Reading my first John Updike, kinda skeeved out by it.

I’ve never read any John Updike before, but I have read a ton of what I would consider “dude lit,” even though I’m a straight woman. I love Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Philip Roth, Don Delillo, Bret Easton Ellis, etc. But this John Updike guy? I just don’t know about him.

I’m reading The Villages, which maybe isn’t a great place to start, but I just really don’t like how Updike writes about women and sex. It’s like he has no empathy for his female characters, at all, it’s like they’re just sex-puppets to him. And this is coming from someone who loves Bret Easton Ellis! Who has sawed his female characters in half! Hemingway, who has knocked up several poor long-suffering nurses and abandoned them! Steinbeck, who has given us so many drunken louts who let down the women in their lives.

I don’t know why Updike’s suburban, milquetoast misogyny bothers me so much! I guess it’s this pervasive belief that his characters seem to have that women are so “different” so “exotic and unknowable.” It’s like, they are just women, like, half the people on the planet, like your own mom and sister. Why does he write about them like they are another species?

I was going to read Rabbit, Run, but now I’m just too skeeved out. Does it handle its female characters well? Is it worth reading? Thanks!