1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give enough direct quotation...- at least one extended passage...- of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's ?uvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never... try to put the author "in his place," making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

Two centuries after Jonathan Edwards sought a link with the divine in the beautiful clarity of things, William Carlos Williams wrote in introducing his long poem Paterson that "for the poet there are no ideas but in things." No ideas but in things. The American artist, first born into a continent without museums and art schools, took Nature as his only instructor, and things as his principal study. A bias toward the empirical, toward the evidential object in the numinous fullness of its being, leads to a certain lininess, as the artist intently maps the visible in a New World that feels surrounded by chaos and emptiness.

Updike is a master of effortless motion - between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalisation, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic. For his own particular purposes, Updike devised for himself a style of narration, an intense, present tense, free indirect style, that can leap up, whenever it wants, to a God's-eye view of Harry, or the view of his put-upon wife, Janice, or victimised son, Nelson. This carefully crafted artifice permits here assumptions about evolutionary theory, which are more Updike than Harry, and comically sweeping notions of Jewry, which are more Harry than Updike.

This is at the heart of the tetralogy's achievement. Updike once said of the Rabbit books that they were an exercise in point of view. This was typically self-deprecating, but contains an important grain of truth. Harry's education extends no further than high school, and his view is further limited by a range of prejudices and a stubborn, combative spirit, yet he is the vehicle for a half-million-word meditation on postwar American anxiety, failure and prosperity. A mode had to be devised to make this possible, and that involved pushing beyond the bounds of realism. In a novel like this, Updike insisted, you have to be generous and allow your characters eloquence, "and not chop them down to what you think is the right size".

For some time now Updike's language has seemed to encode an almost theological optimism about its capacity to refer. Updike is notably unmodern in his impermeability to silence and the interruptions of the abyss. For all his fabled Protestantism, both American Puritan and Lutheran-Barthian, with its cold glitter, its insistence on the aching gap between God and His creatures, Updike seems less like Hawthorne than Balzac, in his unstopping and limitless energy, and his cheerfully professional belief that stories can be continued; the very form of the Rabbit books — here extended a further instance — suggests continuance. Updike does not appear to believe that words ever fail us — ‘life's gallant, battered ongoingness’, indeed — and part of the difficulty he has run into, late in his career, is that he shows no willingness, verbally, to acknowledge silence, failure, interruption, loss of faith, despair and so on. Supremely, better than almost any other contemporary writer, he can always describe these feelings and states; but they are not inscribed in the language itself. Updike's language, for all that it gestures towards the usual range of human disappointment and collapse, testifies instead to its own uncanny success: to a belief that the world can always be brought out of its cloudiness and made clear in a fair season.

Updike's sentences at their frequent best are not a complacent expression of faith. Rather, like Proust's sentences in Updike's description, they "seek out an essence so fine the search itself is an act of faith." Updike aspires to "this sense of self-qualification, the kind of timid reverence towards what exists that Cézanne shows when he grapples for the shape and shade of a fruit through a mist of delicate stabs." Their hesitancy and self-qualification arise as they meet obstacles, readjust and pass on. If life is bountiful in New England, it is also evasive and easily missed. In the stories Updike tells, marriages and homes are made only to be broken. His descriptiveness embodies a promiscuous love for everything in the world. But love is precarious, Updike is always saying, since it thrives on obstructions and makes them if it cannot find them.

The reason I didn't review the book is that it perhaps would have taken me three weeks. My appreciation of it is that diverse and that complicated... John is perhaps the only contemporary writer who I know now who gives me the sense of the fact that life is ... the life that we perform is in an environment that enjoys a grandeur that escapes us. Rabbit is very much possessed of a paradise lost, of a paradise known fleetingly perhaps through erotic love and a paradise that he pursues through his children. It's the vastness of John's scope that I would have described if I could through a review.

His contemporaries invade the ground with wild Dionysian yelps, mocking both the taboos that would make it forbidden and the lust that drives men to it. Updike can be honest about it, and his descriptions of the sight, taste and texture of women's bodies can be perfect little madrigals.

And another regrettable thing about death

is the ceasing of your own brand of magic...

• Updike was featured on the cover of Time twice, on 26 April 1968 and again on 18 October 1982.
• Updike was the subject of a "closed book examination" by Nicholson Baker, entitled U and I (1991). Baker discusses his wish to meet Updike and become his golf partner.
• In a season 12 episode of the animated series The Simpsons, "Insane Clown Poppy" (2000), John Updike is the ghost writer of a book that Krusty the Clown is promoting. The book's title is Your Shoe's Too Big To Kickbox God, a 20-page book written entirely by John Updike as a money-making scam.
• The main character in the Eminem film 8 Mile (2002) is nicknamed "Rabbit" and has some similarities to Rabbit Angstrom. The film's soundtrack has a song titled "Rabbit Run".
• Portraits of Updike appeared several times in The New York Review of Books, drawn by the American caricaturist David Levine.
• In an episode of the television series Gilmore Girls, "In the Clamor and the Clangor", the main characters are attending a funeral and jocularly try to guess which members of the town will be the next to die, but they quickly realize the morbidity of their conversation and regret it, especially when ominous things begin to happen to the people they speculated dying, prompting Lorelai to say, "We are The Witches of Eastwick."
• In 2009 a U.S. television series named Eastwick premiered, based (loosely) on the Updike novel.
• The second episode of the seventh season of Aqua Teen Hunger Force was titled "Rabbot Redux."

• (1960) Rabbit, Run
• (1971) Rabbit Redux
• (1981) Rabbit Is Rich
• (1990) Rabbit At Rest
• (1995) The Four Novels
• (2001) Rabbit Remembered (a novella in the collection Licks of Love)

• (1970) Bech, a Book
• (1982) Bech Is Back
• (1998) Bech at Bay
• (2001) The Complete Henry Bech

• (1974) Buchanan Dying (a play)
• (1992) Memories of the Ford Administration (a novel)

• (1984) The Witches of Eastwick
• (2008) The Widows of Eastwick

• (1959) The Poorhouse Fair
• (1963) The Centaur
• (1965) Of the Farm
• (1968) Couples
• (1977) Marry Me
• (1978) The Coup
• (1994) Brazil
• (1996) In the Beauty of the Lilies
• (1997) Toward the End of Time
• (2000) Gertrude and Claudius
• (2002) Seek My Face
• (2004) Villages
• (2006) Terrorist

• (1959) The Same Door
• (1962) Pigeon Feathers
• (1964) Olinger Stories (a selection)
• (1966) The Music School
• (1972) Museums And Women
• (1979) Problems
• (1979) Too Far To Go (the Maples stories)
• (1987) Trust Me
• (1994) The Afterlife
• (2000) The Best American Short Stories of the Century (editor)
• (2001) Licks of Love
• (2003) 1953—1975
• (2003) Three Stories
• (2009) My Father's Tears and Other Stories
• (2009) The Maples Stories

• (1958) The Carpentered Hen
• (1963) Telephone Poles
• (1969) Midpoint
• (1969) Dance of the Solids
• (1974) Cunts: Upon Receiving The Swingers Life Club Membership Solicitation (limited edition)
• (1977) Tossing and Turning
• (1985) Facing Nature
• (1993) Collected Poems 1953–1993
• (2001) Americana and Other Poems
• (2009) Endpoint and Other Poems

• (1965) Assorted Prose
• (1975) Picked-Up Pieces
• (1983) Hugging The Shore
• (1989) Self-Consciousness: Memoirs
• (1989) Just Looking
• (1991) Odd Jobs
• (1996) Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf
• (1999) More Matter
• (2005) Still Looking: Essays on American Art
• (2005) In Love with a Wanton: Essays on Golf
• (2007) Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism
• (2010) Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu: John Updike on Ted Williams (Library of America)

• 1959 Guggenheim Fellow
• 1959 National Institute of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award
• 1964 National Book Award for Fiction
• 1965 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger
• 1966 O. Henry Prize
• 1981 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
• 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
• 1982 National Book Award for Fiction
• 1982 Union League Club Abraham Lincoln Award
• 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
• 1984 National Arts Club Medal of Honor
• 1987 St. Louis Literary Award
• 1987 Ambassador Book Award
• 1988 PEN/Malamud Award
• 1989 National Medal of Arts
• 1990 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
• 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
• 1991 O. Henry Prize
• 1992 Honorary Doctor of Letters from Harvard University
• 1995 William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• 1995 Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
• 1997 Ambassador Book Award
• 1998 National Book Award Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
• 2003 National Humanities Medal
• 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
• 2006 Rea Award for the Short Story
• 2007 American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction
• 2008 Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award
• 2008 Jefferson Lecture

• Bailey, Peter J., Rabbit (Un)Redeemed: The Drama of Belief in John Updike's Fiction, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, Madison, New Jersey, 2006.
• Baker, Nicholson, U & I: A True Story, Random House, New York, 1991.
• Ben Hassat, Hedda, Prophets Without Vision: Subjectivity and the Sacred in Contemporary American Writing, Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, 2000.
• Bloom, Harold, ed., Modern Critical Views of John Updike, Chelsea House, New York, 1987.
• Boswell, Marshall, John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2001.
• Broer, Lawrence, Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike's Rabbit Novels, University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 2000.
• Burchard, Rachel C., John Updike: Yea Sayings, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Illinois, 1971.
• Campbell, Jeff H., Updike's Novels: Thorns Spell A Word, Midwestern State University Press, Wichita Falls, Texas, 1988.
• Clarke Taylor, C., John Updike: A Bibliography, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, 1968.
• De Bellis, Jack, John Updike: A Bibliography, 1968-1993, Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, Connecticut, 1994.
• De Bellis, Jack, John Updike: The Critical Responses to the Rabbit Saga, Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, Connecticut, 2005.
• De Bellis, Jack, ed., The John Updike Encyclopedia, Greenwood Press, Santa Barbara, California, 2001.
• Detwiler, Robert, John Updike, Twayne, Boston, 1984.
• Greiner, Donald, " Don DeLillo, John Updike, and the Sustaining Power of Myth", UnderWords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo's Underworld, University of Delaware Press, Newark, Delaware, 2002.
• Greiner, Donald, John Updike's Novels, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 1984.
• Greiner, Donald, The Other John Updike: Poems, Short Stories, Prose, Play, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 1981.
• Gullette, Margaret Morganroth, "John Updike: Rabbit Angstrom Grows Up", Safe at Last in the Middle Years : The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel, Backinprint.com, New York, 2001.
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• Hunt, George W., John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion, and Art, William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1985.
• Karshan, Thomas, " Batsy", London Review of Books, 31 March 2005.
• Luscher, Robert M., John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne, New York, 1993.
• McNaughton, William R., ed., Critical Essays on John Updike, GK Hall, Boston, 1982.
• Markle, Joyce B., Fighters and Lovers: Themes in the Novels of John Updike, New York University Press, 1973.
• Miller, D. Quentin, John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2001.
• Morley, Catherine, "The Bard of Everyday Domesticity: John Updike's Song for America", The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Literature, Routledge, New York, 2008.
• Newman, Judie, John Updike, Macmillan, London, 1988.
• O'Connell, Mary, Updike and the Patriarchal Dilemma: Masculinity in the Rabbit Novels, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Illinois, 1996.
• Olster, Stanley, The Cambridge Companion to John Updike, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006.
• Plath, James, ed., Conversations with John Updike, University Press of Mississippi Press, Jackson, Mississippi, 1994.
• Porter, M. Gilbert, " John Updike's 'A&P': The Establishment and an Emersonian Cashier", English Journal 61 (8), pp. 1155-1158, November 1972.
• Pritchard, William, Updike: America's Man of Letters, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, Massachusetts, 2005.
• Ristoff, Dilvo I., John Updike's Rabbit at Rest: Appropriating History, Peter Lang, New York, 1998.'
• Roiphe, Anne, For Rabbit, with Love and Squalor, Free Press, Washington, D.C., 2000.
• Searles, George J., The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Illinois, 1984.
• Schiff, James A., Updike's Version: Rewriting The Scarlet Letter, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 1992.
• Schiff, James A., United States Author Series: John Updike Revisited, Twayne Publishers, Woodbridge, Connecticut, 1998.
• Tallent, Elizabeth, Married Men and Magic Tricks: John Updike's Erotic Heroes, Creative Arts Book Company, Berkeley, California, 1982.
• Tanner, Tony, "A Compromised Environment", City of Words: American Fiction, 1950-1970, Jonathan Cape, London, 1971.
• Thorburn, David and Eiland, Howard, eds., John Updike: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1979.
• Trachtenberg, Stanley, ed., New Essays on Rabbit, Run, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993.
• Uphaus, Suzanne H., John Updike, Ungar, New York, 1980.
• Vidal, Gore, " Rabbit's own burrow", Times Literary Supplement, 26 April 1996.
• Wallace, David Foster, " John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One", New York Observer, 12 October 1997.
• Wood, James, " Gossip in Gilt", London Review of Books, 19 April 2001.
• Wood, James, "John Updike's Complacent God", The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, Modern Library, New York, 2000.
• Yerkes, James, John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Missouri, 1999.