Updike and his time capsules

Chapter 2 and 4 of John Updike's 3rd (?) novel, The Centaur (1963), depict in exquisite detail a day in the life of the protagonist, Peter, a high-school student, from his awakening, rush through breakfast and his ride to school w/ his father, a chemistry teacher at the rural high school, through the school day (most of the school day told in more in summary except for his encounter w/ a young woman at the nearby luncheonette where many of his friends gather for lunch) to the end-of-the-day drive w/ his father to the nearby city of Alton (Reading, Pa.) where Peter goes to a movie as father coaches at a swim meet, and various things go wrong - car troubles - that lead them to stay overnight in a seedy hotel (the New Yorker, ha ha). Many things are important about this passage, which is foundational for Updike's work across his long career: the setting (the sandstone farmhouse to which his family moved during the Depression, far from the city and emblematic of the father's failure to thrive), the adoring mother, the tense and complex relationship w/ the father who considers himself a failure and who brings way too much attention to himself at the school as an eccentric teacher - to Peter's mortification, the young man's yearning for an artistic career in New York. The whole passage - about 60 pp., interrupted briefly for a chapter on another theme - is beautiful start to finish and really gets at the young man's anxiety and his love for and sometimes struggle w/ his parents, typically adolescent in many ways but made so specific and vivid here. Much of this novel is self-consciously built as a series of points of reference to numerous Greek myths (there's even an index at the end), which to me seems pretentious and unnecessary, but if there is one myth that it most closely mimes it would be the voyage of Ulysses on his way home from battle - though the young JU wastoo smart to claim to work the same field as Joyce. These passages - the beautifully rendered night-time in Alton, with the lights in the town center and the all-night garages and diners - were a time capsule even at the time of composition and more so now, a look back at the small industrial cities that provided millions of jobs in small business and manufacturing, particularly in the East; these communities have seldom been depicted in literature, which tends to gravitate toward the major cities, though we do see elements of this social strata in a few other writers: McCullers, Russo, Agee come to mind, and there are others - but none so focused on the forlorn as Updike in this early work and his later Alton/Olinger novels; of course the Rabbit quartet brings the small-city culture and economy into the then-present day. We don't generally think of Updike as a writer of historical or documentary fiction (a few of his later works on historical literary figures aside) but in a way that's what the Centaur (and Of the Farm and The Poorhouse Fair, his earliest works) is about.