One thing that runs through the work of John Updike, at least the works of his that I’ve been drawn to, is his exploration of how the loss of faith in God and the transcendent–a loss he often appears to share–produces much of the evil, dissipation, and unhappiness we see around us in contemporary America. This emerges quite directly in In the Beauty of the Lilies, in which a 19th century clergyman’s sudden lapse of faith produces a chain of worsening destruction through subsequent generations of his family, right up to the explosion of the counterculture.

Updike’s trio of novels very loosely based on The Scarlet Letter–A Month of Sundays (1975), Roger’s Version (1986), and S (1988), the last of which is a send-up of feminism and an hilarious satire on the worship of Eastern-style gurus, an especially virulent development some years ago–also examines how the retreat of the sacred from life leaves it drained and empty, inducing an hysterical search for alternatives.

Although the novel that many readers think his best, The Coup (1978), does not deal directly with contemporary America, it does show how an absence of spiritual depth, and the naive belief that everyone is just like us and wants what we have, can hamper our dealings with other cultures. It might have been helpful for the administration and the Pentagon to read this book before the invasion of Iraq.

In one of his most recent novels, Terrorist (2006), Updike exposes how the erratic upbringing of many young people today, the content-poor education they receive, and most of all the absence of fathers and masculine authority in their lives, can indeed lead to finding meaning in religious fundamentalism and the cause of Islamic jihad. This book is also a skillfully written thriller.

These novels may well contain some explicit sex I have allowed myself to forget, but the overall achievement of these works redeems them in my view. I also recall Rabbit at Rest (1990) as exceptionally well-written, but don’t recall liking it very much, perhaps because it seemed ultimately nihilistic and did not have the resonance I detect in these other works.

Recently, Peter Wood asked which of Updike’s novels might be suitable for a college class. I would say most of the above, given some caution about potentially explict parts.