The Archquaquaversalist Text: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Fulfilled a New Year’s resolution to re-read at least one favorite novel in 2018 — completed this one two weeks before the January 1, 2019 deadline. This time read the Constance Garnett translation (first time through I read the Briggs translation). Also intermittently listened to the audiobook (made that first free Audible download count), playing the disorientating opening scenes over and over, but haven’t made it too deeply into the second part yet.

Felt like a first read in many ways since I didn’t remember that much from eleven years ago beyond major moments like the duel, Prince Andrey at Austerlitz, the wolf hunt, Ellen’s pale bare back and bosom, Moscow in flames, the essay on history and necessity at the end. It’s odd to say “I’ve read this” but not really remember much of it, although I certainly experienced it before, page by page, although a different translation with a slightly different feel. I’ll definitely be re-reading favorites a lot more thanks to my apparently pretty crappy memory.

The 2007 Briggs translation that I read the year it came out seemed a little more contemporary but also mythic/fable-like, aerated (not as dense — possibly related to formatting), and populated by cockney-tongued Brits. The Garnett translation (1904) I just finished is responsible in large part for the novel’s initial reputation in English (although the 1922 Louise and Aylmer Maude and the 1954 Rosemary Edmonds translations surely played major roles as well of course). The Garnett translation felt solid, grand, suitably dated in syntax and word choice (relaying a story that occurred more than two centuries ago), and maybe like 19th-century British novels I haven’t yet read (Austen, Brontes, Eliot, Trollope). It also had a handful of typos (including three on one page!) that have probably persisted since initial publication.

In 2019, I intend to read some W&P/Tolstoy-related criticism, a bio or two, the Maude, the Pevear & Volokhonsky, and maybe even the Edmonds translations, three LT story collections, AK again (in the Garnett translation this time), and whatever else. That’s the plan at least. I haven’t devoted myself to “studying” a novel since college — semi-systematic multiple reads plus secondary sources and biographies could be valuable? I think I’m intuitively drawn to doing something like this in response to a sort of general disillusionment with literature, especially its contemporary variant and its expression online (tweetage, listicles, think pieces, promotion of new publications so often overhyped, leading to disappointment and feeling like I’ve been duped by literary marketers and their electric outposts). I sort of conceive this little Great Russian reading project as antidote and way to rekindle reading/writing enthusiasm by repeatedly jumping through the flames of a novel I trust to offer plenty of instruction on how to live and how to write, all while demonstrating what it is that makes a novel “great” or at least endure and meet/exceed its out-sized reputation. (2025 update: disillusionment is intact but haven’t read much of what’s above yet, other than some criticism and Tolstoy’s story collections.)

This time through I was most interested in its structure, how it felt like a color wheel of characterization, with the primary male colors of Pierre, Prince Andrei, and Nikolai blending with the primary females colors of Natasha, Ellen, and Marya to create different effects for the reader. Each character exists on a moral/spiritual/societal continuum, with Andrei, Pierre, Nikolai inexactly corresponding to Marya, Natasha, and Ellen in terms of their progression from most spiritual/least engaged with society and most-to-least intellectual. But then again there are nearly 500 comparatively minor characters, all with their hues, blending and contrasting with the primaries.

Early on, Anna Pavlova (a character easily confused with Anna Mihalovna thanks to their names and general similarity — both seem significant at first and both fall away entirely before too long) is described as attending to those at her party like a mechanic expertly inspecting and perfecting the interlocking gears of a machine:

Just as the foreman of a spinning-mill settles the work-people in their places, walks up and down the works, and noting any stoppage or unusual creaking or too loud a whir in the spindles, goes up hurriedly, slackens the machinery and sets it going properly, so Anna Pavlovna, walking about her drawing-room, went up to any circle that was pausing or too loud in conversation and by a single word or change of position set the conversational machine going again in its regular, decorous way. (pg 8)

That gear metaphor stuck with me in a novel that really doesn’t function on the level of symbol. I read that line metafictionally, relating to the author, expertly organizing the seamless display of the novel’s players — it was a line that seemed to suggest that I should support the author’s authority. Initial disorientation (the first sentence is unattributed dialogue) is intentional and I will clarify it for you if you lend me your patience. It definitely sets you down in the middle of things and not until nearly 200 pages in (a sensation I remember from my first read) does the narrative focus once the primary characters emerge. Just like the French and Russian armies, the troops are gathered and by the end they’re winnowed down to a handful of survivors, either thanks to death or disappearance I suppose thanks to being no longer necessary.

The characterization of everyone is superlative — not just each character’s description and consistent POV and way of being in the world but also their modulation and transformation. The major characters are on a journey as long and as arduous and as fraught with emotional, spiritual, and physical plot-propelling obstacles/disturbances as Napoleon’s path from Paris to Moscow and back again. The narrative too, the experience of reading the novel, also feels like the French Army’s campaign in a way, as though the initial experience of fear and delight when embarking on an 1386-page novel gives way to total forward flow halfway through in the heat of battle as the pages turn themselves propelled by love stories (Pierre and Ellen, Prince Andrei and Natasha, Nikolai and Sonya at first and then Marya), each character with a spiritual rise and fall and rise again, supported by wonderfully drawn minor characters like Boris the social-climbing conformist; Petya Rostov, the post-adolescent obsessed by a fervor for warfare; and of course the primary fictional villains/agents of disturbance and thereby plot-propulsion Anatole Kuragin and Dolokhov (page 666, one of my favorite descriptive paragraphs in the novel, perfectly describes their preferred coachman/chauffeur/old-fashioned Uber driver and how these immoral young men raise hell speeding through Moscow, running over peasants, boozing, cavorting with alluring Gypsy hussies etc):

Balaga was a well-known driver, who had known Dolohov and Anatole for the last six years, and driven them in his three-horse sledges. More than once, when Anatole’s regiment had been stationed at Tver, he had driven him out of Tver in the evening, reached Moscow by dawn, and driven him back the next night. More than once he had driven Dolohov safe away when he was being pursued. Many a time he had driven them about the town with gypsies and “gay ladies,” as he called them. More than one horse had he ruined in driving them. More than once he had driven over people and upset vehicles in Moscow, and always his “gentlemen,” as he called them, had got him out of trouble. Many a time had they beaten him, many a time made him drunk with champagne and madeira, a wine he loved, and more than one exploit he knew of each of them, which would long ago have sent any ordinary man to Siberia. They often called Balaga in to their carousals, made him drink and dance with the gypsies, and many a thousand roubles of their money had passed through his hands. In their service, twenty times a year, he risked his life and his skin, and wore out more horses than they repaid him for in money. But he liked them, liked their furious driving, eighteen versts an hour, liked upsetting coachmen, and running down people on foot in Moscow, and always flew full gallop along the Moscow streets. He liked to hear behind him the wild shout of drunken voices, “Get on; get on!” when it was impossible to drive faster; liked to give a lash on the neck to a passing peasant who was already hastening out of his way more dead than alive. “Real gentlemen!” he thought.”

But there’s also the novel’s #1 villain, Napoleon himself, the Antichrist alluded to in the first paragraph, later shown to have a twitching calf muscle when worked up, presented as the novel’s greatest thematic foil/fall guy since the novel is about — the one most explicitly expressed among the swarm of ideas/sub-dualities, beyond the title’s obvious uber-duality, mostly expressed via dramatization — undermining the idea of the great man who forces the hand of history. Instead, Tolstoy (affectionately referred to by a critic as the older brother of God) primarily shows but also tells in pretty clear although super-repetitive straight-up essay, that so many other factors are in play. History proceeds primarily thanks to necessity — on a micro/personal level we think we’re free to act but overall there’s a macro-fate/progress essentially proceeding per necessity that subsumes everyone’s micro-freedom. Leaders like Napoleon or the Russian commander-in-chief Kutuzov aren’t responsible for victory or defeat for example so much as the results are an amalgamated inevitability, a rational progression of next steps guided toward its conclusions by the generalized spirit of the people. In this way, the novel is a supreme champion of complexity, always erring (other than when it reduces the complexity of the history of the world to the history of necessity) on the side of arguments that consider ALL SIDES instead of any one reduction of reality to something easier to digest. In short, it’s the archquaquaversalist text. And here’s its representative sentence, with narrative, social, generational, and sort of psychedelic/kaleidoscopic theological overtones (only one page — pg 1212 — did I dog-ear from the bottom corner to quickly find what felt to me like the book’s representative passage):

Again the facts of real life mingled with his dreams; and again some one, himself or some one else, was uttering thoughts in his ear, and the same thoughts, indeed, as had come in his dream at Mozhaisk.

Life is everything. Life is God. All is changing and moving, and that motion is God. And while there is life, there is the joy of the consciousness of the Godhead. To love life is to love God. The hardest and the most blessed thing is to love this life in one’s sufferings, in undeserved suffering.

“Karataev!” flashed into Pierre’s mind. And all at once there rose up, as vivid as though alive, the image, long forgotten, of the gentle old teacher who had given Pierre geography lessons in Switzerland. “Wait a minute,” the old man was saying. And he was showing Pierre a globe. This globe was a living, quivering ball, with no definite limits. Its whole surface consisted of drops, closely cohering together. And those drops were all in motion, and changing, several passing into one, and then one splitting up again into many. Every drop seemed striving to spread, to take up more space, but the others, pressing upon it, sometimes absorbed it, sometimes melted into it.

“This is life,” the old teacher was saying.

“How simple it is and how clear,” thought Pierre. “How was it I did not know that before? God is in the midst, and each drop strives to expand, to reflect Him on the largest scale possible. And it grows, and is absorbed and crowded out, and on the surface it disappears, goes back into the depths, and falls not to the surface again. That is how it is with him, with Karataev; he is absorbed and has disappeared.”

“You understand, my child,” said the teacher.

“You understand, damn you!” shouted a voice, and Pierre woke up.

But beyond ideas, W&P succeeds simply thanks to innumerable memorable images, often mystical or personal moments of sudden unexpected significance confronted with the natural world that opens up to a momentary understanding/insight into the true nature of reality, most famously when Prince Andrei is injured on the battlefield and gawks at the infinite sky, but also when Pierre sees Halley’s Comet and gets a sense of our insignificance/significance, or Prince Andrei listens to Natasha talk on the moonlit balcony above him (definitely sketchy that she’s 16 and he’s like 32 and also has a young son he pretty much totally stays away from — for all his merits, from a 21st-century perspective, Prince Andrei is a crappy dad), or when Pierre rescues the child from the burning building and later sees a man executed and meets Platon the noble savage-like peasant whose every thought and movement is in tune with existence — or Pierre just after the duel stumbling away in the snow or Nikolai singing with his sister Natasha after he’s lost so much gambling, or Nikolai propelled across the battlefield on horseback thanks to the physical memory of wolf hunts and then smashing a young French soldier with his sword, realizing what the hell am I doing?! — or Petya’s death in battle driven toward the fog of war like mosquito toward bug-zapper or Princess Marya dressing in her best bast shoes and peasant gear about to take off as a wandering super-Christian, or Natasha fasting to repent and recover after poisoning herself after the botched elopement, on and on and on.

Ultimately it’s the sort of novel you want to list every moment, every insight, to record them for posterity, so whenever I read this post about my second read over the course of 2.5 months toward the end of 2018 (half of it read in the first two weeks of December when I fully committed mornings, nights, and weekends to reading it and put everything else on hold) I’ll thereby remember so much more, which is really the primary reason I write these little “reviews” after reading, to outsource my memory so it can remember where I put my wallet, glasses, phone, keys.

On third read, I’ll look for instances of necessity, disturbances that arise due to one character’s necessity conflicting with another’s necessity. I’ll keep an eye on some of the secondary historical characters in the war scenes, particularly Kutuzov. I’ll also pay more attention to Denisov and Bilibin and people like that. I want to do a better job tracking the transitions between primary characters — I might even chart it? We shall see. I also want to track the old verities (“love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice”) mentioned in Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech, which I feel like had this novel in mind.

Anyway, if you haven’t read War and Peace, I guess you could say I recommend it.

*

To support the kind publishers who have taken a chance on my writing, please acquire a copy of Neutral Evil ))) and/or JRZDVLZ. Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).

Winner of the Award for the Most Admirable or Most Memorable or Most “Best” Novel I Read in 2017: The Sellout by Paul Beatty

Audacity, execution, authority, oomph, heft, humor — the most enjoyable, truly enlightened, contemporary novel originally written in the English language I’ve read in a long, long time.

I read some of the author’s first novel after it came out back when I lived in Brooklyn and a friend recommended it but I didn’t make my way too far through it, thinking it too derivative of Ishmael Reed, whose Flight to Canada and Mumbo Jumbo I read in college and loved.

Now, the influence still seems there, the hyperbolic po-mo humor, at times like Mark Leyner walking the satirical high wire of serious sociological significance, but the overall world of the novel, delineated by Dickens LA with a DC frame, plus the wholly characterized characters and the inside jokes and the little pokes at Dave Eggers, Bret Easton Ellis, and the like, the obscure side-references loaded up in the last slot of a sentence’s comic series, the clarity of every sentence and paragraph and the macro-level audacity, the old-fashioned yet not at all sentimental father/son story, it’s safe to say that he’s successfully integrated the Ishmael Reed, who’s name-checked at one point, and individuated.

Reading this every day on the Philly subway, wondering what the primarily black passengers think of this white guy reading a book with lawn jockeys on the cover, and wondering more so what someone might think when they read over my shoulder, was probably one of the best possible places to read this, especially when the story gave way to racism-related essayistic stretches.

Nothing is necessarily unknown that he says but the total package delivered with such humor, energy, authentic intelligence (no Wittgenstein quotations!), with such alacrity and pizzazz (as an old prep-school football coach I had used to say about how we should execute drills), with insider info on the LA surf scene to boot and references to Sun Ra and Lee Morgan, and Adam Youch I guess, the total package hangs together so well and articulates the complexity of everything in the most effective possible way.

The writing, the language, always guns it, veering around corners to find unexpected obstacles it blows right through — one of the most exciting, refreshing, funny novels I’ve read, as soon as I’m done writing this I’ll find a home for it on the bookshelf I reserve for major favorites.

The Rabbit Series by John Updike: Twentieth-Century Time Capsule of Restlessness in Southeastern Pennsylvania (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest; Rabbit Remembered)

There’s a Rabbit Run Road near where I live in Southeastern Pennsylvania

Rabbit, Run (1960)

I read a paperback of Rabbit, Run 20+ years ago, mostly sitting in the sun in a backyard in Iowa City. From that reading I really only remember a sex scene early on that seemed to do something to my lower abdominal area, like something had shifted downward — a really weird feeling, not turned on so much as something about the phrases affected, constricted, tightened the guts. Could’ve just been something I ate, of course — I remembering grilling trout a lot that summer.

I read a first-edition hardcover (dust jacket intact protected by mylar) of Rabbit Redux this past May and then, as soon as I finished, I pressed play on the audiobook version of Rabbit, Run on Spotify while otherwise reading Rabbit Is Rich in a first-edition hardcover (dust jacket intact protected by mylar). The opening scene playing some kids at a playground basketball hoop, I remembered, and listening to it again it was so vivid, the swish, the feeling of the ball on the hands. The line at the end of the section, the good kid who respected Rabbit because “real ones know,” seemed to suggest to the reader — or the listener — that the author is a real one and real readers will recognize the quality. There’s something about that line that creates a connection between author and reader, the confidence in Rabbit’s game redounding on Updike’s prose style.

From 2007 until recently my review on Goodreads noted page 17 as the home of the sex scene that created the effect mentioned above, but there was nothing ~17 audiobook pages into this that seemed capable of that. A scene with Janice seemed insignificant compared with what I’d recently read in Rabbit Redux, one of the most explicit novels I’ve read in the modern era, more so than Miranda July’s All Fours.

I listened to the section where Rabbit takes off in the car south while I was driving into Philadelphia from the southwest and laughed at the unrestrained negative descriptions of Philly while descending the George C. Platt Memorial Bridge, with a fantastic view of the city’s skyline, the marshy wasteland south of the city formerly marked by industrial smokestacks spewing obvious toxins replaced by acres of newly constructed AI data centers or maybe Amazon warehouses, a minor improvement I suppose. I definitely didn’t remember that fugue south and wondered if it had influenced a novella I’d written around that time involving a fugue south.

I also definitely didn’t remember the minister Eccles or games of golf with an almost abstracted, mythic, spiritual tinge to them or descriptions of Rabbit’s miraculous drive where the language hits a high. The scenes with Rabbit’s old coach I loved, how Tothero maintained his silence before responding, controlling everyone. Per Google, the surname Tothero is common in southeastern PA and derives from Dötterer, relating to poultry farmers who dealt with eggs, but “Tot” also means “dead” in German, so the coach’s name suggests “Dead Hero.”

And then everything with Ruth is fantastic, the sex scene done well, subdued compared with what’s to come in the second installment but surely shocking or at least alluring and uncommon for its time

The perspective shifts around this part of the novel to Eccles, and as in the second and third novels, I anticipated such a change, expecting that maybe 8% of the novel at most will be told from POVs other than Rabbit’s, an interesting intentional inconsistency that lends some perspective to the primary perspective. And then everything with Janice in childbirth, after the delivery woozy on pain meds, Harry having left Ruth after essentially forcing her to please him on her knees, followed by the horrific scene in which Harry wants just a taste even though Janice has been suffering episiotomy pain and breastfeeding all day, and it’s revealed to all really be about empathy, the perspective shifted to Janice as she repeatedly laments Harry’s inability to put himself in other people’s shoes (what they used to say before they relied on the word “empathy”), which opened up some space between the author and the narrative voice’s occupation of a not always so noble young man, not particularly educated, doing his best, following his instincts, trying to do what’s right but so often making the wrong choice. That is, the shift in perspective let Updike off the hook a bit since sometimes Rabbit’s perceptions are so precise and nasty or distasteful you naturally wind up thinking the author is somewhat of a sicko, but then the bit with Janice shows that the author all along has been trying to create an effect.

And then the novel reveals itself as a tragedy and generally elevated for me, taking on some more heft. The ending scene with Ruth too, when she essentially says divorce Janice and marry me or the baby she carries will die, is totally gripping, and the wide-open ending seems perfectly suitable and right, thanks in large part I suppose to the title.

Listening to the book you can’t of course see the prose and Updike’s prose is so much about vision, description, almost gratuitous, achieving an effect that transcends realism, ie, that’s so well-observed that the familiar seems if not strange than at least seen in a way that, after a dozen or so hours of exposure to its observations and perceptions makes you observe and perceive things if not more clearly than simply a little more. It’s clear that Updike practices a visual art form more than a sonic one, his sentences written for the senses they evoke, the words chosen not just for their meaning and sound but their shape and stance, their look and feel, a writer absolutely 100% aware of the texture of prose.

Thematically, compared with the other two novels set at the end of the 1960s and the end of the 1970s, this one set at the end of the 1950s doesn’t seem as obviously intended to serve as a time capsule or a core sample of its era, although of course it does seem to predict what’s associated with the ’60s, a sense of feeling trapped by family and church and town and expectation and running from it all, dropping out, yes, but not quite tuning in, turning on sexually, sure, but not quite psychically.

Rabbit Redux (1971)

A merry month of May study of Updike’s famous series feels pleasantly contrarian or unrelated or irrelevant or at least it did at first before this one started to unfurl all its gory ’69 glory, almost too relevant to 2020 social justice rioting after the murder of George Floyd, the wide-open racism in the mouths of the whites, the too-meaningful American flag sticker on the back window of the car. The phrase “make America great again” even makes an appearance.

At first Rabbit’s racist thoughts on the bus are too much, almost impossible to imagine in a novel nowadays, trigger warnings galore for sex, drugs, the N word, the C word, all the off-limits words and their related thoughts and spirits spelled out, drawn in bold, emphasized, streaked in graceful attentive consumable flowing surprising changeable language serving for the most part a story naturally unwinding, eventful, alive, human, sometimes so active the text takes on a swerve that almost feels pointillistic, all its details slanted in the direction of where the story’s going across and down the pages.

Sometimes seems to almost follow a formula of a set-up or introductory establishing shot followed by straightforward dialogue-replete scene followed by interior passages, the perspective deepening from surfaces to consciousness, sentence fragments, oft poetic.

And the sex.

There’s a lot more sex than I’m used to reading, loins described as swamp and earth, that sort of thing, gumdrops, but really this is the social justice education of Rabbit (36) with two kids half his age, an 18-year-old white rich girl junkie runaway hippie-type and her young friend, a black Vietnam Vet a little more than half crazy on the run from the fuzz. Sometimes felt like the precedent for Franzen’s recent Crossroads, or I could recognize this one as an essential underlying structure for that one.

Generally, just fully enjoyable reading, immersive, high-def, psychologically and emotionally and socially mature and insightful with its ideas about America 1969 totally embedded in the characters and their interactions, all of them, even the minor characters like a Vietnam Vet who threatens Rabbit about Skeeter staying at his house, so clearly drawn, so patiently and thoroughly described without Henry Jamesing it.

At most at times the expected rotation to passages of interiority seems a bit automatic and too much, but always seemed worth it, and of course there’s the setting, the town of Brewer, essentially Reading, the fifth-largest city in PA, near where Updike grew up in Shillington, where I intend to drive the child to this summer for an hour-or-so outing by car to the northwest of where we live.

I read Rabbit Run 20+ years ago in a backyard in the sun. Had the Everyman’s Library omnibus edition of all four Rabbit novels and read the first page or two of this one a few times but never could manage more. Acquired the old original Knopf hardcovers for nearly nothing at the local library book sale over the last few years and it makes all the difference, the linotype set in Janson, the thick paper, the comfortable margins, the legible size of the text.

Rabbit Is Rich (1981)

There’s something pleasant about Updike’s consciousness and prose style descending to inhabit Harry Angstrom. There’s a slight dissonance, in that we know the author is smarter or more worldly or at least certainly better educated than his character, but the author inhabits the character with grace, giving Harry the benefit of the doubt, albeit a little too often making him seem like a sex-obsessed pig, a little too quick to use the C word. I liked when Harry was seen through Thelma’s eyes, rounding him out, the appealing perceptions counterbalancing everything we know of him.

Sometimes felt like this one corrected for the second volume which corrected for the first volume, in that this one focused more on family and interpersonal dynamics, whereas the second volume was more about the influence or the integration of new societal trends into one’s consciousness, whereas the first volume was more about a young man’s attempt to break free of traditional values of church, coach, wife, family, anticipating that trend in the ’60s.

Like the title indicates, this one is richer than the first two, longer, more populous maybe, the interest introduced in the beginning of Harry and Ruth’s possible daughter used to gracefully herd the novel’s episodes along, like Fritze the collie maybe, intermittently there in the back of this reader’s mind wondering when we’d get back to it.

Got a little frustrated through the bits too often focused on Nelson, although the payoffs with the convertibles and the scene at the party (as they leave) were worth it and solid (I yelled out during the latter). Posted an update about how the novel had lost all narrative drive midway through during the marriage scene but I trusted it would pick up, assuming it would return to Ruth’s daughter, but appreciated how she emerged at the party, Nelson’s curiosity, her white pants, how he wanted to cover her up when she was passed out in one of the bedrooms, a sort of instinctual sibling tenderness. And then things really picked up once Harry explored Webb and Cyndi’s upstairs alone — Updike defaulting to his primary interest in sexual activity — and pretty much maintained that clip to the end.

The final 150 pages or so when Harry and Janice go on an extended triple-date Caribbean vacation worked wonderfully well to get them out of Brewer and change the atmosphere but more so to differentiate the side characters and give them depth, particularly Thelma and Ronnie her drape-head “playmaker” husband who’s been a hairy loud annoyance ever since the first book. And of course there’s the very much unexpected ’70s-style open-mindedness among the three married couples including an even more unexpected instance of extra-marital action, although I suppose it was maybe inevitable after Harry’s intriguing discovery while snooping around upstairs at Webb’s.

Loved how the Webb’s upstairs bathroom (the blue shag toilet cover, the little Hollywood-ish lightbulbs around the mirror) dredged memories of a neighbor friend’s bathrooms from the late 70s — and unlike the first two novels I was alive during this one’s time frame, watched the Rams/Steelers Super Bowl the novel ended on, saw George “The Iceman” Gervin play in person versus Dr J and the 76ers at the Spectrum, appreciated mentions of Phillies (Rose, Bowa) and Eagles players (Jaws) — if set in 1980 instead of the late ’70s, all Philly teams would’ve made the finals — and I remember hearing about inflation for the first time in my life and seeing an expletive preceding “Iran” (which I only associated with a popular Flocks of Seagulls song at the time) spray-painted on the cement under an overpass.

Generally enjoyed reading this — again, in part thanks to the old hardcover.

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Loved this last major installment for the riveting, so well-executed/vivid scene on the little sunfish sailboat with the granddaughter, for its patient final movement echoing the fugue of the first book, for its penultimate scene echoing the opening scene of the series, and for the consistent evocation, reinforcement, and animation of the characterization, particularly the primary family players, not to mention the setting (Brewer PA, as well as Deleon FL).

I’ve always thought of Updike as a supremely graceful liquid lucid sentence writer, who in his essay “At War with My Skin” (in Self-Consciousness) says he smoothed his prose to compensate for his psoriasis. But the take-away from this series more so is his facility with dramatization, the general palpability, the vitality, the simple LIFE of his scenes, the unforced, natural dictation of the dialogue replete with unspoken asides and associations, which over the course of four novels between 300 and 500 pages accretes so Harry’s memories serve as pleasant reminders for readers.

This installment, early on it was pretty obvious we’d be dealing with heart trouble for Harry and a coke habit for Nelson, and the full-on revelation of both issues about 100 to 150 pages in proved fully satisfying and propelled the novel across the somewhat longer, denser pages. This one felt more fully from Harry’s perspective, without, to my memory, the intermittent POV switches to other characters, literarily gaining perspective on Harry’s actions, as in the others. It feels more fully seated in his mind, presenting his thoughts and observations in an accessible way, more in complete sentences than artful “stream of consciousness” deep-POV fragments.

In a comment on an update I posted to Goodreads after reading the first twenty pages or so, a respected friend who had given this one-star wrote: “everyone keeps telling me that Updike is a super-serious major American author, and I just keep assuming that they have carbon monoxide poisoning or something.”

I agree that he’s not “super-serious” — there’s something more “joco-serious” or seriously joking or joking seriously about the narrative stance. There’s a playfulness that’s not quite satire but not NOT satire, almost like Thomas Mann’s characteristic “gentle irony,” that’s by nature accessible and American in a way (not too staid or full of itself, pompous high Euro style), the way Steinbeck is accessible down-to-earth American, or like Steinbeck slanted with some of Nabokov and Joyce’s enchantments?

There’s a smile on the face of the writer as he writes, appreciating his creation, trying to please, neither writing down to his mass audience nor trying to impress them with fancy literary pyrotechnics. You can’t tell these books from their iconic striped covers (I read inexpensive first-edition hardcovers with dust jackets intact in mylar covers), but you can tell them from the author photos below, with Updike serving while playing tennis, or smiling as though he’s just done something naughty, or covering most of his mouth with a hand.

Also interesting is the influence of these books on the next generation, particularly Franzen, DFW, and Nicholson Baker (U & I). Updike’s flag is firmly planted in the family saga, replete with sexy bits time-stamped with the prevalent rabbit ears of the era and the post-Pill prurience of Penthouse Forum cast as sexual liberation. But there’s also an unfurled endurance to the prose, a covering of bases (and outfield, scoreboard, dugout, mound, bleachers, foul poles etc), a super-generous semi-indulgent accessible maximalist realism, unlike the excessive essayistic questioning “hocking” of Roth for example, that set a standard for the next generation of accessible yet often somewhat unconventional maximalist realists, more so I’d say than Nabokov, Roth, or Mailer and Bellow (who I haven’t read much of but will soon).

On the continuum, Updike is a click or two left of centrist Steinbeck, leaning in the direction of Faulkner and Joyce. There’s still that well-made American craftsmanship (in my Goodreads review of East of Eden I compared Steinbeck’s “brand” to Fender and Levi’s), but there’s an artistic ambition to relay a particular quality of perception of reality that can extrapolate out to seem representative or at least symptomatic of its larger societal temporal milieu that makes things somewhat more unconventional than Steinbeck, the sex of course but also the interiority and the almost unhinged excessive deployment of detail — yet still nowhere near as elaborate or extreme as Joyce or Faulkner.

Harry’s libido in this one has thankfully diminished, the C-word only appears once or twice (always shocking and repellent, as with unfortunate yet characterizing racial and ethnic observations), but the scene during the storm alone at home after the heart attack with Pru was, as the unexpected action with Thelma in Rabbit Is Rich, deliciously audacious, the dictionary-definition of “surprising yet inevitable,” and fit perfectly in the climax slot, more so in this volume since it compelled the ending.

Along the lines of Harry’s diminishment, this installment really emphasizes the importance of proper nutrition and exercise. I’m the same height as Harry, a few years younger than he is in this one, but in no way is my memory beginning to slip or do I or anyone else really consider me anything like a grandpa, but then again I run, walk, am engaged in the world beyond my employment and family, and eat a whole lot better than Harry does. Harry seemed more like a man in his mid-to-late sixties than his mid-fifties, although this was written by Updike (born in 1932) in his mid-to-late fifties. But maybe that’s also the point — he’s retired too early, without pursuits, his arteries clogged, his life mostly in the rearview, old before his time . . .

Temporally, this one’s set in the late ’80s, when I was toward the end of high school, so I remember everything mentioned pretty vividly, particularly the sit-coms (Cosby, Cheers, Roseanne) and of course the athletes (Michael Jordan, Deion Sanders, Mike Schmidt, Randall Cunningham).

At one point he tellingly states he prefers the graceful, effortless Schmidt over Pete Rose, saying if you have to do it with “hustle and grit” you shouldn’t be in the game, suggesting I thought something about writing, that he himself (Updike, not Harry) was akin to Schmidt, although maybe it’s just further characterization reinforcement, with Harry associating his old high-school hoops style with Schmidt more than the Ronnie-like Rose. I also loved the influx of candy and fast-food and the general franchising of Brewer and Florida, seen as an incursion and flattening over the course of the overall timeline.

Rabbit Remembered

Read maybe 100 pages of this a month ago and decided to finish it off on Spotify. Some worthwhile scenes, including a blowup at Thanksgiving, the whole Monica Lewinsky scandal used well to dredge reactions from the wine-drunk players. Seemed a little labored or retrospective (“remembered” is in the title), with scenes centered around static dialogue over meals. Probably didn’t quite take off for the author and assume full-on fifth installment of the series novel form but seemed sufficient to publish as a novella. Annabelle Byers is worth knowing if you’ve read the other books, and the inclusion of late ’90s internet and Y2K talk amuses, but it feels like, post-Harry, Janice recedes in favor of a focus on Nelson and his half-sister. Generally, worth a look, and if you come to it with low expectations you may be pleasantly surprised at times.

*

Something about Updike I’ve always known and considered something of a given: these Rabbit books were always on the built-in bookshelves around the fireplace in the living room of the house where I grew up. I have always known about them, ever since I could read and became aware of the titles, which I used to look at all the time and once tried to catalogue (giving up after a few shelves). Updike was always something my parents had in common — they both read all the time but on either end of the spectrum, with my dad reading more genre stuff like Stephen King or Michener and my mom reading more “serious lit” (Beckett, Handke, everything Sontag recommended et al). So, reading these books, it was interesting for me to imagine my parents reading them as they came out via Book-of-the-Month club or from the local public library while I was pre-extant (the first two), a sapling (the third), a high-school senior (this one).

+

To support the publishers who have supported my writing, please acquire a copy of Like It Matters, Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), and/or JRZDVLZ (all from Sagging Meniscus). Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador (from New Directions). Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox (from Barrelhouse). Or The Shimmering Go-Between from me (Atticus, the publisher, is kaput).