The Rabbit series is still incredible, but–just like with Roth and Bellow–the narcissism that these novels represented ended up with some bad news.  This is a great review of the latest Updike novel that is fair to his abilities and also brutal about his decline.  But the best part is the DFW quote:

Updike may have been praised for his missionary work on behalf of the Sexual Revolution in Couples, Marry Me and other tales from the commuter line, but the generation that followed were the children of divorce – the collateral damage of those adulterous games of musical beds. In 1997 the phenomenally gifted David Foster Wallace caused a ruckus in the pages of the New York Observer when, between wallops at Updike’s Toward the End of Time (‘a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape’), took it on himself to be spokesman for the injured party. ‘I think the major reason so many of my generation dislike Mr Updike and the other G.M.N.s has to do with these writers’ radical self-absorption, and with their uncritical celebration of this self-absorption both in themselves and in their characters.’