Top ten merry adulterers in literature

Eliza Kennedy attended the University of Iowa and Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. After graduation she served as a law clerk for a federal judge, then practiced litigation for several years at a prestigious Manhattan law firm. I Take You is her first novel.

One of Kennedy's top ten gleeful adulterers in literature, as shared at the Guardian:

Rabbit Angstrom in Rabbit, Run by John Updike

We do a lot of things wrong here in America, but I like to think we do adultery right. Take, for example, Rabbit Angstrom, former high-school basketball star and eternal charming loser. He walks out on his pregnant wife one night, and just keeps running. He falls in with Ruth Leonard, a tough-talking, sweetly vulnerable stenographer-prostitute, whose “thighs fill the front of her pseudo-silk pale-green dress so that even standing up she has a lap”. After dallying with Ruth for a few months, he returns to his wife, only to change his mind again. Eventually, tragedy strikes, but because Rabbit’s an asshole, not because he’s an adulterer. Even then, it leaves him largely untouched. Well played.

Read about another entry on the list.

Rabbit, Run figures among Sue Townsend's six best books, Julian Barnes's best books to travel with, William Sutcliffe's top 10 relationship novels, and Aifric Campbell's top ten list of favorite jobs in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue