John Updike: Novels 19962000 (LOA #365)

The Library of America's five-volume edition of Updike's novels culminates with three masterful late works

In one volume, brilliant explorations of the American Century and of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and a bittersweet coda to the Rabbit series

The capstone volume of the Library of America edition of John Updike's novels contains some of the master stylist and social observer's most ambitious works.

In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) opens in 1910, when Clarence Wilmot, a Presbyterian minister in Paterson, NJ, experiences a devastating loss of faith. This moment of crisis sets in motion an eighty-year, multigenerational saga whose subject is nothing less than the American Century and modernity itself, seen through the fluctuating fortunes of a single representative family.

In Gertrude and Claudius, Updike boldly imagines the long backstory to the world's most famous play, prompting readers to revisit and perhaps revise their judgments about Hamlet's notorious uncle and mother. Drawing on the twelfth- and fifteenth century sources for Hamlet, but also inventing a new history for Claudius in his far-flung travels across medieval Europe, Updike creates a vivid and surprising origin story for the fabled rottenness in Shakespeare's Denmark.

The novella Rabbit Remembered (2000) is a poignant final curtain call for one of the greatest characters in twentieth-century American literature. Once again the setting is Brewer, Pennsylvania, but now Harry Angstrom's family are figuring out their lives in his absence. Harry's ghost is insistently present, and the stories shared by his children suggest that the reckoning with those closest to us, for better and for worse, never really ends.