Showing papers in "Modern Fiction Studies in 1985"

The Paradoxes of Belonging: The White West Indian Woman in Fiction

Abstract: In Trinidad the street name for the white Trinidadian woman is \"whitey cockroach,\" an allusion both to her skin color and to her status in society. Not strangely, the term crops up in other English-speaking Caribbean islands. Jean Rhys uses it in Wide Sargasso Sea. In that novel, set both in Jamaica and in an island that most likely is Dominica, the maid Amélie sings derisively to her white creÃ3le mistress:

The Two Endings of The French Lieutenant's Woman

Abstract: Les fins, l'univers historique et les relations entre les personnages du roman de John Fowles

Nicole Warren Diver and Alabama Beggs Knight: Women on the Threshold of Freedom

Abstract: Despite Scott Fitzgerald's heated allegations that his wife Zelda had stolen his material for Tender Is the Night when she wrote and published Save Me the Waltz, her 1932 autobiographical novel, Fitzgerald scholars have generally failed to examine the similarities and differences between the two books. Although the situations and characters of Save Me the Waltz and Tender Is the Night are, in some ways, quite similar, the story each conveys is distinct. Critical examination of the two novels is most enlightening when they are viewed as a pair of perspectives on American womanhood in a decade of momentous change. Zelda Fitzgerald wrote the entire manuscript of Save Me the Waltz, her only novel, during six weeks in 1932 while she was a patient in a mental hospital; Scott had already been working for seven years on the novel that was eventually to become Tender Is the Night.' Although Scott managed to impose numerous revisions on Zelda's book before its publication,2 his rage over what he perceived as her infringement on his rights to the literary expression of their common experiences lingered. In 1933, during a conversation between the Fitzgeralds in the presence of Zelda's psychiatrist, Scott accused Zelda of \"broaching at all times on [his] material\" and stubbornly insisted that Zelda make \"an unconditional surrender\" to him, relinquishing her \"idea of writing anything\" in the interest of his career (Bruccoli, Some Sort 349-352). Fitzgerald need not have been so upset. With the exception of Henry Dan Piper, who devotes a chapter of his critical biography of Scott Fitzgerald to Zelda's novel—noting that \"Save Me the Waltz offers a more sensitive account of the deranged wife's view of her marriage than we find in her husband's version, Tender Is the Night\" (204)—few of Scott Fitzgerald's critics examine Zelda's novel in any depth. But the feminist movement has given rise to a flurry of critical activity focusing on women's forgotten writings, and Save Me the Waltz, with its uncommon distinction of viewing from a woman's perspective events and characters made famous by a male author, has recently received considerable attention.3

The Real Woman Inside the Fence in "The Chrysanthemums"

Abstract: Stallman, Robert Wooster, and Lillian Gilkes, eds. Stephen Crane: Letters. New York: New York UP, 1960. Walcutt, Charles Child. American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1956. Wentworth, E. \"The 'Blue Ribbon.' \" Readings and Recitations, No. 2. Ed. L. Penney. New York: National Temperance Society, 1886. 14-15. Willard, Frances E. \"Everybody's War.\" Readings and Recitations, No. 4. Ed. L. Penney. New York: National Temperance Society, 1886. 54-57. Wolter, JÃ1⁄4rgen. \"Drinking, Gambling, Fighting, Paying: Structure and Determinism in 'The Blue Hotel.' \" American Literary Realism 12 (1979): 295-298.

Games and Godgames in The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman

Abstract: In his classic anthropological work, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Johan Huizinga remarks that anthropology and its sister sciences have stressed too little the importance of play and game in human culture. According to Huizinga, Homo ludens, the playing man, deserves at least equal place beside Homo sapiens in the anthropological nomenclature (1). From the profusion of games, contests, and play activities in his works of fiction, John Fowles underscores Huizinga's assertion that \"in the absence of the play-spirit civilization is impossible\" (101). Fowles's interest in the evolutionary struggles and competitions of men and women has led him to investigate in both his essays and his fiction many of the competitive activities in which men and women participate, from childlike play to adult contests for high stakes. His claim in The Aristos is that \"Games are far more important to us, in far deeper ways, than we like to admit\" (158). Fowles inherits his interest in the game from one of his historical mentors, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. In The Aristos Fowles describes Heraclitus as a man who preferred to unravel riddles and to play with children rather than to associate with his intellectual peers. Heraclitus' writings are perplexing riddles themselves. However, Fowles has studied and derived from them many of his own ideas in The Aristos

Sinclair Lewis, Max Gottlieb, and Sherlock Holmes

Abstract: The character of Max Gottlieb, the pure scientist of Sinclair Lewis' best seller Arrowsmith (1925) and the inspirer of its protagonist Martin Arrowsmith, is, in the words of Paul de Kruif, Lewis' scientific collaborator on Arrowsmith, \"a muddy mélange of my revered chief, Professor Novy, and of Jacques Loeb, who was my master in a philosophy of the mechanistic conception of life\" (97-98). Paul de Kruif is correct in identifying two parts of the \"muddy mélange\": Jacques Loeb (1859-1924), the GermanAmerican physiologist, famous for his work with tropisms and artificial parthenogenesis, and de Kruif s colleague for two years at the Rockefeller Institute; and Frederick Novy (1864-1957), professor and chairman of the Department of Bacteriology at the University of Michigan for many years and de Kruif s muchadmired teacher. Perhaps the murkiness of the mélange that went into the formation of the character of Lewis' scientific genius Max Gottlieb prevented de Kruif from identifying a third element in

Authority/Author-ity: Representation and Fictionality in Huckleberry Finn

Abstract: Despite its installation as a canonical text in American literature during the hundred years since its publication, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn persists in leaving many of its readers with a sense not only of the novel's power and greatness but also oi dissatisfaction with some of its parts. Although it exhibits the complexity and richness typical of other major fiction, Twain's novel is special in requiring readers to grapple with an ending, making up nearly a fifth of the work, that most find problematic and unsatisfactory. As Leo Marx has observed, few readers can avoid the feeling that the Phelps plantation sequence is a falling-off, a mistake on Twain's part, a sequence that does not fit into the larger strategies of the novel (424). To one degree or another, nearly all commentators on the novel acknowledge that the section in which Tom and Huck free Jim from the Phelps cabin seems grafted onto the rest of the novel and that it contrasts, in a nearly fatal way, with major structural and thematic aspects of what precedes it: Huck's moral development, a key thread in the novel, seems to collapse, with both Jim and Huck reverting to comic stereotypes; serious issues about freedom and slavery dissolve into farce; and Tom Sawyer seems to manipulate events cruelly out of a literariness and a romanticism that the bulk of the novel satirizes as foolish

Daniel Martin and the Contemporary Epic Novel

Abstract: Since Plato, as they have found "Epic" a useful term in their engagement with the major works of an age or civilization, critics have tended to define epicism in ways that fit their particular critical uses. E. M. W. Tillyard is an example of a critic who defines the epic novel rigidly enough to exclude all but one twentieth-century English novel from epic candidacy (117). Brian Wilkie's examination of the romantic epic poem is an example of an application of looser strictures to epicism than those of Tillyard. Wilkie suggests that "the partial repudiation of earlier epic tradition is itself traditional" and that "no great epic poet has ever written an epic without radically transforming it or giving it new dimensions" (10-11). Because Tillyard considers Nostromo, written in 1904, to be the most recent English novel with enough moral center to be considered epic, one wishing to examine epicism in the contemporary novel might do well to align their approach with Wilkie's liberalism. One might begin the alignment by finding prototypes in romantic epics such as The Prelude and Leaves of Grass for the ways in which recent novels have presented the relationships between the representative individual and public world. With a texture formed by the relationships of its inner and outer worlds, Daniel Martin may be grouped with works written within a period covering approximately the early 1960s through

Ends and Loose Ends: The Triptych Conclusion of Light in August

Abstract: In the second chapter of Light in August (1932), a chapter told primarily from the point of view of Byron Bunch, a narrative presence more distanced and objective than Byron offers the following caution about the difficulty of interpreting human motivation: "Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what that other man or woman is doing" (43). Antecedent to the often-debated question of whether free will or determinism governs the characters in William Faulkner's seventh novel is the issue of understanding itself. To the extent that this book implies a cohesive philosophy of life, it is that life at least resists and probably defies explanation.1 Therefore, the ambiguity and paradox of the three-part conclusion—substantively and structurally the novel's loose ends—cement the epistemological integrity of Light in August and set the capstone to one of its major themes, the poverty of comprehension against

The Dialectics of Debasement in The Magus

Abstract: Commentators and readers alike have praised The Magus as a fascinating and powerful novel of great audacity, richness, and intellectual depth. I am sure that many, like myself, have also found it to be an eminently teachable work that rarely fails to intrigue and to challenge those who study it. Yet The Magus profoundly disturbs many college students; it often affects these young readers in unexpected and unsettling ways. Although praising the novel as a compelling and absorbing work, students frequently express an uneasy concern about various problems: the meaning of Nicholas Urfe's bizarre experience, the extent to which he learns and changes, the unresolved ending, the motives and morality of those who conduct the godgame. One detects a sense of desperate urgency as these readers struggle to address such problems and to solve the book's mysteries. At the same time, surprisingly, students resist Fowles's assertion that the individual reader has the right as well as the obligation to decipher the events narrated. They typically view his advice on interpreting The Magus as an evasion, a \"cop-out\": \"Its meaning is whatever reaction it provokes in the reader, and so far as I am concerned

Being in the Midst: Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Abstract: Italo Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER collapses the distinction between \"solid\" fiction and \"elusive\" reality; his novel is not easily defined or enjoyed without risks, for it is, like the world the Male Reader tries to escape by reading fiction, discontinuous, fragmentary, debatable. The Male Reader, the main character in the novel, pursues an order, \"an exact, taut trajectory\" (27) by which to move through the books he reads, only to find that pursuit to be never-ending and impossible. He looks in fiction for a consolation for his disordered, uncontrollable existence, a way to step outside of time, to exist in \"an abstract and absolute space and time\" (27). But Calvino's novel serves to frustrate this, and other, manifestations of the desire for the One, for a nontemporal metaphysical ideal, whether it is the monolithic author who stands above his text, guiding the potentially disruptive characters and events into a neat resolution; or the critical reader who tries to gain a perspective above the text, playing detective in an attempt to tie themes together and arrive at the true and comprehensive interpretation of the book; or, most importantly, men and women in the world who may live as the characters in the story fragments do, reading their experience for signs

Henry Green and the Writing of His Generation, and: A Companion to "Under the Volcano" (review)

Abstract: Michael North points out in Henry Green and the Writing of His Generation that though Green "was a lifelong friend of Christopher Isherwood, best man to Evelyn Waugh, roommate to Anthony Powell, schoolmate of George Orwell and Cyril Connolly, literary associate of John Lehmann and Stephen Spender, and host to Auden for a tour of the factory where Green worked in the late twenties," few readers think of him as part of that generation of writers. For one thing, Green did not share the commitment to political radicalism common among writers of his day. North argues, however, that Green viewed public and private life in much the same way as his contemporaries, a perspective "more fundamental than politics." Alienation, a principal concept of modern literature, grows out of "one of the most basic modern attitudes about public life [that] holds it to be inimical to the personal integrity of individuals." This estrangement is usually not from society but through it; loss of self comes not from withholding oneself from social processes but from participating in the economic and social aspects of our mass-produced culture. Thus, according to North, the most politically devout writers of the time are placed in great jeopardy "because for them an individual can only become himself through participation in mass society." The result is inevitable loss of faith in self, "suspicion, mistrust, or fear felt by the writer for himself. " North notes Robert Wohl's partial explanation for the Thirties generation's ideas about self that Wohl locates in its either having fought or just missed serving in World War One. The ultimate expression of this sense of self comes in the literature. North notes that the novelists of Green's generation felt "the utter irrelevance of the individual and his complete helplessness in the world of fact." Green, he observes, fits this category in that "Green's novels are based on the belief that the self is not a truth to be expressed but an expression itself, a fiction." For Green, he adds, "public acts" are also fictions "and respond more to the desires of individuals than to objective forces in economics or politics." Like his contemporaries, North argues, Green holds that "self-extinction is the beginning of literature, not because the self-does not matter, nor because it should be sacrificed to impersonal standards of art, but because individuals can achieve by failure what they are too weak to seize by success.

Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, and: Time and Narrative (review)

Abstract: Both these books are interdisciplinary in scope and addressed to an intellectually inquisitive but nonspecialist audience; nonetheless, they offer remarkably different experiences of reading. Brooks, a French-oriented comparatist at Yale, writes lively and graceful literary criticism on Freud's case study of the "Wolf-Man" and on novels by Stendhal, Balzac, Eugà ̈ne Sue, Zola, Dickens, Conrad, and Faulkner, while usefully drawing upon and explaining much relatively technical work from psychoanalysis and "narratology." Ricoeur, a Francophone philosopher oriented toward German hermeneutics but respecting the Anglo-American analytic tradition, develops a soberly lucid argument that illuminates Aristotle's Poetics, Augustine's Confessions, Heidegger's Being and Time, Arthur Danto's Analytic Philosophy of History, Hayden White's Metahistory, and Fernand Braudel's massive history of the Mediterranean. Both works should be read closely by any seriously thoughtful student of modern fiction. I shall concentrate on a few perspectives rather than trying to encapsulate their arguments. Ricoeur offers a "long and difficult three way conversation between history, literary history, and phenomenological philosophy"; Brooks a "convergence of psychoanalysis and literary criticism." Yet both explictly locate their thought in response to Frank Kermode's 7'Ae Sense of an Ending, which has for almost two decades been provoking critics to study the formal shaping of action as itself an activity that moves back and forth between the page and life. For Ricoeur, however, the formal shaping of action, "narrative," is a process, composed of three stages, that begins from human intentionality, whereas for Brooks that shaping is understood as "fiction" and begins from the unconscious production of desire. The two authors share a sense of our moment: it is time to go further than permitted by merely analytic modes, whether those of Anglophone philosophy or continental structuralism. Brooks's reiterated slogan (alluding to his colleague Geoffrey Hartman's book of 1970) is "beyond formalism." Both explicitly characterize their goal as elucidating the "dynamic" aspects of narrative neglected by previous analysts, and both determine that this goal requires a fresh emphasis upon the "reader." This shared language of dynamism and involvement, this renewal of psychology, offers some analogy to what the Romantics did in criticizing and,

The Architecture of Revision: Fowles and the Agora

Abstract: theory of freedom" (439). In response, reassuming the authority of the director to criticize a performer's interpretation, Conchis reemphasizes the performance model. "For as long as you cherish your present view of freedom," asserts Conchis, "it is you who holds the executioner's gun" (439). Through his identification of Urfe with his own role in the execution scenario prior to the game's defeat, Conchis clarifies their dialectical opposition on the point of freedom. For Urfe freedom is a matter of physical escape. When the relationship with Alison becomes too demanding, he frees himself through flight to Phraxos. When school responsibilities on Phraxos become irksome, he frees himself through flight to Bourani. Conchis, in both versions, opposes another kind of freedom to Urfe's physical escape. "Only by becoming the victim," he tells Urfe in an earlier comment on the execution scenario, can one escape "the ultimate joke—which is to discover that by constantly slipping away one has slipped away. One exists no more, one is no longer free" (380, 437-438). In a subsequent clarification of this point Conchis refers to the execution scenario's delineation of two symbolic figures: Anton, the good German officer who commits suicide out of guilt over not having intervened at Phraxos; and the kapetan, the guerrilla leader who chooses death over subjugation. On a symbolic level Anton and the kapetan represent another dialectical pair clarifying not only freedom but the relation between it and hazard. "You must make up your mind," Conchis tells Urfe. "Either you enlist under the kapetan, that murderer who knew only one word, but the only word, or you enlist under Anton. You watch and you despair. Or you despair and you watch. In the first case, you commit physical suicide; in the second, moral" (381, 438). In theatrical terms the guerrilla, in his unrelenting defiance of the director, gives not the performance of his life; rather he gives an extraordinary demonstration of how life should be performed. He performs life as freedom and becomes, like Conchis, a performance model. In opposition to this active performer, Anton, the other half of the dialectical pair, assumes the role of passive watcher. Ironically, within the dramatic structure of the execution scenario this passive audience exists not for the performer but FOWLES AND THE AGORA 65 the director who through its manipulation expresses the full range of his power. Unlike the kapetan who seizes freedom by exposing himself to hazard, Anton protects himself from hazard; he refuses to risk opposing the sadistic Wimmel and ends imprisoned by guilt and despair. In both versions Urfe, taking his cue from Anton's suicide, identifies with the passive audience of watchers who commit moral, if not physical, suicide (381, 439); however, in the revision Fowles strengthens the connection between Urfe's response to the scenario and the assumption of his new psychological role in the finale's radical theater with its elimination of audience and director. The revision places the execution scenario in the emphatic frame of Conchis' announcement that Urfe's "visits" to Bourani are at "an end" (413) and Urfe's surprise conveyed through an image anticipating the new ending with its allusion to L'AstrA©e: "I had not expected . . . the statue of stone in the comic door" (440). In the revision, but not the original, this image is followed with Urfe's reflections on the shallowness of his own notion of freedom compared to those of the scenario, and then Fowles introduces a second emphatic image, anticipating Urfe's final attainment of the self-awareness of psychological maturity and conflating minotaur and labyrinth, bull and arena, Urfe and the agora: "It was as if he had planted a bandillera [sic] in my shoulder ... a knowledge I did not want" (441). This figure of knowledge as the barbed dart in the bull's shoulder effectively suggests the beginning of a new selfawareness reaching fruition when Urfe emerges from a centerless psychological maze (571, 645) into the agora, where he, like the kapetan and Conchis, performs freedom. Urfe pursues a dialectical questioning of Conchis' notion of freedom until the latter's disappearance at the novel's end. The dialectic results in Urfe's final realization that the theater is empty (581, 654), the director and audience gone, leaving the actors free to improvise their own performances. The most important difference between the two endings is Urfe's abandonment of prepared scripts. As long as these scripts are followed, Urfe simply substitutes for Conchis as director of his own godgame. In the original, Urfe assumes this directorial function; Alison takes the role of manipulated player; and both perform for the amusement of the watching Magus. The scripts grant him absolute power over her, and he employs them to victimize her. In the revision the scripts are abandoned, and Urfe acts neither as God nor for God; he acts for himself and Alison. He still slaps her, but the slap removed from the context of the godgame is transformed into an authentic emotional response catapulting them into a space whose only boundaries are hazard and freedom. Originally Alison, after being slapped, shows her continued affiliation with Conchis as director through her smile: "Her eyes were wet, perhaps with pain. But she was slowly smiling. That archaic smile, 66 MODERN FICTION STUDIES her variant of theirs, steadier, braver, far less implacable, without malice or arrogance, yet still that smile" (581). In the revision, her smile, eliminated along with any suggestion of Conchis' presence, is replaced through their discovery of the new unbounded dimensions of the agora: The blow caught her completely by surprise, nearly knocked her off balance, and her eyes blinked with the shock; then very slowly she put her left hand to the cheek. We stared wildly at each other for a moment, in a kind of terror: the world had disappeared and we were falling through space. (654) In both versions the dramatic structure of the final scene repeats that at the conclusion of the three-day holiday. In both endings, Urfe's slap repeats that with which the earlier scene concludes; in both holiday scenes, Alison's presentation of an ultimatum, the either-or choice between Conchis and his circle and her, precipitates the slap; in both endings, Urfe delivers the same ultimatum, reversing their roles. Originally, however, the either-or choice he presents to Alison is part of a prepared script, and Alison's choice of Urfe over Conchis indicates a silent agreement to accept not only the script but Urfe's direction. In the revision Fowles dispenses with the script and places the choice in the context of hazard: "You have a choice. . . . The only thing is you've got to bet" (653). In the context of the revision's final dialectical pair, Alison's response suggests an acceptance of a role as performer in this living theater, in which the actors improvise in an agora bounded by

The Art of Projective Thinking: Franz Kafka and the Paranoid Vision

Abstract: The basic task of Kafka criticism is not to explicate his work but to account for it. How does he bring off time and again, often in just a fragmentary paragraph in his journals, the nearly impossible effects that he achieves? What is the source of the power that his writing exerts over our imaginations, the persuasiveness, even fittingness of the bizarre events that he describes? Why do we enter his world with something like an unsettling sense of recognition? Why do his stories so often seem to point to some broader mythic or allegorical meaning and then refuse to yield it?1 And why does that refusal make them even more tantalizing and profound? What Kafka has done is to take an intuition of the world, a sense of experience, which is peripheral to the vision of most of us most of the time, and make it central to his fiction. He has replaced the world as we \"know\" it to be with the world as we fear it might be. Kafka's fiction appeals to us on a subrational basis; he heads unfailingly to certain kinds of response that other writers have only limited access to or restrict to the level of individual character. He short-circuits everyday defenses that we are not usually even aware we are employing.

The Experimental Fictions of Ambrose Bierce: Structuring the Ineffable (review)

Abstract: understanding of American socialism and American intellectual history. In focusing on London's radicalism, Johnston thus has made a valuable contribution to our knowledge of London's life, his fiction, and the intellectual currents of his time. It is refreshing to have this addition to the increasing body of London criticism, which evaluates him for what he was rather than dismissing him for what he was not.

Time and Ruins in John Fowles's Daniel Martin

Abstract: DANIEL MARTIN, besides being a good story, demonstrates John Fowles's \"technical wizardry\" (Gardner 22), in part through the novelist's handling of time, one of the book's major motifs and a dominant concern from the first chapter. \"Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation\" (3), Fowles writes, and initiates the attempted achievement of that whole sight through an examination of all the days of Daniel Martin. The chapter is a beautifully detailed recreation of a day in Dan's youth, a summer day some thirty years before the present of the novel. Its opening paragraphs are written in the past tense, setting the scene in a Devon wheat field: \"the field sloped,\" \"Lewis sat,\" \"the younger horse . . . stood.\" Then, for four paragraphs, the verb tense is present: \"there are four figures,\" \"the boy waves,\" \"thistledown floats southward.\" A brief section using future tense follows: \"the day will endure,\" \"the reaper's noise will stop,\" \"Mr. Luscombe will pull out his old fob\"; then there is a return to the present tense for the remainder of the chapter, but with frequent transitions suggesting the passing of time: two dozen thens, for example, in five pages. This first chapter prefigures the total work's concern with time. \"Whole sight\" demands an examination of past, present, and future, and the novel continually moves back and forth in time, a kaleidoscope of scenes from the life of Daniel Martin. Of the forty-six chapters,

American Silences: The Realism of James Agee, Walker Evans, and Edward Hopper (review)

Abstract: Ward's insightful study of fiction, photography, and painting isolates a recurrent characteristic of realism usually ignored in American art. This characteristic derives from the recognition by artists that silence reflects need for withdrawal. Although often not expressed by fiction writers, this seems to be an aspect of importance to American art. It is appropriate that Agee stimulated this extended study: Ward wrote two essays about A Death in the Family and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and was astonished to discover that Agee's \"obsession with silence\" provided an aesthetic that shaped his major work. He sought to find other American writers whose enthusiasm for silence was similar but realized finally his subject \"was not silence in literature but silence in realism.\" The closest Agee affinities proved to be Sherwood Anderson and Hemingway, subjects of Ward's second chapter. Through examination of early short fiction he demonstrates how these artists were fascinated with the difficulty of communication and the need of characters for silence. They created characters who attain silence (for example, Nick of \"Big Two-Hearted River\") that is not to be found in their earlier fiction. Both this chapter and the preceding one about Poe, Melville, James, and Adams serve as background for the studies about Agee, Evans, and Hopper. In this background Ward demonstrates that earlier major artists also expressed a need for withdrawal from the world to silence. These speculations might be further extended. Ward's isolation of a quality in art that is \"a passivity approaching a nearly inhuman humility\" is a thread that ties his separate chapters together. A diffi-

At the Handles of the Lock: Themes in the Fiction of S. J. Agnon (review)

Abstract: Agonesque passivity, like that in Kafka's writing, appears to result from a prior act of submission in childhood, undermining self-respect and inhibiting self-assertion. It betrays a lifelong need to return home, either physically or psychologically, a need which can never be satisfied. It is also a cultural and social phenomenon, and a many-sided tactic, a symptom of fear or apathy, a turning inward, a form of flight.

The Coup: John Updike's Modernist Masterpiece

Abstract: John Updike, critic, poet, and one of America's most prolific and important writers of fiction, has been justly celebrated for his evocations of middle-class American life. Novels such as Couples and Marry Me recreate a rootless, moneyed suburban milieu, and his two books that follow the life and loves of Henry Bech carry the reader into the world of the urban Jewish intelligentsia. Updike is perhaps most famous, however, for his three \"Rabbit\" novels—Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, and Rabbit Is Rich, which follow the career of Harry Angstrom at ten-year intervals from the frightened and alienated young husband of the Fifties to the portly and prosperous latter-day Babbitt of the Seventies. Updike's many critics have generally either lauded his elegant prose and his sensitive evocations of ordinary life or disparaged his \"limited\" vision and what they see as his failure to move beyond an outmoded realistic tradition in the novels following The Centaur, an early portrait of Updike's father set within an elaborate mythological framework. Whereas postmodernist writers such as John Hawkes, John Barth, and Thomas Pynchon attempt to evoke the chaos and anxiety of post-World War Two America through a fiction that is not only nonrealistic but antirealistic, Updike has remained for the most part fairly strictly within the confines of realism, increasingly incorporating topical events and