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That's the bad news. The good news is that the rest of the collection is a sheer delight. "My Father on the Verge of Disgrace" explores some fascinating Oedipal outskirts, even as the narrator's first cigarette takes on a theological accent: "It was my way of becoming a human being, and part of being human is being on the verge of disgrace". In "How Was It, Really?" Updike unveils the real dirty secret of old age, which is not the persistence of erotic appetite but the inevitable, appalling failure of memory. Best of all, he returns to two of his longest running franchises, with admirable results in both cases. "His Oeuvre" revives that Semitic doppelganger Henry Bech for one more lap around the track, and finds the author making intermittent fun of his own fancy prose style. Harry Angstrom is, needless to say, beyond hope of resurrection. But in a 182-page novella, "Rabbit Remembered", Updike brings back his survivors for a superb, surprising curtain call. The author's present-tense notation of American life (whose paradoxical epicentre is, as always, Brewer, Pennsylvania) remains as mesmerising as ever. And despite his death, the putative hero is everywhere, as his illegitimate daughter returns to the unwilling bosom of the Angstrom clan: "A whiff of Harry, a pale glow, an unsettling drift comes off this girl, this thirty-nine-year-old piece of evidence". Wallowing in this unexpected bonus, Updike fans should steel themselves for a single pang of regret: this is likely to be the last Rabbit he will pull from his hat. --James Marcus
‘I think the Rabbit books are the greatest work of literature in English since the war’- David Baddiel, The Sunday Times
‘He is one of the few authors who can genuinely claim never to have written a bad sentence. The harmony of his expression is a joy. John Updike is the Mozart of novelists and this collection of stories is pure pleasure’ - The Daily Telegraph
‘Detailed, craftsmanlike, beautiful, and utterly true to American life’ – The Independent on Sunday
‘The prose... positively sings with the babble of contemporary America’ – Literary Review’
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