I don’t have an essay in the pretty excellent essay collection MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction (FSG, 2014) but in 2008, four years after I left NYC, two years after I graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with an MFA in fiction, I drank some icy white wine and talked on the phone with a guy I knew a little bit from when I’d lived in NYC before Iowa. He was working on an interview-based article for Vice about the MFA and workshops. We talked for an hour, I got loose and ranted, and he asked questions and sounded like he was listening or at least was still on the line whenever I paused. In exchange for semi-drunkenly rambling about Iowa for an hour, he sent me an ARC of 2666, a signed copy of my former teacher’s latest novel (Home), and the new Leonard Michaels collection. 2666 blew my doors off and I was psyched for the interview to show up in Vice, but then it never seemed to come out. Huh. Too bad. I forgot about it.
Five years later I received an e-mail from an editor at n + 1 saying they’re putting thisMFA vs NYC collection together and they’d like to use some quotations (~two tweets worth) from me from the interview, which Vice apparently published at some point, and then months later the friendly people at n + 1 sent an ARC of the book, which I found to be an enjoyable, stimulating, at times pleasurably enervating trip down MFA/NYC lane.
The collection acknowledges of course what many suspect — some writers in the world might not have MFAs and not live in NYC, or might even have MFAs and not live in NYC and yet they still somehow manage to write and publish. But as a former resident of Brooklyn (specifically, Greenpoint about a decade before “Girls,” a few miles north of what Chad Harbach deems the NYC where NYC novelists live: “a small area of west-central Brooklyn bounded by DUMBO and Prospect Heights”) who moved to NYC to meet some writers and, as in an O. Henry story (a refrain twice repeated in MFA vs NYC), immediately wound up dating a doozy of a young writer (no MFA, occasionally visiting NYC from her distant homeland, although she lives there now) and meeting some of her writer friends who I’d heard about more than I’d read, and then a little later on dating another young writer from NYC who despised the city and lived in Iowa City after attending the Workshop, which I eventually wound up attending, participating in the final complete workshop taught by Frank Conroy (his portrait in this is a good one but doesn’t mention how he evoked “magic” and repeated phrases like “respect the experiment” and “protect the edge” when evaluating unconventional work like mine), this book seemed more or less written for me. But there’s enough in here to hold anyone’s attention, probably, as long as you’re interested in a tour of fiction writing sausage factories in this country.
The essays that present NYC as a professional institution — essays by agents and publicists particularly — were illuminating. An excellent agent says he only reads about six novels a year, other than all those he’s evaluating and selling for work. What are the chances therefore that one of these books is Joseph and His Brothers or Extinction, books that might obliterate a market-based perspective of what’s good? He also probably doesn’t read canonically, as DFW and Elif Bautman and others assume that writers in MFA programs don’t do either, which has some merit but isn’t totally true, in my experience.
A NYC blogger writer rarely mentions reading anything at all although she does go on about her internet addiction and her cat’s health issues (and the resulting costs) at length. I particularly liked the transparency in a few essays about finances — making a living writing ain’t easy, apparently.
In general, there’s a sense that everyone in NYC is trying to survive the city’s exaggerated $$$ pressures — and it’s possible that such pressure turns rocks into gems.
I’ve always argued that there’s no reason for the literary industry to remain in NYC since NYC undermines its interests. No one buys hard covers because they’re too expensive but need to be so costly to cover the publisher’s rent. The whole enterprise should really move to rural Pennsylvania or maybe even Iowa City if it wants to prevail and not simply survive.
On the MFA side of things, I most agree with George Saunders:
“You are not going to be doing this workshop crap forever. You are doing it to get a little baptism by fire, purge yourself of certain habits (of sloth, of under-revision, of the sin of thinking you’d made a thing clear when you haven’t) and then you are going to run away from the whole approach like your pants are on fire, and not look back, but return to that sacred land where your writing is private and you don’t have to defend it or explain it one bit.”
Post-NYC and post-MFA, that’s where I stand in this “argument.” At some point, wherever you are, you have to find a way to make enough money to write and read without worrying all the time about distractions.
No longer all that young and certainly not all that wealthy, NYC seems to me too expensive and offers too many obvious distractions for a writer (unless young or wealthy).
Teaching can distract from reading and writing, but you can bring your passion to play and infect young minds so they in turn buy books you and your friends publish. That’s one of the best points in the book, at the end of Harbach’s titular essay: the common ambition and only hope of all writers will be “to make writers of us all.”
All essays in here are worthwhile — some may stand out for you more than others. I was partial to contributions by the editor, Saunders, Eli S. Evans, Keith Gessen, the literary agent Jim Rutman, the one by the publicist in part about Prep, and the one about Gordon Lish. (The DFW essay I’d read before and think it’s so-so for him.)
There’s a good academic/personal mix, although I found the more academic essays a little wonky and maybe even sometimes wrong. Iowa at least doesn’t teach about itself and adverbs.
John Barth in one of his “Fridays” books says somewhere something like “not even at Iowa can you major in Towering Literary Artistry.” For the record, at Iowa I took a seminar with Edward Carey, author of Observatory Mansions and Alva & Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City — it was about the use of art in lit. We read Sebald, Bruno Schulz, Chris Ware, Pullmann, Gulliver’s Travels. He jumped up and down about making our stuff WEIRDER. A great class, so up my alley, and so unlike what people think Iowa is. Kevin Brockmeier taught there. Jim Crace visited for two weeks. Ben Marcus was in the running to replace Frank Conroy as director. There’s a long-standing Cheever/Yates-lovin’ conservative streak that runs through it, or at least there was, but then there’s Marilynne Robinson’s not particularly conventional “consciousness” approach and everyone who takes Ethan Canin winds up writing a “deep POV” story. In general, I get a little ornery when people reduce the varied work of 25 writers there each year to “Iowa fiction” or say the program flattens fiction. It’s just not really true, or wasn’t true of my time there at least.
But I suppose I should also at this point complexify the duality emphasized by the subtitle (THE Two Cultures of American Fiction) as THE only two cultures worth discussing. To represent the reality of the “cultures” in play, it seems like it would make sense to introduce another acronym into the mix, especially now, four years after publication, when nothing else more pressing is at stake in the world.
To yin the yang of the reductive MFA/NYC duality, how about we add the acronym FTE, for “full-time employee,” AKA writers with non-academic jobs living somewhere other than NYC?
In the year after grad school when I taught fiction and lit and non-fiction writing at Temple as an adjunct for a year, I found I could always procrastinate and keep myself from writing by preparing more for classes. I was generally too focused on writing, too extended in that direction, talking with students about my primary interest and trying to infect them with enthusiasm for something that flagged for me at the time because my passion had become my employment. But more so, making something like $7K a semester plus whatever freelance editing I managed to find, I was always worried about money and had to take on some credit card debt to make ends meet.
I’ve since learned that having set hours and consistent pay stabilizes my schedule and psyche. Working as a full-time salaried editor in an office setting, generally applying advanced ninja editorial skillz, works for me. In particular, I spend my time out of work reading whatever I want, not the books and stories I’ve assigned or student work. In the first months after I re-entered the corporate editorial world, I remember saying that the great pleasure of having a non-academic editorial job was that I could read the greatest writing ever in the history of the world. I could only expose myself to truth and beauty and bright-shining prose! No more crappy stories written in an hour by stoned students!
Many years later, I miss the classroom and organizing my ideas about fiction, miss the learning and laughing, but not enough to think about trying to teach again. At least not until I’m in my sixties/seventies and have lived, read, and written enough to feel like I have something truly worthwhile to relay to students.
Anyway, if you’re an FTE somewhere other than NYC and don’t have an MFA yet wonder what such people think, this is an invaluable collection. If you’re an MFA/NYC type already, you can’t help but gaze into the cracked mirror of this collection and struggle a bit to put the pieces (of your history, your thoughts, where you stand on everything) back together again.
Thinking somewhat about this stuff is valuable, sure, no matter where you are these days. But in the end you retreat to that sacred little space where you make your true living when you read and write in peace.
If you haven’t read Stefan Zweig, you may be familiar with a semblance of his spirit as seen in Wes Anderson’s 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel, which features a concierge (Ralph Fiennes) who looks somewhat like Zweig himself. You can review the plot summary here, and in this interview you can read how Anderson remixed elements he’d read in Zweig’s writing into a feature film. Of course Wes Anderson doesn’t talk about how he wesandersonified everything and reduced the Nazis to defanged, bumbling “ZZs” (named for the lightning bolts on SS labels). And he certainly doesn’t mention (and probably doesn’t even know!) that I found everything in general perfectly enjoyable although a little too stylized, whimsical, and twee for my tastes. A friend had gone to see it on consecutive days and talked it up too much to me, so instead of encountering a masterpiece it seemed something like a WWII-era mitteleuropa cartoon, which again was a perfectly fine way to spend an afternoon four years ago but a bit of a let down due to high expectations.
Zweig’s writing has never really disappointed, plus this is about the handful of Zweig books I’ve read so far, not a movie I’ll probably never watch again (2024 note: streamed it semi-recently and liked it a good deal, way more than Asteroid City, if not as much as Isle of Dogs, which child demanded so often a few years ago we ultimately acquired on DVD). As you’ll see in the little “book reviews” below, my #1 response to reading Zweig always seems to be read more Zweig. His prose in translation always maintains a graceful, profluent, sophisticated, accessible intelligence. It’s easy to see how his books sold millions before they were banned by the Nazis.
Generally, Zweig is an ambassador for a by-gone belief in the supremity of humanity, best expressed not through political or religious activities but in works of art. I still haven’t read his stories (I own the big orange collection), many of his novels, biographies, and mini-histories, or Three Lives, a biography about him. But I look forward to getting to all of it soon-ish and maybe posting about it here when I do.
I imagine Stefan Zweig sitting down next to me while traveling long distance alone by train (first class). A dapper man in a gray three-piece suit, he excuses himself and, with a gentle, weary smile, relays a story told to him the last time he traveled this route in a charming (yet never preening), forward-flowing (yet patient), good-natured (yet never silly/goofy) manner that nevertheless conveys some serious shit that occurred long ago and far away, sure, but still retains its relevance and urgency when considered in terms of the rise of fascism in the United States today.
Also, I’m saddened to learn (via Twitter, just as I went to announce this post) that Stefan Zweig’s primary translator Anthea Bell died today (October 18, 2018). I very much hope the occasion of working on this and posting it had nothing to do with her health. In all seriousness, she’s a translator I’ve known of for years and always looked forward to reading.
Also, 2024 update: streamed/re-watched “The Grand Budapest Hotel” recently and liked it quite a lot. Good work, Wes.
A flowing, engaging, gripping, hefty, accessible, masterful novella. Effortless/seamless old-timey Austrian structure: a narrator tells a story that includes someone’s third-person account about one major character and a longish first-person account by another major character. The two chess players are well drawn and absolutely differentiated: one’s a stoic idiot-savant peasant, the other’s an anxious intellectual from a highly regarded Viennese family. Really worth spending the hour or so it takes to read.
Directly addresses Nazi interrogation tactics and oppression but I’d say it’s maybe more about the ability of the mind to free one’s ass but also potentially become a sort of prison in itself. The imagination can imbue a wooden grid and wooden statues with so much serious rational significance that people devote their lives to chess and can ideally provide a refuge against oppression, whether as obvious as Nazi occupation or as subtle as daily boredom and/or a sense of the nothingness of existence etc. But then it can also operate in overdrive, go too far, feed on itself, become a sickness, an arrogance, a feverish instability that fails to recognize what’s going on in reality. I suppose this could be extrapolated to critique National Socialism, too — something about rational reclamation of a country’s spirit taken to sickly irrational extreme? Or maybe it has to do with the war-damaged artistic imagination? Regardless, looks like I need to read a lot more Zweig.
I’d been having trouble settling into a string of novels, too impatient and restless and dissatisfied even with Tolstoy’s Resurrection, zoning out, not looking forward to reading at all. Finally I said screw it and grabbed Zweig’s memoir. By the time I’d made it through his preface it was like he’d administered a heaping dose of just what I need into my unsettled reading organ. I really did feel immediately healed, wanting nothing other than to settle down with Zweig’s flowing sentences, his self-effacing charm, his belief in the primacy of art as protection for humanity.
For a memoir covering his days of early education to 1939, a few years before his suicide in Brazil, he so rarely talks about himself or his family — there’s a mention of trying to apply for a license to marry his second wife in England right as England declares war on Germany, but no mention of a first wife. No mention of kids. Hardly a mention of his parents, other than a bit at the beginning and a bit at the end about his mother. This isn’t a personal memoir at all, really, but a cultural/artistic one. Zero gossip, even if he namedrops Rilke, Rodin, Gide, Joyce, Freud, Richard Strauss, Romain Rolland (who he considers the best of the best and who now seems wildly underread).
Zweig’s a little like a Zelig character, except Zweig at the time is as famous as those he’s with. The portraits of Rodin (great artists are always the kindest, he says — he also shows Rodin go into such an OCD trance while working on a sculpture that he forgets young Zweig is even in the room) and the stiff, bitter polylinguist James Joyce during WWI in Zurich as he’s working on Ulysses are worth the price of admission.
But more so it’s the gravitas, the horrorshow, the heft, the drastic real-life poignancy of the loss of old European security. Forever everyone has remarked — most recently, the poet known by the nickname Biggie — that things done changed, but the change experienced by Zweig, Vienna, and Europe in general from the 1890s to 1939 is drastic. Zweig’s storytelling skills make it all seem like a consistent forward flow into the abyss — the days of security and complacency and the primacy of art, lit, music, and theater, give way to enthusiasm for the first World War (a completely unnecessary consequence of international saber-rattling/posturing) to post-war horrors, poverty, runaway inflation, to a period of experimentation and youthful reflowering coinciding with a rage for order that leads to protofascist glimmerings, brownshirts, the rise of the secretly well-funded National Socialists, political deceit, and crimes against humanity.
The Nazis are the antithesis of Zweig’s apolitical pan-European humanism. He’s able to write a letter to his number one fan in Italy (Mussolini) to get someone’s sentence lightened, but he can’t change history once it’s goosestepping toward Hades. He retreats, goes into exile, and writes biographies subtly critiquing the contemporary political situation. He works with Strauss who works with the Nazis — and Hitler himself even lets an opera with a libretto written by the Jew Zweig be performed. (It rarely comes up, but Zweig is a totally assimilated Viennese Jew.) He didn’t collaborate with the Nazis so much as try to preserve the primacy of art when faced with deathheads.
It’s the sort of book that makes you aware of the sweep of history we’ve lived through — the comparatively quiet yet totally disruptive technological revolution of the past 17 years or so, the artistic and cultural plate tectonics that slowly but surely rearrange the continents over time. I read this purposefully before reading The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig and I’m glad I did. I look forward to seeing echoes of everything covered in this memoir in his fiction, and I’ll also probably get to a biography about him to learn a bit about his personal life.
Zweig doesn’t have the reputation of Mann and Musil or Proust or those early 20th century uberdogs, and that’s most likely because he’s a centrist who’s so very balanced aesthetically and intellectually. Also, unlike Mann and Musil, his books were suppressed and/or burned and therefore unread in Germany for a while there. His writing and thinking are so accessible and he sold millions of copies as a result but he never dumbs things down. The few pages where he talks about his writing process were illuminating: he apparently wrote 800 pages and whittled them to the 200 necessary pages, always interested in pace, since he identified himself as a restless reader.
Anyway, can’t recommend this one more highly.
(Note: I’ve recommended this directly to two people, and both really disliked it. One was the bartender at a bar I used to go to in South Philly who had said he was really into WWII-related books, and the other was my wife more recently who thought it was weak and quit on it right quick. <<Shruggies!>>)
The take-home message is read everything Zweig ever wrote. Jeez. Such flowing, insightful, lucid prose, like a faucet streaming graceful intelligence across and down the pages. A good book for melancholic seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness.
Hölderlin the ethereal poet, Kleist the restless exaggerator, Nietzsche the inspired light. Totally compelling across the board biographical essays on creative genius and madness. Goethe comes up all the time as a sort of rational gubernatorial foil to these inspired/possessed folks. Like all psych portraiture, the fun part is self-IDing shared traits. In each case, Zweig writes about them because they’re off-the-chart extremes — and again (I’m thinking of Bernhard’s “art of exaggeration” in Extinction) it’s exaggeration that always seems so essential for powerful creation, as long as it’s hyper-truthful. More true than truth.
Zweig’s portraits are exaggerated most likely too — these guys come off as legends, mystics, saints, proto tragic rock stars. But never did I think he was overdoing it, or maybe every once in a while when talking about Nietzsche. But again the thing I’ll most remember about this one is that it will lead me to read all of Zweig (particularly his biographies) and Kleist and most of Nietzsche. Hölderlin doesn’t interest me too much, although I may have enjoyed his section the most.
Anyway, a great literary biography — recommended to anyone frazzled by trying to write etc. Interesting that for so many writers I know it’s not a spiritual struggle so much as a struggle for a shred of success, struggles regarding whether or not to self-promote, self-publish, sell-out and write something that (as Bill Hicks says) sucks Satan’s cock — it’s refreshing therefore to read about these writers’ old-fashioned struggles with art and inspiration.
Said something like oh man that’s awesome when I finished (owing more to the final half-page chapter than the entire novella) but it also sometimes felt melodramatic, sensationalist, hysterical — a review I read calls Zweig a watered-down Proust or Stendhal but that doesn’t hold water for me since the passionate tilt-a-whirl overwrought feints and parries in the French biggies are pronounced and dramatized to the extreme whereas here they’re glossed over by Zweig’s essayistic instinct, his graceful, flowing summary.
I can’t think of another novella from 1927 in which the narrator admits that he’s essentially in love with the mind of a male teacher — and that toward the end so explicitly treats of early 1900s gay life in Berlin, particularly derision, oppression, blackmail, unsavory clandestine spasms in alleys etc. The love triangle among wife of professor, charismatic professor, and hot young passionate student narrator isn’t fleshed out enough? Swimming scenes seemed muted, even when a slip of tit made its PG-13 appearance. But the prose soars when it’s totally platonic and the professor dictates his long repressed work on Shakespeare to the narrator.
Zweig, becoming a great favorite, excels when describing ecstatic intellectual paroxysms. But he’s becoming a favorite more so for perfectly phrased insight. Although in many ways unlike Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless, which predates this by ~21 years, I think it’s safe to associate them thanks to the shared academic setting, “Confusion” in the title, pre-Nazi era, and man-on-man action/passion.
Another flowing, perfectly phrased, psychologically and historically charged, emotionally moving novella by Zweig, this time about life before, during, and after WWI as Nazi shadows gather. About thwarted desire, great physical distance followed by insurmountable temporal distance, lives interrupted by war, the pleasures of memory over the anxieties of the present, especially when the present involves goose-stepping rows of uniformed men parading through a quiet college town, Heidelberg, which I’ve visited and could imagine as clearly as Zweig’s prose portrayed the path to the castle and the view of the river valley.
Looks like I’ll have to read everything available in English by him. Words to describe his prose are watery, liquidy, silken, flowing, light-handed, almost always sliding ahead as a result of expectations in a sentence loaded toward its start. But also the language disappears and conveys real insight and atmosphere and psychological and emotional urgency and moral sense.
Great stuff, Stefan — too bad you snuffed yourself at 60! This edition sandwiches the long story with two excellent little biographical essays. Might read the story again since it’s formally exemplary, I’d say. Seems so simple and smooth and subtle without ever being elusive or arch or clever. Honest, respectful, deeply imagined urgency.
Zweig is the best. Secular humanism uber alles! Great to return to him and think the same general thought: I need to read everything he’s written, particularly these short biographies. This is a step in that direction. It’s really a pretty slight but insightful/enjoyable rundown of Montaigne’s life, paralleled by Zweig’s own. Zweig wrote this in Brazil shortly before he killed himself with his second wife, exiled from the irretrievably ruined European culture he thrived in and treated like his true religion.
I haven’t read Montaigne, though I’ve tried and will surely try again soon. Interesting bits: he flees the plague that kills half of Bordeaux’s 34K population, he essentially self-publishes his essays, he travels for nearly two years at age 48 to get away from all the demands of family and land ownership and while away is named mayor without running for office, he essentially locks himself in a tower with a view of his inherited estate and writes, trying to get as close as possible to the core of his life (I’ve used that phrase before writing about Knausgaard) yet he doesn’t consider himself a writer. His mother comes from a Spanish Jewish family, yet he doesn’t talk about her at all. As a child his father immersed him in Latin to such a degree (all caregivers and teachers only spoke it) that it was his true first language.
But the real power of this, what sustains it through its 115 pages (first 35 pages is an introduction) is the parallel Zweig draws right away between his time (the unimaginable brutalities of the Nazi rise and WWII) and Montaigne’s time, which offered sufficient horrific slaughter, with a sort of civil war descending into what Zweig calls (deploying a typically perfect Zweig-type phrase) “a vortex of pandemonium,” totally lawless criminality run rampant etc. During such a time, how do you protect yourself from contracting some terrible infection of the soul? Montaigne and Zweig inculcate themselves, fighting the battle the only way they really can: internally, waging a sort of soul battle against the incursions of immorality run amok.
But the really interesting thing was to read the opening as Zweig parallels his own time with Montaigne’s time, thinking all the time of course about our own time, its particular nastiness — really bad, so bad, bad! Thankfully little books like this, beautifully published by Pushkin Press (French flaps, textured covers, thick bright pages), disperse readers across centuries of struggles, most of which seem far worse than anything we face now, which is good to keep in mind since, despite the general gist of protecting oneself from the forces of idiocy and evil all around, these guys aren’t exactly role models — it’s probably not a good idea for everyone to hide away in a tower writing essays about what they know or to light out for South America and ultimately end themselves before seeing the resolution of an era’s nasty issues. But still totally worth the few hours reading and a reminder that things have always been simultaneously good and bad, undulating for the most part between either extreme for all time.
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).
