My title doubtless will strike many readers as odd, since criticism on John Updike almost never mentions postmodernism. His fiction is most often identified as realist; occasionally, as modernist. And yet as the two epigraphs I begin with reveal, Updike is not unaware of the cultural phenomenon of postmodernism. Updike's relation to postmodernism, however, goes well beyond such passing references. In fact, much of Updike's fiction since A Month of Sundays (1975) reveals a novelist who, if not exactly a postmodernist, has read a number of key poststructuralist texts that inform postmodern poetics and has experimented with postmodern narrative strategies as he chronicles contemporary America. Updike has written novels in the past three decades that intertextually play with the aesthetic past, that are often highly metafictional, and that draw on genres ranging from magic realism (Brazil [1994]) to science fiction (Toward the End of Time [1997]).