Two temptations when writing about a book like this: the first is to imitate its “crazee” infectious style, adopt its motifs, and in this case start every phrase with “the fact that,” and the second is to translate it into something more conventional, excavate its characters and plot, stripping away all disorientation, themes, and exaggerated logorrhea.
Generally, I loved this for the first few hundred pages, thinking of it like a modern Midwestern Molly Bloom soliloquy (complete with a husband named Leo), a quasi American Bernhardian Knausgaardian exagmination of the quotidian, structurally similar to Mathias Enard’s Zone (discontinuous single sentence — phrase pile-up, really — separated by brief installments of comparatively conventional story), thriving thanks to competing/conflicting forces that extrude (girth and great sentence length) and contract (constant bursts of word-association shorthand).
On the most American of page numbers (76), the title’s famous precedent from Lolita appears: “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.” In this, the “motif” is introduced with a story about an enormous penguin and the response to it (“cool”) — later on “penguin, ‘cool'” appears, and that’s one of the ways a reader starts to have fun with this, learning how to read this, how to climb the sheer rock face of phrases without full stops or space breaks. But there are plenty of handholds and little regularly appearing ledges that help you “send” this one — it’s not at all difficult reading, it’s totally accessible, mostly because the tone/style, the pitch of the language, is so even-keeled, without pretentious poetic flourish or much variation: “equability‘s my A1 priority” on pg 79).
And of course there’s “the fact that,” which serves as a sort of space break, a grammar, and is thematically interesting in a work of fiction which is essentially, like Enard’s Zone and Compass, a Major Reference Work, a Wiki-marbled novel (for me, it’s “marbled,” not “larded”) that feels like a compendium of readily available facts copied, pasted, and if not necessary charged then at least propelled with some purpose.
But by 560 for some reason, soon after learning the meaning of the title (it feels like a spoiler to discuss it because learning what it refers to was critical propulsion for me, really the only plot-ish engine other than the story about the lion — also seemed like its revelation came too early on page 504 — around 475 I started thinking that it wouldn’t be revealed until the end as a carrot for the reader to strive for), my reading accelerated somewhat through the primary “the fact that” steam of consciousness POV, looking forward to the short, interstitial, comparatively conventional segments from the perspective of a lioness.
Sometimes thought it was written by a computer programmed to emit phrases that somehow corresponded to an endless elaboration of Pi. Loved it, rooted for it, recommended it, but then it started to seem inexhaustible — and the system of associations too often returned to Hollywood movies/actors (Harrison Ford, Jane Fonda, Walter Matthau), environmental devastation and assorted horrors at the hands of corporations and men, as well as really recent Trump-related news that was interesting at first, relevant, hefty, charged, but that dulled for me with repetition and exposure, as though the pathos and contemporary politics felt tacked on, pasted in, enough already, thereby effectively mirroring the emotional/psychological overload pretty much everyone feels three years into the “SUPER CALLOUS FRAGILE RACIST SEXIST NAZI POTUS” era (loved the bit about Stace’s class photo T-shirt). In short, without a tinge of sexism from this male reviewer, its game got played out for me a little beyond the midway point, I experienced negative reality overload, and yet there were still some 400 pages to go.
The whole antecedent correction thing also irritated me whenever it appeared — not this, that. But with so much time and enjoyment and interest already invested there was no way I’d put it down — I had to push through, albeit a little quicker than before, especially when the focus returned to movies, pies, environmental atrocities, town names, etc.
It’s odd how in a novel like this, one that undermines conventional expectation of plot and character, it’s exactly plot and character that shine through when they do appear, as though made more valuable by scarcity. The determined lioness had my total attention throughout because she passionately wants something particular. Even the scrappy little submissive chicken coop mongrel that follows her seems more interesting than the narrator’s family, friends, and children, who other than Stace never really seemed to come to much life. Leo, loving and benevolent foil for everything awful related to men, appears off-stage throughout, an academic who specializes in bridges, which seems almost too thematically perfect in an associative novel? But none of this means I wasn’t in this one’s favor, just that like the country it’s explicitly about (it comes with a mini American flag suitable for sticking in a cupcake and was published on July 4), the gist is complicated, its glories and gore indivisible (same is true for lionesses apparently).
Two other semi-major dealios at play in my mind while reading: the author’s gender and geographic residence. I was attracted by this in part because it’s a massive brick of text by a woman. Women have written long novels. I’m pretty sure JK Rowling is a woman. But when it comes to experimental/unconventional mega-novels, other than Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, which I own but haven’t read more than the first three pages of, it’s been a male domain. So I was interested in a Bernhardian mega-rant long sentence from the perspective of a middle-aged Midwestern woman who has “led a pretty shark-free, tornado-free, hurricane-free, cyclone-free, volcano-free, war-free, bomb-free-, plane-crash-free, gun-rampage-free, rape-free, murder-free, electrocution-free existence” (pg 703), that is, her perspective is privileged and self-aware — she’s a cancer survivor and suffering from health care costs but she’s not a victim run by the author through a cruel-fate wringer to make a single clear socially relevant point or maximize poignancy.
The author also was born and raised in the US but now lives in Scotland, so there’s something there too, a sense of displacement or exile or criticism from afar that I liked sometimes thinking about as I read, the sense that the author is not the narrator although probably in many ways not NOT the narrator either. But regardless of reductions related to current spatial occupancy and gender, since the vast majority of novels exist on a uniform and thereby Utopian and universal plane of bound whitish pages covered in ordered lines of blackish print, it’s the author’s sensibility and the reader’s engagement and activated imaginative capacities that matter most.
At times I wished the author had supplied a narrator with more range, especially when it came to cultural reference. All the references, from Little House on the Prairie to “The Sound of Music,” made the narrator seem much older than someone who seemed to be essentially my age, so where was she in the ’80s and early ’90s? Only watching Harrison Ford movies? What about MTV? U2? Nary a mention of wholly American exports like hip hop or Nirvana, let alone Tortoise (one of the reasons I love Knausgaard, who talks about Tortoise in one of the volumes).
I guess I’m talking about the point where relatability meets believability. The fact that frequent cultural references are related to old-timey not-very-PC prairie life (LHOTP) and Nazi Germany (TSOM) almost undermines believability because it seems contrived by the author to reflect on a contemporary Red State. Lack of random references to wholly American late ’80s hair metal like Ratt and Whitesnake made this less relatable and less believable than it could have been. It almost seemed like the author had this story about an older (like in her sixties or seventies) Ohioan pie baker sitting around for a while but then blew it up with contemporary American politics and made her younger? Really just thought about this a few days after finishing — it wasn’t a concern while reading. But the cultural references suggest an older narrator, or one who stopped paying attention to pop culture at some point when she would’ve been in her late teens?
Another thing I was thinking about, early on at least, was how the hell could something this good not be published by a single American publisher? (It’s North American publisher in September will be Biblioasis, which is based in Canada.) I shook my fist at American publishers. But then by page 600 or so, with 400 to go, yeah, OK, I get it, I see how they respectfully declined. But it’s discouraging that there aren’t at least a handful of indie presses in the US that might have seemed like natural choices for taking a shot at this, like for example an Archipelago Books that primarily published novels originally written in English by Americans (even if they currently live elsewhere).
So, ultimately, I found this worth the time spent with it, exciting and rewarding and “great” at first, but then less so the longer it got — it could’ve been like 350 to 500 pages shorter and not suffered a bit, except who knows if I would have ordered a merely 500-page novel all the way from the UK. Extreme length is essential to its marketing but also combined with minimal formal variety — its equability, ultimately — it probably won’t be all that celebrated in the end. But I’d definitely recommend it to those who wouldn’t mind getting a taste of this one’s greatness without worrying about every single word (how many among us have read every single footnote in Infinite Jest or every single line describing murdered women in 2666?) and want to support ambitious individuated unconventional literature with limited commercial potential.
Note: I haven’t read Lucy Ellmann’s previous novels but will try to do so soon. If so, I’ll add a postscript here.
On the High Wire by Philippe Petit (Translated by Paul Auster)
Like an instruction manual for high-wire walking by Kafka, figurative and applicable to any art, but practical advice when taken literally (though few will take to the sky). Great introduction and translation by Paul Auster.
A must for fans of Man on Wire, which I saw in the theater an hour before I heard that DFW was dead, which wrenched back the nobility of humanity I sensed after cinematic exposure to the feats and flat-out Herzogian superherodom of Monsieur Petit.
Alone on the Wall by Alex Honnold (with David Roberts)
Should come with a glossary of terms Alex uses like “send the gnar,” “worked,” “beta,” not to mention all the minute variations in rock like a “smear.” But otherwise I flowed over these pages (had them pretty much dialed/couldn’t put it down) like Alex over a 3000-foot granite slab. Read because I watched recently and loved “Free Solo” and “Meru” and “The Dawn Wall,” and although I had this one in my queue for months I didn’t decide to fire it up until mid-way through On the High Wire by Philippe Petit, a similar daredevil obsessive singular athlete who most famously walked a high wire between the Twin Towers in 1974. Petit’s book is more like an esoteric instruction manual and his sensibility seems so Euro slanted and enchanted, whereas Alex Honnold is in many ways the opposite yet equivalent force — there’s no reason to try to judge which insane act of expertise and athleticism and fearlessness and reduced to a perfect form sort of simplicity is radder, as Alex would say, but I had Petit’s book in my head the whole time I read this one. Alex, although fluent in French thanks to his language teacher mother, is so very Californian, a low-key dude interested in “chicks” and gnarl adventuring, but more than that he’s so casual, so matter of fact, so sincere and “down to earth” yet intentionally and naturally simple that he makes Petit seem, in the best possible way, like a pretentious clown at times, an entertainer/death-defying magician more than whatever Alex is, a California climber bro with good intentions and something gloriously wrong with his built-in fear sensor — his prose reflects this, straightforward compound sentences with some conversational inflection, unobtrusively integrated slang, exclamation points.
If we read for “worlds” really more than anything else (the great Frank Conroy’s assertion in a writing workshop I was in, fall 2004) Alex succeeded on a language level to immerse me in the sounds and sense of one of the world’s elite “dirtbag” climbers, living in his van, flying all over the world, sponsored by well-known outdoorsy namebrands, low-key climbing steep shit solo, setting speed records, and every once in a while learning that another of their extended climber posse has died — they’re compared to gladiators but there’s also something ninja-ish about them, the respect for what they do, the art and science of it, but also an appreciation that an aspect of its awesomeness is the ever-present underlying consequence of a freak accident, an avalanche, or really even just a split-second of inattention.
There’s a definite transcendent spiritual side to what Honnold and Petit do, demonstrating the far-edge potential of our spirit’s ability to overcome seemingly impossible obstacles with persistence, practice, concentration, focus, opportunity, full-on commitment, and a little help from friends.
Alex in particular succeeds in doing what they say good writing should do: he makes the strange seem familiar, “freeing” for readers the sense that what he’s doing is even possible, climbing without ropes or any sort of protection straight-up El Capitan in Yosemite, 3K feet of granite, perched on tiny “smears,” indentations, ripples, worming up vertical fissures, ALL WITHOUT A ROPE OR NET OR anything to make it anything less than a death sentence if he simply slips. He’s so good, such a master in terms of technique and temperament — the Hendrix of climbing — he makes it seem effortless, a sure sign of mastery, and yet when you watch videos or look at a picture (or even read about it) it induces vertigo and a sense of my god dude is gonna die. When I watched the film, for days after I wondered if he just fell off some cliff in Chad or Patagonia or Nevada — reading this I started worrying about him again.
Loved the interviews with his friends, expert climbers, the equivalents of Beck, Clapton, and Townsend acknowledging that Hendrix is on another level. Very much liked the alternation between Alex’s italicized testimony and David Roberts’ narration, which brought the reader to earth, put things in a perspective that Alex certainly does not seem to have.
Alex’s environmental instinct, his charitable foundation etc, is interesting in terms of karma, that is the chance that his good deeds keep him from falling off the wall somehow, but felt tacked on in this — although I suppose he does spend his life in National Parks and is glued to these rocks and experiences them in a way no one else on earth really does. I liked also that the last few sections were written by Alex without David Roberts — for the parts about his monumental soloing achievement, Alex had to push on alone to where only he could go.
There was something very Zen monk-ish about his description toward the end of every move, the hand-holds, each step, the tension in however many digits of his fingers — like the way a monk spends an afternoon walking across the stones of a garden, focused on every single movement as though life and death hung in the balance.
Generally, I tend to rail against novels that simplify the complexity of existence but this memoir celebrates the simplicity side of the continuum, intentionally living with few possessions, doing all the time what he most wants to do, minimizing his impact, trying to come as close as he possibly can to perfection.
If you haven’t seen it, I’d definitely recommend “Free Solo” first or even a tour of the related YouTube before reading this, but those who do make it through this won’t be disappointed.
The Push: A Climber’s Search for the Path by Tommy Caldwell
“Pitch” perfect memoir about persistence/perseverance and overcoming adversity in the form of things you cannot control (premature birth, developmental delays, special ed, big ears etc, being taken hostage in a war-torn country, spouse’s infidelity, cut-off finger, assorted random injuries), and goals that must be overcome to fulfill one’s dream.
Flowing anonymous American prose, insightful, vivid, inspiring, but also defined so many terms and explained so many things that Alone on the Wall just sort of aired and moved through. Read this thanks to Tommy’s excerpts that appeared in Honnold’s book, which has a much deeper POV, comparatively, is almost like a sort of poetry at times lingo-wise (listen to Alex and Tommy take about 25 minutes to describe in-depth a sub-two hour climb of the Nose in El Cap — they really dive deep into the language of climbing and although almost none of it makes sense to a bystander like me their elite insider expertise achieves a pleasurable hypnotic evocation of their feat: https://soundcloud.com/american-alpin…).
Also loved The Dawn Wall which is pretty much the audiovisual complement to this textual experience — an immersive experience in the world of an elite big-wall rock climber, not just the climbs and cliffs but the psychological, emotional, interpersonal nuances of dedicating one’s life to something with huge existential rewards, limited financial prospects, and massive mortal risk.
Makes it seem not so daunting to do whatever it is we do every day on the comparatively horizontal surface of the earth.
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.
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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).
