Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Updike, John (Vol. 139) - Matthew Wilson (essay date Spring 1991)

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Matthew Wilson (essay date Spring 1991)

SOURCE: “The Rabbit Tetralogy: From Solitude to Society to Solitude Again,” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1, Spring, 1991, pp. 5–24.

[In the following essay, Wilson examines elements of social drama, historical consciousness, and tension between the desire for isolation and integration in Updike's Rabbit tetralogy.]

Frederick R. Karl in his exhaustive survey of postwar American fiction has little to say about novel sequences because, he claims, in comparison to Britain, there is a “paucity of sequential novels” in America. Our “social expectations” and “our need for movement and escape” militate against novel sequences, which, of necessity, imply “limited options.” The relative scarcity of this form, he argues, is “tied to our optimism, [and] our desire to break from predetermined forms, to free ourselves from the historical past, emerging into that purer...

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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