Donald Fagen writes about John Updike

In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the late David Foster Wallace said that many of John Updike's protagonists - "clearly stand-ins for the author himself"—are "incorrigibly narcissistic, philandering, self-contemptuous," and "self-pitying," and that many younger readers consider him to be the worst of the generation of "Great Male Narcissists" that included Mailer, Roth, Exley, and Bukowski. As a reader who came of age in the bohemian subculture of the '60s, I've found myself reacting in much the same way to Updike's "old school" attitude toward women and to the sometimes near-sociopathic detachment that seems to be part of the profile of his leading characters.

And yet I remember my excitement when the publication of a new installment of the Rabbit Angstrom series was announced. Each novel was a reality check on the preceding decade, revealing a just-lived chunk of time in startling new ways. If you want to know what it really felt like to live through the late '60s, forget Easy Rider: check out the creepy, entropic nightmare that is Rabbit Redux. That strangely nourishing epic Rabbit is Rich nails down the Me Decade in the most entertaining possible way. And throughout the series, as in all of Updike's work, we're treated to those Proustian waves of prose in which Rabbit, magically endowed with his creator's extraordinary perceptual depth and descriptive power, tries to find some key to eternity in the details of the physical world.

http://www.slate.com/id/2210094/pagenum/4