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The youngest of Martha's three sons from a former marriage lives with them; Updike's four children "are all grown up and living more or less on their own." David Updike, 24, seems to have inherited his father's precocity; he has already had three short stories published in The New Yorker.
Updike works at home in a semi-attached room that once housed an antiques store. He settles in there each morning by 9, usually writes in pencil on the backs of old manuscripts, then acts as his own typist. He tries to complete three pages a day: "I set that quota for myself many years ago, and it seems to be about right. It's not so much that you're overwhelmed by it, and it's not so little that you don't begin to accumulate a manuscript." After a late lunch around 1:30, he reads proofs, sees to the mail, and tries to get in some golf. Although he sometimes breaks 80, he remains unimpressed by his game: "Mediocre would be a kind way of describing it."
At 49, Updike looks lean and fit. He claims an excess of 5 Ibs., but has visibly avoided Rabbit's paunch. He was jogging while writing Rabbit Is Rich but has stopped, at least for a while. He retains an interest in skiing, although he finds "it gets increasingly scary, the stiffer I feel and the more fragile." Social life consists of a round of dinner parties and frequent trips to Boston to see friends, ballet and the Red Sox.
Will Rabbit reappear in ten years or so down the line? Updike's answer is both conditional and firm: "Barring the unforeseen, yes. I don't know what the decade will bring me. I hope to be alive and writing still, and if I am, I expect Rabbit will be alive too, in his corner of Pennsylvania."
Excerpt
"Running. Harry has continued the running he began up in the Poconos, as a way of getting his body back from those sodden years he never thought about it, just ate and did what he wanted, restaurant lunches downtown in Brewer plus the Rotary every Thursday, it begins to pack on. The town is dark he runs through, full of slanty alleys and sidewalks cracked and tipped from underneath, whole cement slabs lifted up by roots like crypt lids in a horror movie, the dead reach up, they catch athis heels."