Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Well, very recently, it was made official if it hadn't been before.

Rabbit Angstrom is officially a novel.

It's a novel published in the last 25 years, and it is considered by people sent ballots by the New York Times to be one of the five most important novels published in America in the last 25 years. So I thought it would be wonderful, instructive, fascinating,

to read it as a whole and to accept it as John Upteke, its author, suggests that it is a mega-novel.

And I don't think many people have had the opportunity to talk to John Updike about the work as a whole.

And I thought it would be wonderful since I have him in the studio and a great honor to talk to him about it that way. Now, first of all, there has been since

the completion of the four novels a novella that appeared in Licks of Love. Is Rabbit and his

saga now over? Because I expect another four years from now to hear more. I can't imagine any

device or frame in which I would perpetrate a further sequel. The whole book, the whole mega novel,

let's call it, has was improvised in a way. I think of all the writing I've done,

the writing of these four and a half, let's call them novels, was most trance-like, most fluid,

most open to accident, contemporary news events would just sneak their way in

the very next day of the page. There's a spot on the page, so they are the most casual and yet

probably the most, may I say, majestic of my novelistic efforts. I wrote Rabbit Run with no thought of a sequel. I was prouded

to write a sequel, Rabbit Radux, because I couldn't think of anything other to do. I turned back to

rabbit because people had asked me, well, what happened to him?

...