Rabbit, Run was published in the 1960s, but its plot is firmly grounded in the mid-50s. The reader surmises by the first page of the novel that the cover image is likely a minimalist, pop-art rendering of a basketball. Its cover bore a pattern of thin, light blue, yellow, and green lines that switch color toward the middle of the image to form an optical illusion of a sphere. It was there within a vertical sea of glossy book jackets of Stephen King and James Patterson that I found a first edition of Rabbit, Run. Maps, depicting what type of book would be found where, hung every four or five feet on the walls - Cookbooks: table 14 Biography: tables 2 and 3 Hardback Fiction: northwest-corner shelves. Rows of wide tables limited movement in the space but provided ample places to stack books or boxes.
The sale was held in a long, rectangular room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lining each wall. Joyce Carol Oates has long been a vocal proponent of Updike’s Rabbit series, saying that Updike is “a master, like Flaubert, of mesmerizing us with his narrative voice.”Ī couple of years ago, I was browsing a section of shelves at Wisconsin’s largest used book sale, a biannual event that attracted used bookstore owners from the tri-city (Madison, Chicago, Milwaukee) region.
But only a select few writers I admire have ever gone so far as to make an anti-Updike value judgment - even David Foster Wallace’s comment need not be solely interpreted as negative critique. “A penis with a thesaurus,” David Foster Wallace penned in the 90s “Your books are just boring,” a caller on C-SPAN told the aged author during a live broadcast. The complaints about Updike, who died in 2009 (shortly before I was required to read his youthful short story “A&P”), were pervasive enough that it is understandable why most readers would shy away from his body of works completely.
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