The Audio Book Club on Rabbit, Run.

The Audio Book Club on Rabbit, Run.

The Audio Book Club on Rabbit, Run.

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Feb. 19 2009 7:02 AM

The Audio Book Club on Rabbit, Run

Our critics discuss John Updike's first great novel.

To listen to the Slate Audio Book Club discussion of John Updike's Rabbit, Run, click the arrow on the player below.

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This month, the Audio Book Club looks at John Updike's Rabbit, Run. For Troy Patterson—who discusses the book with Meghan O'Rourke and Katie Roiphe—the first 40 or so pages of Rabbit, Run"are as good as anything that's ever been written in this country." The novel tackles marriage, life in the 1950s, and a particularly American kind of charm. The 50-minute conversation explores these and other themes.

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In our next Audio Book Club, we really will get to David Foster Wallace's massive novel Infinite Jest. Watch for—and listen to—our discussion of Infinite Jest in March.

Questions? Comments? Write to us at podcasts@slate.com. (E-mailers may be quoted by name unless they request otherwise.)

*  To download the MP3 file,right-click (Windows) or hold down the Control key while you click (Mac), and then use the "save" or "download" command to save the audio file to your hard drive.

Meghan O’Rourke is Slate’s culture critic and an advisory editor. She was previously an editor at the New Yorker. The Long Goodbye, a memoir about her mother’s death, is now out in paperback.

Troy Patterson is Slate’s writer at large and a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine.

Katie Roiphe, professor at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, is the author of Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages and In Praise of Messy Lives.