From my journal, 5 April 1972:

Just finished Updike's _Rabbit Redux_. It was disappointing, as most sequels are. I really liked _Rabbit Run_ -- in fact, read it several times -- because it brought into sharp focus the difference between being abnormal & being neurotic. Angstrom (funny -- I know the unit was named after a man, but that still sounds funny as a man's name -- as if someone were called Inch) is a _normal neurotic_: someone who leaves the radio on when he's driving & listens to the commercials & knows the names of the drivelly music; someone who, when he gets himself in trouble, goes first to his old basketball coach & then to his minister; someone who has not difficulty making sexual advances, & actually is attracted only to women -- & yet he is obviously fucked up: more so than I am, if one judges by the pain he is capable of causing. Probably, in _Rabbit, Run_, he is a remembrance of Updike's unsophisticated youth, &, so far as one unaccustomed to normal people can tell, he is believable. But now Updike has run off & become a literary man, so he has no experience on which to base his extrapolation of the Rabbit that stayed in "Brewer", & his imagination (constricted by his new parish, the N.Y. literary world?) mostly fails him. The characters are too witty to be real, & not witty enough to be entertaining a la Shaw. The plot is a positive soap opera of grotesque disasters.

In that respect _Couples_ (wh. I read last summer) was better; there Updike was once again writing about people of his generation _and_ class. My only complaint about _that_ book was that it did not have a happy ending. I read the beginning of it over a yr ago & then lost my copy, & all that time I hoped that it wd turn out to be a pleasantly ironic story of a community kept _together_, & families _stabilized_, by adultery. This idea was stimulated by a remark I read years ago, that no-one preaches sermons on the families that are _saved_ by drink, wh. makes so many husbands & wives able to face each other & their children. (Margaret Mead, perhaps?) But it turned out not to be Mr Updike's idea. (Perh. I shd have been reading Rimmer's propaganda instead.)