FSG published Natasha Wimmer’s exemplary English translation of Roberto Bolaño’s undisputed champion of the world/masterpiece 2666 on November 11, 2008, which for those unable to make simple calculations is nearly ten years ago now — a simpler time, with a President Elect we could be proud of and only a handful of early adopters on Twitter. As such, now that it’s been ten years, I‘d like to post some impressions from my first reading way back when — I read an ARC with a quotation on the cover from a review of The Savage Detectives in The San Francisco Chronicle by friend from Iowa and at the time fellow recent arrival to Philadelphia Vinne Wilhelm!
Something wholly positive that can be said about 2666 is that it’s not summarizable in plot or theme — its dimensions suggest the entirety of life on Earth. Seriously! And so all I can really think to do is offer a telling quotation: “. . . history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.”
I sometimes impatiently derided this monster as a hybrid of Cormac McCarthy and Raymond Chandler, a brutal borderlands high-lit mystery that suggested more than it ever actually signified. But then came a speech by a former Black Panther and a New Yorker named Oscar Fate and things took off, especially once it offers multitudinous murders and the prodigiously pissing, iconoclastic Penitent, and then the massive German, Klaus, in prison.
I may have skimmed a dozen or so overly gratuitous descriptions of murdered women, and wasn’t high on the 2666 hog through the end of the fourth part, but then the fifth part, mainly set in Europe during and after WWII Germany, is more than worth it. Like reaching the Rockies and the West after driving across the plains en route from New Jersey to California — all the better because you’d made it that far.
I’ve learned that the masterpiece is like a crucified Jesus — in this book, a Romanian general with a foot-long schlong — that needs the minor thieves to conceal it, or like a lake in a forest of minor novels.
You could discuss 2666 endlessly, or never say a word thanks to respectful speechlessness. It’s more an experience than a literary entertainment. A highwater mark for ambition, authority, oomph, audacity, execution.
At the end, there’s a reverberating sense, like I wanted to start from the beginning in a totally vain hope that all the clattering echoes cohere into an a-ha moment of thematic clarity.
The structure requires the reader to make associative diagrams (like Amalfitano’s charts), which are essential to this one’s “fun.” Total authority in the prose ensures that such associative thinking isn’t just an exercise in making “castles in the air.” A proliferation of images circles around and conceals and suggests the masterpiece’s center.
No cookie-cutter poignancy here or precious, luminous prose: five pairs of cat’s eyes rise in the dark, lacking “spatiotemporal coherence,” during a feverish, clandestine buggery session in a crowded house.
Maybe the only contemporary novel I’ve read where expectations raised by its blurbs seemed at least matched and maybe even exceeded by my reading. My final sense of the book is a distinct but equivalent awe.
. . . In the ten years since my first read, I’ve listened to the audiobook twice from start to finish and to parts of it, particularly the last part about Hans Reiter/Benno von Archimboldi, several times. I have some of it memorized, or I can anticipate similes (incredible sky similes throughout) and key lines, like the one about how the formula for great literature is supply + demand + magic.
The gateway to a full-on Proust habit. About varieties of love: eros (carnal), agape (unconditional/motherly), societal (admiration), divine (mystical/aesthetic). That last one isn’t old-fashioned denominational GOD LOVE, but more like a recognition of the wonder of existence/beauty, often tinged with a wistfulness, or melancholy, since the instance of divine love is experienced without warning or reason and then only remembered/recaptured with decreasing intensity thereafter. Importantly, this sort of divine love requires one to have an innate capacity to experience moments of incapacitating/life-elevating beauty. The narrator has it, Swann does too, others also suggest an experience of rapture. (Others not so much — I’m looking at you, Odette). Everyone knows the famous madeleine, but the other similar motifs/vehicles of ecstatic beauty come to the reader in passages just as good/memorable/beautiful about pink hawthorns and a phrase in a sonata. Not the stuff of visceral plot-driven fiction, alas. No plot. It’s also about the experience of TIME, of course, and the book’s length and approach exercise the reader’s memory and reinforce a sense that time in the novel has really passed, in part because it’s been days since you’d read a passage or image referred to later on. Sometimes felt suffused with chrysanthemum dust. Best when discussing solo apprehension of the divine. Slowest when about carnal superficial love and attendant tilt-a-whirl adolescent worries (like what little I’ve read of Balzac, Stendhal), and related highly calibrated societal sensitivities. Words I’d use to describe the prose and approach would include mixolydian, serpentine, rapturous, velveteen. At times like a psychedelic Stendhal, sort of. Good call by the translators to name the first volume Swann’s Way instead of Meseglise Way, the true name of the path but not nearly as catchy a title! 4.5 stars rounded up for canonical status and the sense that it must be re-read to really appreciate once the whole thing’s been completed. It’s clear now that I’m 250 pages into the second volume that the prose in the first volume is softer, sort of prissier, redolent of youth in the country, more innocent than it is at least later on when it offers plenty of writer-related talk and brothels. A good time of year to read this stuff — something about it matches the light in September (ie, it’s “radiant” or “luminous”), although that might also have to do with the beautifully formatted Modern Library paperbacks. Or D. J. Enright’s work on Terence Kilmartin’s revision of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s original translation.
Within A Budding Grove
Now just past his adolescent years, our nameless little narrator friend spends time at the Balbec beach and basks in the ambit of some fine young lasses after chatting with a kindly ambassador and a famous (albeit brutishly dressed and mannered!) writer he admires. The bits with Bergotte, the great writer, were fun — I love great writers as imagined by great writers (the only others I can think of are Arnheim in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, Vol. 1, and Archimiboldi/Hans Reiter in 2666). I’m having trouble recapturing all that’s covered in this one, particularly early on, since I somehow started it about six weeks ago. Good to see Swann and Odette years later, comparatively settled down, to feel like I’d experienced their most passionate episodes and now know them well, can see the world through their eyes and appreciate changes in character. Little narrator dude alludes to time spent in a brothel, just chatting of course, and in general seems a lot less wispily enthralled by pink hawthorns. Once he travels to the beach, he recognizes young yearning ladies but has a low estimation of his ill self and sort of holds his tail between his legs and talks not of sharing in their yearning but appreciating young ladies for how interesting they might be, something which at first seemed indicative of the author/narrator’s sexuality but also nicely setup a change of tune (from bashful whistle to let’s get it on) after hundreds of pages. Narrator hangs with some male folks his age, particularly Saint-Loup, who really stands out at first, erect as a silver bishop on the swirly shifting societal chess board, a kind kindred aristocratic kid for Marcel to marvel at and befriend. For the most part, over 730 pages, all that really happens (ie, in terms of a concentrated burst of action) is he tries to mack on a hot little lady who’s asked him to come sit by her bedside after pressing on his hand, giving him meaningful looks, and speaking “the language of affection” with him, and so when he leans in to kiss her . . . I won’t give it away since it’s a relatively pleasurable payoff on page 701. This long second installment seems a little more solid as narrator comes into his own, essentially sides with writing over an ambassadorial career, and then develops his eye for beauty in art, nature, and pale little dark-haired ladies wired to please, all near the sea with its sets of waves as liquidy and luminously lapidary as the prose, as always. A cathedral is associated with rocky cliffs along the sea while talking to a cool painter guy who sees everything’s intricacy and serves as role model and ambassador to the girls. Something continually of interest is the lack of Christian religious significance/influence and the suggestion that a sort of mystical artistic perception (all elements of life imbued with beauty) transforms the world into a cathedral. The end’s very much about the first stirrings of adolescent eros, whose innocence is underscored by the hysterical tilt-a-whirl romance between Swann and Odette in the “Swann in Love” section of Swann’s Way. This one ends with the recognition of his reserve of passion within, sort of how the first one ended with recognition of his reserve of divine love/artistic perception. It’s not so much a “five star” book in itself — some stretches really dragged and others soared — but the overall project (its themes, characters, settings, execution, insight, and particularly its language of course) is without a doubt at least seven stars. Monumental without being monstrous at all.
The Guermantes Way
Five stars for the project, four stars for the bulk of this installment, although it leaps beyond stars every once in a while, which keeps me reading/rating it five stars. It’s tough to pull off hundreds of pages of shallow conversations in super-rich salons of bygone Paris, but MP does it. Scenes of conversations among sometimes insufficiently characterized artistocratic characters is exactly the sort of stereotype old-timey canonical novels come up against when derided by those who’ve never read them. Questions readers tend to ask are: 1) what the heck are they talking about and 2) who the heck’s talking anyway? Within those scenes are nuggets, morsels, scrumptious bon mots for the attentive reader to savor, but I often found myself fighting upstream through these long passages to get to the good stuff for me in Proust: Marcel rehashing things solo, self-analyzing, taking off on essayistic benders. Like in The Magic Mountain, another major modernist touchstone, where Hans gets caught in a blizzard and the novel hits an eighteen-star peak, in this one, at the beginning of section two, more than midway through, I think, the self-contained ~30 pages about Marcel’s granny are about as good as it gets in lit. The sort of thing that’s so good, so affecting, so smoothly rendered, so poignant, as they say, that the light of proceedings streaming fore and aft is refracted through its prism (I hope you’re picturing the cover of “The Dark Side of Moon”) — like these ~30 pages of serious meaningfulness focus and color the narrator’s grayscale social ambitions, emotional longings, and disillusionment with it all.
Sodom and Gomorrah
Let’s
say three stars for interminable party scenes and seven stars for solo
Marcel going on about grandma and dreams and seeing an airplane for the
first time (maybe my favorite page/paragraph so far — the end of 581
and most of 582). Oh place names reduced to their historical tribal
derivation and places reduced to fancy homes where one is always
welcome. That’s sort of like the opposite of the madeline-induced
association — instead of something small mysteriously opening up rich
far-reaching memories, experience transforms the wide-open endless
mysteries of a girl on the beach, the name of a town along a train
route, and the lofty aristocratic salons of Paris to something
lesser/known if not quite quotidian. Oh Marcel, you lover of mystery,
you mystic (pink hawthorns, Vinteuil’s little phrase, Elstir’s radiant
sea cliffs), always flipping/flopping between incantations of adoration
and indifference (whatever it takes to win the girl). Mostly didn’t like
how narrator condescends to his characters but toward the end I saw the
point that he’d been disillusioned by, first, Parisian aristocratic
circles and then Balbec’s fancy/pretentious untitled folks. Spoiler:
everyone’s an invert. Loved the opening essay on inverts. (I love the
word invert.) Albertine waltzing with a female friend in a mutally
arousing way, with tah-tahs touching — shocking! I don’t have too much
to say about how Marcel handles inversion. I suppose it’s outdated but
also, as a reader, I couldn’t help being like dude the reason you’re
flipping and flopping about marrying Albertine and worried about her
lady lovin’ is that you, the author, clearly want to press your chest to
the chest of someone named Albert. Didn’t quite buy narrator’s freakout
about Albertine toward the end — seemed histrionic/forced — but loved
the cliffhanger. In general, glad this one’s over and glad I made it
through. The prose pulls you through even if the characters don’t seem
as loved by the author as much as the artists Bergotte and Elstir, or
revered friends like Saint-Loup. M. de Charlus (extraordinarily well
characterized after hundreds of pages devoted to the book’s most
variable prickly invert supreme) and Morel (at this point, not much more
than a cutout quarry of a handsome virtuoso violinist) are not the most
charming folks. Nevertheless, dog-eared dozens of pages, especially
toward the end, of Proust-y excellence. Flowing insight wins the day and
makes the dual whirlpools of not always so scintillating chitchat
worthwhile. Five stars for In Search of Lost Time so far — four stars
for this volume.
The Captive and the Fugitive
The longest book I’ve ever read, longer than those with many more pages. I don’t mean the complete Search — I’m referring to this volume, a mere 936 pages that took me forever. If I’m honest with this impression, I should admit that I find Proust sort of stupefying most of the time. I can only read 15 pages at a time without dosing off or reaching for my phone. But every once in a while there’s an image or insight that makes it all worthwhile. I mean, the book is regularly studded with the best of things I look for in books, my copy is regularly dogeared, but this installment is dense and nutso. For the most part, Marcel is with Albertine but doesn’t want to be with her (“The Captive”), but once she’s gone (“The Fugitive”) he’s obsessed with her again, madly in love, until he learns of her sudden spoiler alert. Most of the musing seems to be about whether Albertine is getting it on with women. The finest section, up there with the description of the grandmother’s death, describes Albertine asleep. It’s not riveting but it’s surely real good and maybe even the best ever. Other bits take off, especially about music and Venice but they’re not as clear as the bit about Albertine sleeping. When Proust’s prose clarifies an image, be it a little phrase in a concerto, pink hawthorns, an airplane rising into the sky, or his lover asleep, he’s the best. For me, when he brings the aristocracy on stage, he doesn’t totally falter at all but I fall asleep. Memorable bits in this include asking Andree if he can watch as she gets it on with another woman — or at least gently caresses a woman’s arm. Also, the revelation about M. de Charlus and Odette, and about St. Loup at the end. In general, like in Stendhal’s “The Red and the Black,” this depicts (more in summary than in scene) the tilt-a-whirl game-playing dynamics of the ending of an intense relationship. The gist is: say or do exactly the opposite of what you really want to say or do — insincere concealment is essential to successful manipulation of a lover. As a non-reader, I hate that shit so much, but on the page, it’s less frustrating/childish, although Marcel is starting to seem more and more to me like a manipulative obsessive sociopath. I mean, he can’t seem to look at a young lady without wondering if she’s a lesbian. In the end, it seems like he wrote 900+ pages of this volume so he could embed this bit of straightforward editorializing: “Personally, I found it absolutely immaterial from a moral point of view whether one took one’s pleasure with a man or woman, and only too natural and human that one should take it where one could find it” (p 934). The violinist signs his letters to male lovers “Bobette” — similarly I don’t think I’ve ever really totally believed that Albertine (who at one points wants her “pot broken,” a euphemism for buggery) is not actually an Albert — Gilberte is a thinly veiled Gilbert and Andree is really an Andre. Also, Marcel at one point says he’ll get the commoner Albertine a yacht and a Rolls Royce — the class stuff maybe makes me less a full-on lover of this? The prose is fantastic at times, the insight impeccable, but everything’s so high-falutin and a bit unbelievable, especially the society stuff. It’s hard to summarize since I’ve already forgotten so much, which seems like part of the point of Mr. Proust’s massive project — over time Marcel forgets Albertine; I’ve forgotten the first pages by the time I’ve reached the end. One more volume to go in the fall, before I read it all again 10 years from now. Also, the bare thigh on the cover of this one has maybe been photoshopped to the point of seeming unhealthily thin?
Time Regained
To say I’ve read the complete seven-volume novel now is truth and lie since it’ll take a few more trips down the pair of “ways” and “transversals” before I can really call this “read.” Maybe my favorite volume for the fifty-page stretch where M. explicitly addresses the work to come. Some of the best writing about writing I’ve read. Otherwise, threads are tied up — plus there’s literal tying up (bondage), pedophilia (only a mention), WWI in Paris, zeppelins and airplane fighters at night (the prose takes off during the wartime sections). Toward the end everything is degraded by age, war, perversion — entropy uber alles. The shortest and most accessible volume — I’d maybe even suggest that intrepid readers might want to try reading this first before Swann’s Way? Every fifth page dogeared. Proust, by this volume, has perfected his epigrammatic skills, for sure. Now at the end I have a better grasp on everyone in the world of Paris, Combray, Balbec and I’ll appreciate it more next time through — a volume a year every year forever. In this one, there was some satisfaction that M’s stated intentions regarding solitude and society, and the moments of perception that make life worth living, jibed with my impressions of the novel — it worked for me exactly as M. states he hoped it would. I experienced what had been experienced as the language sharpened as M. emphasized an impression’s importance — the maybe-too-famous madeleine, the pink hawthorns in bloom, the little phrase in the sonata, the aeroplane climbing the sky, his grandmother’s death, Albertine asleep, slipping on uneven paving stones, sitting in a library room conceiving this cathedral dress of an Arabian Nights-like masterpiece — ie, all these memorable solo ecstatic moments of sensory intensity rendered in riveting and superclear language, compared to long scenes in society of always perceptive yet oft-soporific calibrations of character. Loved that the church at Combray was ruined during the war; the image of old Odette; Charlus ultimately a depraved exaggeration of what he’d been; the tragic dissolution of Saint-Loup and the flat-bottom of his daughter’s nose, same as her mother and grandmother’s; M. the narrator dissolving into Marcel the author. As with most of these volumes, there were stretches were I was like will I really give this four stars? But then Proustian expository overdrive would kick in and save the day. Again, this was really just an introduction to a text I’m sure I’ll return to throughout life thanks to its wisdom and insight, its structure and exemplary language, its world and its riches.
*
And if you’ve scrolled this far down the page you might be interested in this:
Loved this short bio focused on Proust’s transition from social-climbing gadabout dilettante to the next Stendhal thanks to the conception, execution, and reception of In Search of Lost Time, his “telescope fixed upon time.”
The prose is dignified, flowing, accessible, not quite aping Proust but in a similar direction, with a similar spirit. It’s also not at all fawning or overcelebratory or sensationalist — a few times it calls out Marcel for being foolish to suggest that he’d pay for printings of his books, for example, and there’s a bit about Marcel’s penchant for autoerotic manual manipulation while two starved caged rats are released to eviscerate one another. The author gapes aghast along with the reader. A percentage of the text is dedicated to inversion, mostly in terms of source material for his great inverts, but most of it focuses on the budding and flowering of The Search, for example Marcel’s pivotal translations of John Ruskin (downloaded the complete Ruskin ebook for $2 as a result):
“Art divinizes, according to Ruskin, according to Proust. Of course the great difference between them was, as Tadie says, that the ‘Bible lay at the heart of Ruskin’s aesthetics; it was his religious fervor that had guided his religious feelings; Proust would retain the divine without the religion.’ Judaism and Christianity, the enemy creeds of Marcel’s maternal and paternal ancestors, had beautifully canceled out in him. He was what he would remain: a congregation of one.”
Of course it’s also compelling to learn about the provenance of the little phrase in the sonata, or that the source model for Albertine was actually an Alfred, or that the primary model for Charlus is the same as Des Esseintes in Huysman’s Against Nature (Au Rebours).
Also confirms that Swann’s Way and Time Regained were composed simultaneously — one day I intend to read The Search backwards, or at least start with TR and then SW before reading the others. Will most likely read the Tadie bio at one point but not right away. For now, this more than sufficed as an introduction to Proust’s life. Also worth it for descriptions of his late-life appearance as a sort of Jewish Howard Hughes, emaciated, his paper-thin skin blue, his eyes in profile almost Asian, and the bit about his bathetic late-life encounter with James Joyce, not to mention elucidation of the social repercussions/semi-hysterical antisemitism of the Dreyfus Affair.
A beautiful hardback that’s aptly weightier than it should be for a book so slight, with deckled edges, and a sweet Philip Roth blurb on the back.
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.
I also tried to read the novella Rabbit Remembered in the story collection Licks of Love but quit after about 100 pages, thinking that the movement was a little too off the old man’s fastball, but later this summer I’ll re-read Rabbit Run in print (read 20 years ago and listened to this past May) once I get my hands on one of the two old hardcovers my mom says are in her bookshelf.
That’s something too 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).
