What are John Updike's best books? What does /lit think

>>8420768
Rabbit Tetralogy.

Of these, the middle two are the best, and my personal favorite is the latter one of the middle two, Rabbit is Rich.

He'a a great stylist, his books can actually sometimes have engrossing plots, other times be boring as fuck and he's complete shit in everything else. Doesn't care about deep philosophical themes, about creating interesting characters that aren't juvenile cardboard figures who never develop. Doesn't care about or is incapable of seriously tackling age-old themes of honor, death, love, friendship, etc. His works read like extraordinarily well-written soap operas and sometimes sitcoms meant to represent modern America (for the most part).

His style can be very inconsistent, with pages of heavenly godtier stuff and then stuff that tries to be poetic on the same level but just seems like a lot of shit next to it. Odd, really. He claimed that he wrote spontaneously and eschewed meticulous self-editing and perfectionism after writing for long enough, so I guess that partly explains why not everything in his books is cut to the same standard as the best parts of it.

All in all, worth reading for the fun of the style alone, which is so fucking great it's hard to exaggerate how great it is. If you've never read him yet, I envy the joy you're about to feel at reading the best of his style for the first time.

What's Updike?

>>8420768
I like his Shakespeare fan fiction. I imagine he would post it on fanfiction.net if he were born in a different time.

Couples was enjoyable

>>8421143
nm hbu

>>8421186
Fuck.....

>>8420782
Good post

>>8420782
This. New York Girl and Lunch Hour provoke, in their final pages the same feeling I get at the end of some of my favourite Chopin. Then there are just stories about a load of cats which this guy's dead mother was taking care of and how he has to make his peace with them, s'about DEATTHTHTHT.

>>8421434
>Chopin
>not Schubert
>not Dvorak

ending of rabbit, run gives me the heebie jeebies