Someone named “Mauve,” a twenty-two-year-old male apparently based in India, sent me a Goodreads message and asked for book recommendations that matched the most famous films by David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Wong Kar-Wai, and another director whose name I didn’t recognize.
I responded “so you’re looking for books that are stylized and weird, with an edge of violence, but generally entertaining?”
He replied “bingo, sensei.”
I liked that he called me “sensei,” so I spent a few minutes scrolling through my “read” list and pasting links to my reviews of the small percentage of novels I’d read that sort of fit the bill.
It was a fun exercise that I found instructive since I was surprised how many novels were too literary, serious, or silly. Or weird novels that weren’t particularly entertaining or edgy. Or stylized but not particularly weird or violent or entertaining. It turns out, very few of the novels I’ve marked as “read” on Goodreads overlap on the Venn diagram in play. But those in the shaded sub-segments of the overlapping circles are absolute favorites.
“Mauve” thanked me and said he was an aspiring filmmaker and promised to read all the novels I recommended. He then asked if I’d read a novel as good as War and Peace and I recommended Joseph & His Brothers, the only contender really. I also recommended a few others that were great in their own way if not as ambitious as W&P or weird, stylized, kind of violent, entertaining. He said I was the only one who responded — he must have asked many others on GR the same question.
His question had come late in the afternoon when otherwise comatose at work and I was happy to take a break from editorial labor for a few minutes. Also it made me wonder why I recommend novels in general, why do I have such an evangelical instinct, why do I seek what I deem great and then share it?
Am I doing it for the obvious reason of spreading the word or is there something else going on related to ego (associating myself with greatness, elevating myself via evangelizing novels already widely considered undisputed champs, or novels considered long, boring, difficult, et cetera)? Or am I just trying to identify the standard, the goal, the high-water mark in an otherwise unquantifiable field like literature? Is there maybe a spiritual side to it, the identification of a personal canon to act as stand-in or 21st-century replacement for predecessors’ experiences submitting themselves to a degree to the existential authority of the supremely bookish Judaism (on my father’s side) and to a lesser extent but nevertheless obviously book-based Catholicism (on my mother’s side)?
I thought I would paste the links I sent to “Mauve” here but our correspondence was gone when I looked for it — “Mauve” apparently deleted his account. I immediately wondered who he really was, thinking he could be a “journalist” looking to criticize the sort of novels recommended by middle-aged men on GR. I’m not really all that paranoid about it — s/he most likely just disappeared for whatever reason related to consumption of psychotropic processed foodstuffs — but I did think it could be worthwhile to post my immediate impressions of the few novels I’ve read that meet Mauve’s shadowy criteria, so here ya go:
The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels Ágota Kristóf (translated by Alan Sheridan, David Watson, Marc Romano)
The first part (“The Notebook”) was wonderfully effed-up reading: first-person plural (“we”) narrator and short chapters, studded with sensationalist psychoerotic gruesomeness, focused on super-smart sinister twins during wartime. Spareness plus unspecified time/space coordinates gave it a mythic/fabulist vibe. Two-hundred pages of controlled horrifics, albeit with maybe a bit of a guilty sense for me that this wasn’t quite “Waiting for the Barbarians,” “Blindness,” or “In the Penal Colony” — maybe I was more into it for the psychoerotic insanities than stuff about how folks endure the genocidal atrocities, enemy occupations, etc, that warp them?
The second and third sections fell way off from the first section, mostly I think because the awesome first-person plural point of view in “The Notebook” shifts to third person (“The Proof”), then first person (“The Third Lie”). Also, it turns out I must’ve really been swayed by the psychoerotic nastinesses in the first book because their lack in the other two I very much noted. I skimmed the last book, admittedly — not engaged by the writing (mainly) or the unreliable nature of storytelling subtextual schtuff. But still, the first book was 4.75 stars for me (at least) and some of the second one was not so bad either (3 stars?). Something else: it’s clear that the author also writes for the theater. The first two parts are so spare they’re practically scripts. Very little exposition, mostly dialogue, a few stage directions. Works perfectly for the very young, sympathetic, batshit narrator(s).
Have had this since 1997, a crusty old paperback taken for free or not much more from a neighbor’s yard sale. Read some in the past but never persevered to finish. Recommended for fans of dark, violent, realist fables. Call it skewed yet scarily/stuntedly straightforward post-traumatic stress syndrome lit? Sometimes like Kafka anecdotes but never even a smidge irreal (what seem at first like humanoids are simply humans), also lacking suggestion of a spiritual side? Sometimes like Jesus’ Son but without that hazy Christian glow. Heavenly reflection on earth is just the shadow of a rotten brown leaf. Sometimes like an evil Kundera with a long knife instead of philosophical exposition — at the end of a brief part, when the knife goes in, the whole thing seems to crystallize (sneaky starts, in general, and yowza sensationalist endings). Perpetuates stereotypes of the sicko post-war Old Country (fans of this sort of stuff should definitely check out The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels). Right away, ignorance and oppression dupes an innocent into beliving her liberator’s credit cards are magic. Decapitations. Gang rape. Crazy naked lady in a cage. Soccer team obliterated by artillery fire. Bored snipers take out strolling couples, a bored guy takes out the night watchman of an abandoned building. On and on, short psychically linked bits, carefully and cleanly composed, often told by a cold if not pathologically calculating post-war narrator. Sometimes italicized psychoanalytic-like dialogue. Suggestion of unspecified international atrocities provides sense of serious heft (ie, human condition significance) throughout, despite book’s general brevity. Literature of the “Oh the Humanity”- or “The Horror, The Horror”-type. A precursor to Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: Stories — read this after so many years because it’s mentioned in the DFW bio as an influence. A particularly vivid bit about a fast driver hired to do just that as business deals go on in the back. I’m interested in Kozinski’s others but not about to run out after them. Amazing this won the National Book Award in 1968. A very different literary world back then, huh? Will come back to parts of it now and again to retrace some unexpected “steps” . . .
Ghosts Cesar Aira (Translated by Chris Andrews)
A patient, dense, even-handed/sane, attentive, purposefully naturalistic short novel populated by what seems like many undercharacterized characters milling about and talking in paragraphless dialogue as naked manly ghosts hover around and sometimes piss in arcs that produce rainbows with a metallic sheen. Excellent active ending: like a methodical, casually eddying river that suddenly accelerates toward its catarata. Aira really shifts from static dense atmospherics to electrified sprints. A tricky, shifty writer who throws changeups — that is, intentionally slows things down, manifests some serious density, so a faster sentence jumps out that much quicker in comparison: “He was letting his thoughts show in that gentle, docile way because sleepiness was overcoming him irresistibly. And both aspects of his excuse were reasonable, in a way. The mood of summery exhibitionism prevailing on the site, accentuated perhaps by the imperfect, deceptive repetition from one floor to the next, didn’t shock Patri (even she wasn’t that naive) so much as intrigue her. She’s seen the gang of ghosts shaking their sturdy members and aiming the jets of urine at the sky, showering it over the first-floor patio (their favorite place for this sport) until rainbows with a metallic sheen appeared in the siesta’s white glare. The day the big satellite dish was installed on the terrace, they spent hours doing it, perched on the edge.” Political suggestions re: Chile/Argentina I didn’t quite register enough to associate the ghosts or the building etc. But I liked how this sort of South American “magical realism” is concrete instead of verdant relentless fornicating flora and fauna, hyperbolically flowing prose saturated with the streaking plummage of a quetzal in flight — in this, the tone is stable gray, the surfaces of the luxury apartment building are concrete, the ghosts are covered in a sort of concrete powder/dust and pretty much keep their distance. You can tell this book by its cover.
Finished Stone Upon Stone (translated from the original Polish by Bill Johnston) and said something like “whoa, great book.” The title is perfect — per the epigram it’s from a folk song: “stone upon stone / on stone a stone / and on that stone / another stone.” A perfect title because it’s a simple introduction to the novel’s alinear associative structure/progress across the clear-cut beginning, middle, and end of a few eras — the narrator’s pre-war youth of mostly satisfying work in the fields, fighting in the resistance during WWII, and the post-war soviet era marked by administrative work, excessive drinking, and chasing women.
Like the book I read before this one (Buddenbrooks), it light-handedly dramatizes dramatic societal shifts occurring over a few decades — in this, the blacksmith’s sons repair TVs.
The present scenes, whenever the narrator Syzmek comes up for air after dunking his head in the river of the past, involve building a tomb. Each anecdote amounts to a virtual stone Syzmek uses to construct this tomb of a book, divided into nine long chapters, two or three of which are masterpieces.
The chapters “Land,” “Hallelujah,” and most of “Bread” supplied exactly the sort of thing you hope to find when you open a 534-page dense peri-WWII not-western-Euro novel published by the great Archipelago Books: disputes over boundaries between fields, near-fatal beatings, in-depth descriptions of various war wounds, drinking binges and deceitful drunks, all sorts of earthly desires and earthly horrors — why fear hell when we’ve lived through so much on earth, sexiness and sorrows, a virtuoso accordion player who used to play crazy amazing improvisations at funerals hanged by the Germans with his bandmates (they hanged his accordion too), sumptuous passages about some wartime respite with a lovely young lady completed with an off-hand phrase like “before they burned her,” an isolated town in the woods burned and everyone hanged, wonderful steady scenes of slow careful courtship and desire fulfilled before happiness is wrenched back by miscommunication and violence, the best descriptions of scythe-work/threshing since Levin in Anna Karenina, a locked iron gate leading to nowhere in the middle of a field, a simile involving turning into a snake to wrap around a neck and hang someone from the nearest tree.
Fantastic soliloquies, especially by a pretzel seller early on about her many husbands, by an administrator later on about the ways of the world, and later by a long-time lover about everything and nothing that delivers the moral of the story, and toward the end an awesome semi-querulous Q&A with a priest about the ways of men, women, God, and the afterworld wherein Syzmek stands his ground and defends his hard-won wisdom against accusations of sin and heresy, rejecting easy consolation.
All angles organically covered: love, hate, life, death, joy, sorrow, sex, solitude, work, play, war, peace, life on earth and the afterlife, the life of the body and life of the mind — even a little light metafiction at the end about the language of everyday objects.
All in all, an excellent novel — not for everyone of course since it’s hardcore Euro Lit, associatively structured, rangy sentences, replete with paragraphless pages and subcharacters with too many consonants in their names, no easy conclusions other than the certainty of moral ambiguity and always coming down on the side of life, more life, you have to live!
If there’s any moral to the story, it’s that: you have to live, even if decisions don’t make life easier. How else do you become wise to the ways of the world?
Represents and revels in the complexity of everything, including life’s simplicities, and reeks therefore of the best sort of lit.
Mysliwski’s a little like the better-known Bohumil Hrabal but without as obvious a smile of his face and maybe a little more reckless for stretches (these aren’t criticisms of either writer). If this sort of thing is your thing, this one’s highly recommended.
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).
