"Of the Farm" by John Updike

Oh, what a disappointment. This book didn't work for me. The story centers on a man who takes his second wife and stepson back to his childhood farm, where his ailing mother lives. From the beginning I just didn't sympathize with the narrator. I didn't feel like the story was full enough. Maybe this (partly?) due to the fact that the book was written in the mid-1960's, when divorce and remarriage was less accepted. And I am too jaded by our current society to see the narrator's struggle. But Updike's Rabbit books deal with all sorts of philandering and moral transgressions, none of which are lost on this twenty-first-century, Gen-X reader.