operating in an intellectual milieu where he belonged. Yet as with Bellow in The Adventures of Augie March or Roth in Portnoy's Complaint, Updike's strengths as a writer really first emerged when he returned to the environment of his childhood, an America a million miles away from the Algonquin Hotel.
Rabbit Run (1960) is the story of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, 26 when the story begins, a former high school basketball star who now makes a living demonstrating the MagiPeel Kitchen Peeler to housewives in five-and-dime stores. His is the classic story of an ex-athlete baffled by the subsequent failure of life to repeat his adolescent triumphs. Married to Janice, who drinks too much, with one son and another child on the way, Harry finds his life changed when he falls for Ruth Leonard, a woman on the fringes of prostitution whose alternating toughness and vulnerability stir Angstrom in an unprecedented way. He leaves Janice for Ruth, resists the entreaties of the local vicar to return, but goes back to the alcoholic Janice after she accidentally drowns their new-born baby in the bath. The freedom once felt on the basketball court remains elusive, though at the novel's end there is the powerful sense that Angstrom will keep trying to find it:
His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.
It is a fairly simple story of an ordinary man, but told in extraordinary language. To many readers Rabbit's thoughts seem outlandishly complex, improbably articulate, but the dialogue of the book is entirely plausible. Updike defended himself vigorously:
In a novel, you have to give the characters eloquence and not be constantly chopping them down to what you think is the correct size... Everybody senses more than they could say. A novelist tries to give people the words to express what in fact almost everybody does feel.
If there was beauty and subtlety in an ordinary life, there was, he argued, a beautiful eloquence lurking in an ordinary man. And he never believed that writing should be invisible; aesthetically he could not be further from the likes of minimalist stylists such as Raymond Carver:
I think people know... that this object in front of them is a page of words. What I really like in a book is the sense that the writing is itself entertaining.
Three more Rabbit novels were to follow over the decades, charting the characteristic rise of Rabbit into the solid middle-class affluence so widespread in post-war America. Rabbit Redux (1971) was inspired by the tumultuous events of the 1960s in America, which led Updike to wonder what his earlier hero would make of them. The domestic tables have been turned, for it is Janice now who leaves Rabbit, for Stavros, a car salesman. Staying at home with his young son Nelson, Rabbit soon takes up with an 18-year-old runaway named Jill, and for a time this odd ménage prospers, as Rabbit overcomes his fearful distaste for the emerging counterculture of marijuana and rock 'n' roll.
The arrival of Skeeter, however, a black militant friend of Jill, brings an unsurvivable tension to the household, culminating in a fire that kills Skeeter and Jill. The irruptions of racial conflict, sexual liberation and the overhanging influence of the war in Vietnam are injected so obviously into Rabbit Angstrom's life that some critics complained, but 40 years on these themes seem brilliantly positioned, since it was precisely humdrum lives that were affected most by the '60s.
All four Rabbit novels present a protagonist whose sexuality is intense, aggressive, sometimes destructive. Depicted with unsparing candour, this sexual preoccupation is particularly strong in Couples (1968), Updike's account of the marital mores of 10 couples living north of Boston in Massachusetts. Often described as an upscale Peyton Place, Couples is in fact a beautifully written novel which captures the emotional misconduct and misalliances of adultery as much as the vividly described physical details of its extramarital couplings. It put Updike on the cover of Time magazine, and made him a mass best-seller for the first (and virtually only) time.