"Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism." JOHN UPDIKE
The principal themes in Updike’s work are religion, sex, America, adultery, and death.
<!--[iReligion:
. He was a Protestant middle class, so he liked middles because it is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
. During this time, Updike also underwent spiritual crisis because of suffering from a loss of religious faith. Then he remained a believing Christian.
+ In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996): decline of religion in America alongside the history of cinema
+ Rabbit Angstrom (1995): acts as a Kierkegaardian Knight of Arabia
Sex
His prose favors “external sexual imagery” rife with “explicit anatomical detail” rather than descriptions of “internal emotion” in descriptions of sex.
+ Rabbit Run (1960): Rabbit Angstrom contemplates the merits of sex with the wife of his friend Reverend Jack Eccles while the latter is giving his sermon
<!--[iAmerica:
. A certain nostalgia, reverence, recognition, and celebration of America’s board diversity.
+ Rabbit series: Rabbit reflected much of Updike’s confusion and ambivalence towards the social and political changes of the U.S at that time
<!--[iWar and politics:
+ The Coup (1978): African dictatorship
+ The Witches of Eastwick (1984): novel about witches living in Rhode Island
+ The Western Canon (1994) of Harold Bloom
+ The Widow of Eastwick (2008): a return to the witches in their old age.
<!--[iAdultery_ “The Adulterous Society” as headline in Time magazine.
. His narrator is often “a man guilty of infidelity and abandonment of his family.”
. He divorced in 1974, and remarried in 1977
+ Couples (1968): a novel about adultery in small fictional Massachusetts town called Tarbox.
+ Separating (1974)
+ Here come the Maples (1976): related to his divorce
+ Marry Me (1977)
<!--[iDeath:
. In Updike’s poem, death is prevalent because he realized that using death in his poem as a “mosaic of reactions” to morality, ranging from terror to attempts at insulation. Additionally, death is more frightening and less obvious in its ramification, especially in the afterlife.
+ The Poorhouse Fair (1959): the elder John Hook demonstrates a religious, metaphysical faith.
+ Rabbit at Rest (1990): Rabbit demonstrates a kind of certainty to tell his con Nelson on his deathbed.
+ The Centaur (1963): George Caldwell is afraid of his cancer and does not have any religious faith
+ Returning Native (1993): trees turn yellower, less rocks, less cold, the sky is soft,
