This book was a major redpill for me. Throughout my teenage years

>>9219480
Read the whole series. It's all fantastic. His prose is beautiful. Critical interest in his work is on the rise.

My family is friends with the Updikes, and I had the pleasure of spending a fair amount of time with Mr. Updike before he passed. Whether you enjoy his writing or not, he was a great guy and funny as hell. Wish he was still around.

>>9219480

Chris Marker's documentary a grin without a cat was a redpill for me in the exact opposite sense than Updike was for you. Postmodernism came later, it was the French intellectual reaction to the failure of 1968. Likewise in America the new left drifted away from the anarchic idealism of it's early days and splintered into a thousand maoist sects. The broader counterculture sank into the morass of Yuppie culture. If people were stupid it's because the era was much more apocalyptic than we remember it, you get a sense of that from McLuhan, among others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4tksCx2gUk&list=PL0B325779C50443E1

>>9219480
You have to understand that the book unwittingly reveals Updike's own intolerance and narrowmindedness. The reader probably shouldn't take Rabbit's impressions as particularly incisive, or Rabbit himself as superior to the essentialized hippie. Remember that Rabbit is selfish, peaked in high school, impulsive and emotionally distance. His response to the stultifying conformity of postwar America was to runaway. His response to the '60s was to appropriate the concepts he liked--free love, radical individualism--for selfish ends, while discarding the ones he was uncomfortable with. For my money the bohemian music critics who lived through the '60s provide the best analysis. Even Roth does a better job. But none of this is to detract from either author.

>>9219520
I'm not saying Rabbit made any profound statements. It was actually his ignorance that did it for me. It all just placed that whole time in a realistic context that I hadn't understood before.

>>9219514
Any stories about the man?

>>9219566
Yes, and that's important. You'll notice that all the big novelistic commentators on the '60s were from the silent generation or earlier, giving them some distance. Part of what did '60s idealism in was its emphasis on youth. So Updike, Pynchon, Roth had a handle on this, but they were always outsiders.

>>9219480
>Plus Updike was a G at writing. Reading his work is like witnessing a miracle.
This is something I can't deny. But his works rub me emotionally the wrong way. It's too much like television, he never wants to make it too deep IMO.

>>9219480
You had me until "Postmodern Marxist bullshit", but I'll take a critique of the sixties any time of the day and gobble it up like big bowl of corn flakes, or my name isn't Alan Moore.

>>9219480
Stopped reading at "redpill"

Updike is SUPER problematic.