Just finished this. Thought it was pretty good. The 10 or 15

You're not my type of reader I if you want more of that. Updike, at least here, is regarded as a very talented writer who isn't worth reading. The limited scope and epetition of his work is not appealing to me.
If you enjoy it you can make it through a large part of his oeuvre a happy camper. It's funny that I'm not sure who to suggest aside from Updike - he's probably the best at what he does. Maybe someone like Roth, though I'd be surprised if you hadn't taken a trip through his work yet. Try Sabbath's Theater if not.

>>9125065
Updike is great, I think Rabbit, Run has one of the best endings of any book I've read in a long time. He plays along with notions of the American dream "catching up" with contemporary life and an write about boobs in about a hundred lively different ways

>>9125114
Be quiet. Reading the Rabbit Tetralogy and being awed by the prose but ultimately cynical about his moral value is a wonderful experience everyone should have.

Anyway, The Centaur is his loveliest prose work IMO, and was apparently Nabokov's favorite. The rest of The Rabbit Tetralogy is a must-read, you might hate Rabbit, all the characters, and perhaps Updike himself by the end of it, but the prose is mind-blowingly gorgeous, like out of this world.

Yes, Updike is a bit trite. If every book he'd written after Rabbit, Run was completely different, wasn't the same irritatingly chauvinistic soap-opera bullshit, I might retrospectively hold a better view of it. It stands well by itself, but once you keep reading Updike and realize it's the same thing over and over again, the same suburban chauvinists he describes, that's when it gets annoying.

But the style! Holy shit, the style! Get your hand on The Centaur, it starts out clumsily but then goes on to have the best prose of the 20th century. He wasted his talents but he might inspire better writers to come, hopefully.

>>9125693
Also re the prose, I think Rabbit, Run probably had the shabbiest style of any book he wrote that I read so far, but even then that's not that bad, in fact is great, for a shabby style, especially since it's his first book.

If you pick up any of his books, you're likely to find mindblowing prose, and perhaps very irritating suburban characters it's impossible to sympathize with. Couples is fantastically written too, an astonishing style.

>>9125693

Thanks anon. I'll keep on going with the Rabbit novels and check out The Centaur as well.

>>9126861
That's exactly what I said to do in the first fucking post. Fucking nothing but idiots on this board.