Reading one of Updike's Rabbit books. So that it will be listed once in this blog, here is the publishing chronology:
Rabbit, Run (1960)
Rabbit Redux (1971)
Rabbit is Rich (1981)
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
And a short story, portraying the lives of some of the series' characters after Harry Angstrom's death, Rabbit Remembered (2001)
I've often said (in this blog and elsewhere) that the Rabbit series does not contain Updike's best work. The Updike I admire writes novels of ideas, where vivid characters debate theology or other weighty matters in terms often academically informed but never dry.
Roger's Version fits that description, as does Memories of the Ford Administration, the Bech series, and In the Beauty of the Lilies.
The Rabbit series, though, is the story of an uninteresting ex-jock growing up and growing old, having what we are to take as paradigmatic crises -- paradigmatic for working-class white American men of the second half of the 20th century. Not my cup of tea, though not without some of the characteristic Updike flair.
And today is a lazy Christmas eve day, so I won't try to think of something clever to write about instead. .
SPOILER ALERT: I'm not shy about giving away plot twists in what follows.
Angstrom got the nickname "Rabbit," a reference to his small nose, and to his leaping agility, during his basketball-star days in high school, in the late 1940s. When we first meet him in Rabbit Run, those days are already a memory -- it is the mid 1950s and Rabbit is selling kitchen gadgets. He is married, has a two year old son, and his wife (Janice) is heavily pregnant with their second. In the course of that novel, the baby is born, and later dies, drowned in the bathtub in a way that implicates both Harry and Janice, though they escape from legal consequences.
Rabbit Redux begins in 1969: indeed, it begins on the day that Apollo 11 takes off for the moon. The town where these novels are set, Brewer, PA., is an old-line industrial sort of place, and one of its businesses made one of the electronic components crucial to the success of Neil Armstrong et al. The local paper runs a story beginning:
"When Brewerites this Sunday gaze up at the moon, it may look a little bit different to them.
"Why?
"Because there's going to be a little bit of Brewer on it."
Angstrom is the one to set those words in type, because he is employed at a print shop, while Janice works at an auto dealership her father owns.
Janice and Harry go their separate ways in the course of this novel. Janice saves her lover while he is suffering a heart attack and Harry lives for a time with a young woman named Jill, who is closer in age to his and Janice's son (Nelson) than to Harry. The plot eventually kills off Jill in a house fire -- Harry and Janice reconcile.
By the time we reach Rabbit is Rich, the year is 1979. Janice's father is deceased, and the Angstroms have inherited the above mentioned dealership (selling Toyotas). As the title of the novel indicates, that vastly improves their material circumstances, though they still live in Brewer,which by this point represents the decline of US industrial might -- no more bits of Brewer are heading to the moon, because America has closed down the Apollo program.
In Rabbit at Rest, Harry is in retirement in Florida the late 1980s, and the news is full of the destruction of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Nelson Angstrom now runs the Toyota dealership -- and is running it either incompetently or crookedly. During a sunfishing expedition, Rabbit rescues his visiting granddaughter, Rebecca, (Nelson's girl) from drowning. This gives him a sense of redemption from his guilt over the death of his daughter all those decades before, yet the exertion weakens his heart contributing to his own demise.
Showing posts with label John Updike. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Updike. Show all posts
24 December 2011
04 December 2011
Roger's Version
If you have on your personal bucket list the thought that you should read one novel by John Updike before you die, what one should that be?
The Rabbit series is over-rated.
The best single Updike, in my opinion, is Roger's Version.
Amazon's "most helpful" review, by someone calling himself "Outside Looking In," captures a nice moment from the book. The protagonist, Roger Lambert, is thinking about ancient Jews and contemporary Protestants.
"How did those Israelites get their hooks into us so deeply, sticking us with their frightful black Bible and it imprecations while their modern descendants treat the matter as a family joke, filling their own lives with violin music and clear-eyed, Godless science? L'Chaim! Compared with the Jews we protestants do indeed dwell in the valley of death."
In essence, Lambert is a Barthian. His "rascally pet" as he says at one point, is the great Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968). What he most admires in Barth is the utter Otherness of Barth's God, the rejection of even an "analogic" relationship between God's Being and our own being. God is essentially a hidden God.
Updike pits this Barthianism against the seemingly more naive views of a younger man, Dale, who believes that contemporary physics is making God visible, and who believes he can complete that uncovering of God through computer science.
Lambert helps Dale get the grant for his project, but in subtler ways undermines both that project and Dale's faith.
As to the reviewers, David Wisehart thinks the book "both fascinating and frustrating."
David Lodge, writing in The New York Times, speaks of its "richness and viruosity," and says he finished it with "renewed respect for one of the most intelligent and resourceful of contemporary novelists."
Mark Athitakis, writing for Critical Mass, admires the way Updike "smoothly embeds dense scientific discussion into his narrative, anticipating the controversy over Intelligent Design more than a decade before it became a mainstream issue."
Not everyone liked it, though. In The New York Review of Books, Frederick Crews spoke of "the growth of a belligerent, almost hysterical callousness" in Updike's career generally, which he sees as epitomized here.
I don't see what Crews thinks he sees.
The Rabbit series is over-rated.
The best single Updike, in my opinion, is Roger's Version.
Amazon's "most helpful" review, by someone calling himself "Outside Looking In," captures a nice moment from the book. The protagonist, Roger Lambert, is thinking about ancient Jews and contemporary Protestants.
"How did those Israelites get their hooks into us so deeply, sticking us with their frightful black Bible and it imprecations while their modern descendants treat the matter as a family joke, filling their own lives with violin music and clear-eyed, Godless science? L'Chaim! Compared with the Jews we protestants do indeed dwell in the valley of death."
In essence, Lambert is a Barthian. His "rascally pet" as he says at one point, is the great Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968). What he most admires in Barth is the utter Otherness of Barth's God, the rejection of even an "analogic" relationship between God's Being and our own being. God is essentially a hidden God.
Updike pits this Barthianism against the seemingly more naive views of a younger man, Dale, who believes that contemporary physics is making God visible, and who believes he can complete that uncovering of God through computer science.
Lambert helps Dale get the grant for his project, but in subtler ways undermines both that project and Dale's faith.
As to the reviewers, David Wisehart thinks the book "both fascinating and frustrating."
David Lodge, writing in The New York Times, speaks of its "richness and viruosity," and says he finished it with "renewed respect for one of the most intelligent and resourceful of contemporary novelists."
Mark Athitakis, writing for Critical Mass, admires the way Updike "smoothly embeds dense scientific discussion into his narrative, anticipating the controversy over Intelligent Design more than a decade before it became a mainstream issue."
Not everyone liked it, though. In The New York Review of Books, Frederick Crews spoke of "the growth of a belligerent, almost hysterical callousness" in Updike's career generally, which he sees as epitomized here.
I don't see what Crews thinks he sees.
29 January 2009
John Updike, RIP
John Updike, my favorite novelist, left us this week. I've said something in earlier entries here about the reasons for my admiration. Here's an example: on his novel Seek My Face.
For a man so wonderfully prolific, it is astonishingly difficult to find a sloppy sentence from any keyboard of his.
In TOWARD THE END OF TIME, he writes a sentence that plays with the "first robin of spring" cliche in a manner I find ... well ... intrepid.
"Yesterday," he writes, in the voice of his protagonist, "I spotted my first robin, strutting along the driveway's gravel shoulder in his familiar dusky uniform, gawkily startled into flight by my approach: a stuffy bird, faintly pompous in its portly movements, spoiled by too many songs and poems unaccountably devoted to him."
Now THERE's a man with a way with a cliche! At first you think, "oooh no, first robin of spring! This is going to be like one of those posed pictures of some grinning tourist pretending to hold up the leaning tower of Pisa."
But he is soon taking the picture from an unexpected angle. The robin is in a very particular place, the driveway's gravel shoulder. This isn't nature description, it is a sample of one of the pieces of natue that make it into the regulated spaces of suburbia. Nothing about the "redness" (which never seemed to me properly red) of the robin's breast. Rather, we're reminded of the duskiness of the overall uniform, the creature's propensity for startled gawkiness, etc.
Then we're given some gently unstressed alliteration with the letter "p": "pompous ... portly ... spoiled ... poems" on the way of a shocking bit of anthropomorphism.
Of course we don't believe that the robin is aware of his fame in the cliched songs and poems, but we see the free associations going on in the head of the protagonist to that effect, and to some extent we are drawn to share in them.
Cheers, then, to Updike. I'll miss him.
For a man so wonderfully prolific, it is astonishingly difficult to find a sloppy sentence from any keyboard of his.
In TOWARD THE END OF TIME, he writes a sentence that plays with the "first robin of spring" cliche in a manner I find ... well ... intrepid.
"Yesterday," he writes, in the voice of his protagonist, "I spotted my first robin, strutting along the driveway's gravel shoulder in his familiar dusky uniform, gawkily startled into flight by my approach: a stuffy bird, faintly pompous in its portly movements, spoiled by too many songs and poems unaccountably devoted to him."
Now THERE's a man with a way with a cliche! At first you think, "oooh no, first robin of spring! This is going to be like one of those posed pictures of some grinning tourist pretending to hold up the leaning tower of Pisa."
But he is soon taking the picture from an unexpected angle. The robin is in a very particular place, the driveway's gravel shoulder. This isn't nature description, it is a sample of one of the pieces of natue that make it into the regulated spaces of suburbia. Nothing about the "redness" (which never seemed to me properly red) of the robin's breast. Rather, we're reminded of the duskiness of the overall uniform, the creature's propensity for startled gawkiness, etc.
Then we're given some gently unstressed alliteration with the letter "p": "pompous ... portly ... spoiled ... poems" on the way of a shocking bit of anthropomorphism.
Of course we don't believe that the robin is aware of his fame in the cliched songs and poems, but we see the free associations going on in the head of the protagonist to that effect, and to some extent we are drawn to share in them.
Cheers, then, to Updike. I'll miss him.
09 November 2008
A passage from Updike
I'm leafing today for no good reason through the Updike novel SEEK MY FACE (2002). The action of the novel consists entirely of a day-long interview. The only two characters, then, in the novel's present tense are an elderly artist, Hope, and a young reporter.
In this passage, about one-quarter of the way into the book, Hope is showing Kathryn her studio.
"Photographs of herself with others in other times goingback to Ardmore in the 'twenties, framed certificates of graduation and commendation ... the hideous trophies of crystal and painted metal one gets as tokens of recognition and public gratitude (the most ungainly of them handed to her sheepishly by the first President Bush, a tall and boyish Connecticut gent apparently as pleasantly surprised to find himself in the White House as she was; at lunch afterward, seated beside her, he pointed out for Hope to admire the daily flowers, the elegantly clad Marine guards, the splendidly imposing punctilio which momentarily surrounded them, two proper children of the fading Protestant hegemony): these souvenirs, still in the hasty order of an afternoon's arranging when the studio was newly built, attract Kathryn's attention less than Hope exected. Only the old photographs tempt the interloper to move closer, her neck craned forward in that unbecoming way: 'How pretty you were.'"
I love that. But in my lazy-Sunday fashion, I won't bother enumerating why.
In this passage, about one-quarter of the way into the book, Hope is showing Kathryn her studio.
"Photographs of herself with others in other times goingback to Ardmore in the 'twenties, framed certificates of graduation and commendation ... the hideous trophies of crystal and painted metal one gets as tokens of recognition and public gratitude (the most ungainly of them handed to her sheepishly by the first President Bush, a tall and boyish Connecticut gent apparently as pleasantly surprised to find himself in the White House as she was; at lunch afterward, seated beside her, he pointed out for Hope to admire the daily flowers, the elegantly clad Marine guards, the splendidly imposing punctilio which momentarily surrounded them, two proper children of the fading Protestant hegemony): these souvenirs, still in the hasty order of an afternoon's arranging when the studio was newly built, attract Kathryn's attention less than Hope exected. Only the old photographs tempt the interloper to move closer, her neck craned forward in that unbecoming way: 'How pretty you were.'"
I love that. But in my lazy-Sunday fashion, I won't bother enumerating why.
26 July 2007
John Updike
Just fifteen entries ago, July 11, I discussed a passage from a book of Updike's SEEK MY FACE. That book was a fictionalization of the history of modernist art.
Today, I'd like to bring another of Updike's recent novels to your attention. This is VILLAGES (2004). Again, it is on one level a fictionalization of some recent history -- in this case, the development of computing. The protagonist, Owen McKenzie, grew up in rural Pennsylvania through the era of the Second World War, studied electrical engineering at MIT, and co-founded a computer-servicing firm in the pre-Apollo era.
At the suggestion of his partner, Ed Mervine, the two men set up shop in rural Connecticut -- to the north and west of New Haven. They each make a modest fortune before the style of computer off of which they thrive becomes obsolete as Silicon Valley, California, rises to dominance.
That's the narrative arc. But in this novel, as in SEEK MY FACE, Updike is also concerned with the visual arts, and with contrasting ideas about them. He sets one scene in the living room of a neighboring couple in that Connecticut village -- the husband of that couple is an illustrator for the mass-market magazines -- framed samples of his work from POST and COLLIER's and REDBOOK grace the "cracked plaster walls" of the Morrissey home. But we've arrived at 1968, and the magazine world is shifting away from the sort of work Ian Morrissey has to offer -- nonfiction outsells fiction, and nonfiction is illustrated by photographers.
Ian is understandably cranky about this, and he blames computer nerds like Owen for the disappearance of his market. This spirited tirade is part of the result:
"But you, O. dear boy, you know better. You have a soul, or had one once. Let me put it this way -- you know something's missing, and still you've signed up, a good soldier for Moloch. Whatever you call it. Industry. The defense establishment. Defense, death, pollution, and mass-produced crap for the crappy masses."
I'll give only a bit of Owen's reply, for the flavor of the exchange.
"Some would say, incidentally, that the women's magazines you do your illustrations for are good soldiers for Moloch, selling cosmetics and tampons and dishwashers and sexy underwear and whatever else women can be persuaded they want. It's the Devil's bargain, Ian -- medicine and electricity and rocket science in exchange for an empty Heaven."
It's a perfect 1968 conversation. C.P. Snow's expression for the rift between the humanities and the sciences, "the two cultures," -- first coined by Snow in 1959 -- had taken this long to become common coin, and such self-conscious bantering of representatives of the two might I imagine have been heard in such a living room. Updike takes the ideas of his characters seriously, yet all the time they remain characters, defined by time place and plot -- not mouthpieces.
Today, I'd like to bring another of Updike's recent novels to your attention. This is VILLAGES (2004). Again, it is on one level a fictionalization of some recent history -- in this case, the development of computing. The protagonist, Owen McKenzie, grew up in rural Pennsylvania through the era of the Second World War, studied electrical engineering at MIT, and co-founded a computer-servicing firm in the pre-Apollo era.
At the suggestion of his partner, Ed Mervine, the two men set up shop in rural Connecticut -- to the north and west of New Haven. They each make a modest fortune before the style of computer off of which they thrive becomes obsolete as Silicon Valley, California, rises to dominance.
That's the narrative arc. But in this novel, as in SEEK MY FACE, Updike is also concerned with the visual arts, and with contrasting ideas about them. He sets one scene in the living room of a neighboring couple in that Connecticut village -- the husband of that couple is an illustrator for the mass-market magazines -- framed samples of his work from POST and COLLIER's and REDBOOK grace the "cracked plaster walls" of the Morrissey home. But we've arrived at 1968, and the magazine world is shifting away from the sort of work Ian Morrissey has to offer -- nonfiction outsells fiction, and nonfiction is illustrated by photographers.
Ian is understandably cranky about this, and he blames computer nerds like Owen for the disappearance of his market. This spirited tirade is part of the result:
"But you, O. dear boy, you know better. You have a soul, or had one once. Let me put it this way -- you know something's missing, and still you've signed up, a good soldier for Moloch. Whatever you call it. Industry. The defense establishment. Defense, death, pollution, and mass-produced crap for the crappy masses."
I'll give only a bit of Owen's reply, for the flavor of the exchange.
"Some would say, incidentally, that the women's magazines you do your illustrations for are good soldiers for Moloch, selling cosmetics and tampons and dishwashers and sexy underwear and whatever else women can be persuaded they want. It's the Devil's bargain, Ian -- medicine and electricity and rocket science in exchange for an empty Heaven."
It's a perfect 1968 conversation. C.P. Snow's expression for the rift between the humanities and the sciences, "the two cultures," -- first coined by Snow in 1959 -- had taken this long to become common coin, and such self-conscious bantering of representatives of the two might I imagine have been heard in such a living room. Updike takes the ideas of his characters seriously, yet all the time they remain characters, defined by time place and plot -- not mouthpieces.
11 July 2007
"The Canvas Enlists the Viewer"
I was looking again, recently, at John Updike's 2002 novelization of the history of modernist painting, SEEK MY FACE.
One of the minor characters in John Updike's story is known, in the novel, as Bernie Nova. I suspect that Bernie must be a slight fictionalization of some real painter or intellectual or both, but I don't know enough of the relevant history to guess who.
Bernie is a friend of Zack, who is clearly based on Jackson Pollack. One day in the 1940s -- the war was still on, though these young men were oblivious to it -- Bernie and Zack and others of their crowd (including one Roger) argue about the future of painting in a diner, sitting in the dark leatherette booths. This gives Updike his chance to unload Bernie's big theory on us.
Bernie snaps at Roger, "Your Surrealist friends are French playboys, playing with Freud, who was playful enough. Who says that being asleep is more profound than being awake? Dreams are a muddle -- brain-slime. What matters is not the psyche but metaphysics. Penetration into the world mystery; for this the painter's mind should be as pure as the scientist's and the philosopher's."
A little later in the conversation, Bernie again: "The canvas enlists the viewer in sympathetic participation with the artist's thought. It expresses the mind foremost, and whatever is still sensuous is secondary, an incidental accident. Truth before pleasure."
--------------
So for the question: did anybody in the US in the era depicted talk like that about art? Was he part of a social circle around Pollack? or part of the post-war development of abstract expressionism?
One of the minor characters in John Updike's story is known, in the novel, as Bernie Nova. I suspect that Bernie must be a slight fictionalization of some real painter or intellectual or both, but I don't know enough of the relevant history to guess who.
Bernie is a friend of Zack, who is clearly based on Jackson Pollack. One day in the 1940s -- the war was still on, though these young men were oblivious to it -- Bernie and Zack and others of their crowd (including one Roger) argue about the future of painting in a diner, sitting in the dark leatherette booths. This gives Updike his chance to unload Bernie's big theory on us.
Bernie snaps at Roger, "Your Surrealist friends are French playboys, playing with Freud, who was playful enough. Who says that being asleep is more profound than being awake? Dreams are a muddle -- brain-slime. What matters is not the psyche but metaphysics. Penetration into the world mystery; for this the painter's mind should be as pure as the scientist's and the philosopher's."
A little later in the conversation, Bernie again: "The canvas enlists the viewer in sympathetic participation with the artist's thought. It expresses the mind foremost, and whatever is still sensuous is secondary, an incidental accident. Truth before pleasure."
--------------
So for the question: did anybody in the US in the era depicted talk like that about art? Was he part of a social circle around Pollack? or part of the post-war development of abstract expressionism?
29 March 2007
Updike's "Terrorist" -- Should I Read It?
I'm a great admirer of John Updike. I won't say I've read everything he's written -- that would be an enormous task, leaving little room for anything else. I have, though, read and admired Roger's Version, S., A Month of Sundays, The Beauty of the Lilies, Couples ... you get the picture.
The "Rabbit" series is, I think, over-rated. Update is at his best when his characters are engaged with ideas. He can give us a picture of the academic/intellectual worlds without making us choke on the chalkdust.
Both Roger's Version and S. are replete with religious/theological debates, so it might have seemed logical, after 9/11, for Updike to take on the question of jihadism, both at the intellectual and at the all-too-practical levels.
That is, at any rate, what "Terrorist" tries to do. So I'm told. I've put off reading it, though, not just because the subject matter still seems a bit too close to home but because so many of the reviews were so scathing.
Should I take the plunge? Have any of my faithful readers done so?
By the way: the cover design is striking. It takes a moment to adjust to what you're seeing, then mentally flip the image around, and realize that that way, it makes perfect sense. See for yourself what I mean.
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