“America fiction is notoriously thin on women,” John Updike once remarked when asked about how much he sees himself as belonging to an American literary tradition. Asserting “I have attempted a number of portraits of women,” and contrasting his own inclusions with the notable omissions of nineteenth-century male novelists, he ended by speculating, “we may have reached that point of civilization, or decadence, where we can look at women. I'm not sure Mark Twain was able to.” There is looking, of course – and then there is looking. Harry Angstrom has no difficulty looking at women in Rabbit, Run – his gazing at wives and waifs, strangers and sisters, mothers and matrons makes him a consummate voyeur.