John Updike is a truly unique writer in 20th-century world literature—simply because his work was NEVER confined to ANY stylistic framework. In Updike’s works, legend and myth become reality; realism bordering on naturalism turns into a strange fairy tale; the postmodernism of this author is simple and natural to perceive, while the lightness of his pen is paradoxically many-faceted…
This is love. This is hatred. This is love-hatred. Perhaps this is John Updike’s most ruthless work—comparable in the degree of merciless psychological exposure only to his early “Rabbit, Run.” This is not even just a book, but a truly delicate study of the human soul…