Many key Updike lifelong themes introduced in his 1963 novel The Centaur

I've started reading one of the few John Updike novels I'd never read, The Centaur (1963); it's one of 4 collected in the first vol of the great Library of America Updike series - though I'm reading it in a a Fawcett pb +50 years old w/ too-small type and crumbling pages but still, I can write in it! The Centaur won Updike his first National Book Award, though once again it's clearly a case of right author, wrong book - seeming to be a make-up for passing over the now-classic Rabbit, Run. Still, Centaur is Updike, so there's some excellent writing throughout and we get an introduction to some of the themes and motifs that will be with Updike throughout his long career: the family move from the small city of Alton (Reading, Pa.) to the mother's family's farm; the garrulous father, a high-school teacher, who'd had other aspirations; the strong bond between son and mother; the son's artistic sensibilities (in this novel, he dreams of becoming an artist) so out of place in this rural setting; the son's first awakening to sexuality; his love for and embarrassment by his father; and others. The second chapter (these chapters are all pretty long - +30 pp) is a great example of Updike's lifelong themes. The novel, however, balances these naturalistic portrayals of family life with some strange, over-wrought, even pretentious attempts to model this novel on the myth of the Centaur (explained briefly in a note at the start of the book: In chapter 1, a Centaur wounded by a poisoned arrow, which an artisan removes and, in return, the Centaurs give up their immortality and institute an annual (human?) sacrifice to appease the gods - who knew?) - so in the first chapter a character who seems to be an alternate v. of the family father (closely modeled on Updike's father) gets shot in the ankle by a student and goes to the nearby auto mechanic to have the arrow removed - quite preposterous if taken realistically, but it seems that this will shed some light on the family that we meet in chapter two - though why all this superstructure is needed is at this point in my reading beyond me. Does it add to the novel? Or just show JU's cleverness and erudition?