Swan, “Laguna Symbolic Geography and Silko’s Ceremony,” American Indian
Quarterly, 12, 3 (Summer 1988): 229–249.
Detailed examination of the traditional symbols of the Laguna and how those are
interwoven into Silko’s novel.

Jude Todd, “Knotted Bellies and Fragile Webs: Untangling and Re-spinning
in Tayo’s Healing Journey,” American Indian Quarterly, 19 (Spring 1995):
155–170.
Focuses on the importance of Spider Woman and the belly, from where stories
are spun and children are birthed, and notes that much of Tayo’s sickness has to
do with vomiting. In addition to the explanation of the importance of the belly,
Todd offers useful explications of Night Swan and Ts’eh.

—Kathryn West

h

John Updike, Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich;

Rabbit at Rest

(New York: Knopf, 1971; 1981; 1990)

When John Updike died in 2009, he was one of the most prominent American
writers of his generation. While he was also respected as a poet and an essay-
ist, he was most acclaimed for his novels and short stories. He was born on 18
March 1932 in Reading, Pennsylvania, and lived until age thirteen in the nearby
small town of Shillington. This area serves as the setting for many of his works,
including the Rabbit novels, where Shillington appears as Mt. Judge and Brewer
stands in for Reading. Updike received a scholarship to attend Harvard Univer-
sity, where he majored in English. He originally wanted to be a cartoonist and
spent a year at Oxford University’s Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art.
He then returned to the United States and became a staff writer for The New
Yorker, which later published many of his short stories, poems, and essays. After
two years, he decided to try to become a full-time author and moved to Ipswich,
Massachusetts; he lived there for the rest of his life. Among the most notable of
his more than sixty books are Bech: A Book (1970), Bech Is Back (1982), and Bech
at Bay: A Quasi-Novel (1998), comic novels about a writer who is the opposite
of Updike in every key respect (he is Jewish, a city dweller, reclusive, and not very
prolific); The Centaur (1963), winner of the National Book Award; Olinger Stories
(1964), dramatizing suburban and small-town lives; Couples (1968), an explora-
tion of changing sexual mores and adultery; the memoir Self-Consciousness (1989);
Collected Poems, 1953–1993 (1993); the voluminous collection The Early Stories:
1953–1975 (2003), winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award; and Terrorist (2006).
Updike described his popular novel The Witches of Eastwick (1984) as an
attempt to please his “feminist detractors,” but many readers considered it misog-
ynistic. Updike’s final novel was a sequel to that work; The Widows of Eastwick

John Updike