John Updike: Novels 1986-1990 (LOA #354): Roger’s Version / Rabbit at Rest

John Updike, at the peak of his powers, concludes his unforgettable Rabbit series and reimagines Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter for contemporary America

The latest volume in Library of America’s John Updike edition presents two essential novels by the master stylist of postwar American fiction. Roger’s Version (1986) stakes out ground that encompasses Updike’s recurring themes of sex, desire, and adultery as well as an emerging interest in the cosmic implications of contemporary scientific breakthroughs. In a dazzling refashioning of the love triangle at the heart of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, twin adulteries unfold, revealing the heightened contrasts and inequalities of Ronald Reagan’s America.

Widely hailed upon publication as a masterpiece, awarded a Pulitzer and a National Book Critics Circle prize, Rabbit at Rest (1990) wraps up the saga of Updike’s most enduring protagonist and concludes his surpassingly eloquent elegy for his country, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates. Now in his mid-fifties, the outwardly comfortable and complacent Harry Angstrom has settled into leisured obsolescence, dividing his time between Pennsylvania and the Valhalla Village retirement community in Florida. But alongside his golfing, junk-food consumption, and other forms of ease there loom unavoidable markers of Rabbit’s human fragility and his mortality.