Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Updike, John (Vol. 139) - Anthony Quinn (review date 26 October 1990)

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Anthony Quinn (review date 26 October 1990)

SOURCE: “Fifty-five and Fading,” in New Statesman & Society, October 26, 1990, p. 33.

[In the following review, Quinn offers praise for Rabbit at Rest.]

The past 30 years of American life have been pretty crowded by any standards, and will presumably continue to disgorge their historians, their scourges and their apologists. There will be many a baggy social chronicle to pin it all down, though few will match either the intimacy or the eloquence of John Updike's Rabbit sequence.

Centring on the fortunes and foibles of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, middle American anti-hero and everyman, each novel put the seal on a decade's end—the fifties in Rabbit, Run (1960), the sixties in Rabbit Redux (1971) and the seventies in Rabbit Is Rich (1981). In those rollicking, rueful comedies, Updike's talents were in overdrive, both as master of the heroic sentence...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Joseph Epstein (essay date January 1983)
   2. Gail Godwin (review date 4 June 1984)
   3. Katha Pollitt (review date 23 June 1984)
   4. D. J. Enright (review date 2 February 1987)
   5. Edward Abbey (review date 28 March 1987)
   6. Richard Gilman (review date 20 June 1988)
   7. Denis Donoghue (review date 5 March 1989)
   8. Elizabeth Hardwick (review date 18 May 1989)
   9. John F. Fleischauer (essay date Summer 1989)
   10. Victor K. Lasseter (essay date October 1989)
   11. George J. Searles (review date 1–15 October 1990)
   12. Anthony Quinn (review date 26 October 1990)
   13. Barbara Leckie (essay date Spring 1991)
   14. Matthew Wilson (essay date Spring 1991)
   15. Martin Amis (review date 10 November 1991)
   16. Barbara Kingsolver (review date 6 February 1994)
   17. John Bayley (review date 12 May 1994)
   18. Jay Parini (review date 6 November 1994)
   19. Julian Barnes (review date 28 January 1996)
   20. A. O. Scott (review date 12 February 1996)
   21. Margaret Atwood (review date 12 October 1997)
   22. Tom LeClair (review date 3 November 1997)
   23. Robert Boyers (review date 17 November 1997)
   24. James Shapiro (review date 25 October 1998)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. John Updike