The Rabbit books

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.

Random Literary Quotation

"A Sunday repose prevailed the whole moribund town, peaceful, profound. A certain pleasing numbness, a sense of grateful enervation exhaled from the scorching plaster. There was no movement, no sound of human business. The faint hum of the insect, the intermittent murmur of the guitar, the mellow complainings of the pigeons, the prolonged purr of the white cat, the contented clucking of the hens--all these noises mingled together to form a faint, drowsy bourdon, prolonged, stupefying, suggestive of an infinite quiet, of a calm, complacent life, centuries old, lapsing gradually to its end under the gorgeous loneliness of a cloudless, pale blue sky and the steady fire of an interminable sun."

- Frank Norris, The Octopus

That's a nice bit of stage setting.

I especially like the word "bourdon," for a low-pitched tone, a word that seems to have dropped out of use since Norris' day.  I also love the unexpected modifiers, "grateful enervation," "mellow complainings," "infinite quiet."  The generation of writers after Norris became very reflectively anti-adjective, but here one sees there is nothing disreputable about that form of speech.

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.

A lunch, and Anne Hutchinson

A friend and I had lunch this Friday with an author's group in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

Why? Well ... as I mentioned in this August entry I have a way-too-unwieldy manuscript sitting around that is meant to be a novel. In recent weeks I've formulated a plan to get the ms into publishable shape, by trimming and re-writing it in the YA model.

The lunch meeting's authors involved those with YA experience and success, and I was happy to hear from them. I've since ordered three of their books.

One of the authors there was Jeannine Atkins, the author of Anne Hutchinson's Way.

I'm especially curious to see how that one is written. It involves I have to expect not just the conveyance of events, an adventuresome narrative, but the conveyance of the ideas. What the events were all about to the participants.

Anne Hutchinson was exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for her antinomian theological opinions.

Booklist says, "Atkins is able to take the issue of religious freedom and make it personal ... this offers something solid for children, especially those studying early American history."

Fragrant Harbour: The movie script

I blogged about a John Lanchester novel, in my Sept. 25 entry here.

Or I didn't. I set out that day to blog about the novel, but ended up in my errant stream-of-consciousness way talking merely about a single proverb that the novel invokes.

Can I say anything more generally about the book. Well, although I admired much in it, I couldn't help but wonder as I was reading how, if at all, it could ever be turned into a screenplay. It seems to have too much disparate material for that.

No author has a duty to produce a movie-adaptable novel, of course. This was simply the path my thoughts followed.

I can imagine myself angling for the screenwriter's job (hey, work with me here). Then reading the book and becoming dismayed at the task of reducing it to two hours -- three at most -- of filmable material. Ah, but it's time to get on the phone to the studio exec and make my pitch.

"Yes, JB, of course I think we can do it. Get this. There's a woman in a newsroom. No, not in Hong Kong. She starts off working for a small daily in a seaside resort town in England. She wants to make it big, our gal. She's ambitious. Has her eye on the London papers, and covering the biggest stories there.

"Fortunately for her, the Tory Party [pause as JB talks] those are the Conservatives ... the party holds a convention in her resort town. She meets a group of members of Parliament and goes out drinking with them.

"The next morning, she's in the newsroom, all hung over, but struggling to meet a deadline on a story about some missing kid. One of the guys she'd been drinking with approaches her, looking all shame-faced.

"At first she asks herself -- we use voice over of course -- did I sleep with him? No, I would have remembered that. I'm pretty sure. What's he here for.

"So they go off into the break room for some privacy, and he says to her, 'I said some quite indiscreet things last night. I would take it as a great favor if you would keep that especially sensitive bit I told you to yourself.'

"Well of course, JB! You're catching on. She has no idea what secret it is to which she is supposedly privy. But she's ambitious and bright. She looks him right in the eye and says, 'I'll take it to my grave.'"

"Thanks to this Tory and his friends, she gets her gig at a London paper. Once tghere, other rung-climbing opportunities and challenges present themselves, and of course there's a romance angle with a photographer.

"Yes, eventually we follow her to Hong Kong. And our gal makes it big there, too. But she breaks up with her now-long-distance boyfriend.

"Unfortunately the novel then cuts away from her story and she's only tangentially involved in the rest of the book. But ignore all that. Her story, early on, is the most cinematic part of the whole. We can give it a different ending -- something about how boundless ambition in time leads to her fall -- or something sweet involving the photographer. Or both. We'll work it out.

"Wonderful, JB! Now, let's talk about my pay...."

The Book Thief

I've decided to rework my unwieldy antebellum-America novel in terms of genre and target audience.

I hope to make it a "Young Adult" novel. That seems to be the publishing industry's term for works aimed at the 12-18 age group.

The manuscript is wildly unfocused as it stands, and follows the wanderings of a handful of fictional characters who bump into historical persons at intervals.

I've decided that in the re-write, the central consciousness of the book will be a historical figure. Daniel Webster, no less. The ms as it stands has some passages about Webster I especially like, and this will make it easy both to save and to expand on them.

Since I've made this decision, I've also started to look into examples of YA. And one that intrigues me, published two years ago, is called The Book Thief.

I urge you all to read that review. Most of it is a simple plot summary, with a minimum of critique (or of praise for that matter) and the ambition of the book's author is breath-taking.

Bravo, Markus Zusak.

Two Henry Roths

One Henry Roth, the real one, was the author of CALL IT SLEEP, a novel set in the world of Jewish immigrants to New York, 1934.

Here's a bit from it. "Aunt Bertha's customary verve and impudence had vanished, and with it her boisterous manner that was part of her even when she spoke quietly. But though her lips drooped and she seemed to address her words to the floor, dully, falteringly, there was still a remnant of stubborn, blunt defiance in her tone and the way she jerked her head."

The other Henry Roth, the fictional one, is also a writer. He's a character in a sappy movie, a chick-flick romantic comedy, called DEDICATION, which you can read about here and watch at your leisure.

But dont' bother. Get a copy of CALL IT SLEEP instead.

Chapter Five

This will conclude my reading of the Nicky Marsh book. Her final chapter involves the portrayal of women within the financial world in contemporary Brit fiction.

One of the novels featured here is Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It (2002). A footnote tells us that Miramax bought the rights to this novel, in the hope it would prve the next Bridget Jones' Diary.

Bridget Jones, though, was an assistant at a book publisher. Pearson's protagonist Kate Reddy, is a hedge fund manager. She has a rather grandiose view of what it means for a woman at the start of the 21st century to manage a hedge fund, thinking: "We are the foundation stones and the females who come after us will scarcely give us a second thought but they will walk on our bones."

The book doesn't have a lot of the detailed accounts of particular trades that get into the sort of "financial thrillers" Marsh discussed in her fourth chapter. Not only doesn't it contain many such passages but, as Marsh puts it, the book "resists" such passages.

"The real dramas in the novel occur not around the fluctuations of currencies or stocks but around the blurry definitions of care and responsibility that economics place upon the people who drive Reddy's car, wash Reddy's clothes, and, most crucially, look after her children."

So (to wrap this up) a bankers life, or a hedge fund managers life, can give rise to drama and literature, just so long as one takes it as a life. And not just as a matter of staring at a screen, or supervising people who stare at screens.

Chapter Three

Continuing my reading of Nicky Marsh's book.

But chapter three, she's narrowing her attention to issues more akin to those that inspired me to request a review copy of the book in the first place. For this isn't about literature and attitudes toward hoarding or the exchange rate -- this is about Brit lit and attitudes toward "the City," the financial district of London.

One of the books prominently featured here is "What a Carve Up!" by Jonathan Coe (1994). This is very much a pomo novel. Its about a novelist, Michael Owen, which is always a good post-modern start. Michael has been hired to write the history of a particular eccentric family, the Winshaws. Increasingly, Michael's research uncovers ways in which the Winshaws' lives intersect with his own, so that he becomes central to his text.

One of the objects of that research is Thomas Winshaw, a banker. Through Michael's eyes, then, Coe describes Thomas' obsession with computer screens and the visually self-enveloping character of his work in the City.

Thomas, who supervises traders, installs a camera so he can stare all day at a screen that shows "nothing but row upon row of his traders, themselves staring at screens ... It seemed, at such moments, there was no end to the glassy barriers which he could put up between himself and the people (did they really exist?) whose money formed the basis of each day's intoxicating speculations."

This reminds me of last week's news out of France. Of course a superviser who followed Thomas' methods would never have found any harm in Jerome K's dealings. He would simply have seen that Jerome came in on time each day, sat at his desk, stared at his screen, and pressed buttons on the keyboard.

At any rate, on the evidence of Marsh's quotations from Coe, I have to credit the latter with at least that one arresting image of the work life of one sort of banker.

Gambling, Debts, Opera

Yesterday, in my list of operas that will shortly be produced at The Met, I included without any special note The Gambler, an adaptation of the great Dostoyevsky novel of the same name. Both the music and the libretto are the creation of Sergei Prokofiev.

The origin of the Dostoyevsky novel is itself legendary. The great writer was addicted to the roulette tables himself, and he had to cook up something for publication fast to restore some level of contentment to the creditors he had acquired as a result. Pressed also to write on the deadline of an unforgiving publisher, he came up with a novella about -- debts and a casino.

That sounds like a prescription for a veritable hack-job of a novel. Still, Dostoyevsky was Dostoyevsky. He couldn't write a hack job, and of course he didn't.

You can read the result online:
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=671

The central character, who narrates the book in the first person, is the household employee of a general and his family who were once affluent but who are now living in tightened circumstances.

On the first page, the narrator has just returned from two weeks' leave. He tells us that things were different when he got back.

Of course, since this is the first page, we don't know what they had been like, so telling us that they had become different creates an air of mystery and plunges us into the middle of things, as an opening should.

The narrator's fascination with gambling is something he shares with several other characters in the novel, including a wealthy older woman called only Grandmother.

The General is waiting for Grandmother to die, because inheriting her wealth would ease his circumstances. She's in no hurry to help him out, and her displeasure with the deathwatch helps make her reckless at the roulette table -- at first recklessly successful, then ruinously (for the General's hopes) unsuccessful.

Here's one brief passage: "Yet now, when the Grandmother had just performed an astonishing feat at roulette; now, when the old lady's personality had
been so clearly and typically revealed as that of a rugged, arrogant woman who was 'tombee en enfance'; now, when everything appeared to be lost,--why, now the Grandmother was as merry as a child which plays with thistle-down."

I can certainly see how Grandmother would make a fine operatic character, but the complexity of the plot (quite intricate given its brevity) would seem to create some difficulties.

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.

http://www.amazon.com/Terrorist-John-Updike/dp/0307264653/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-4850285-7084120?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1175171312&sr=8-1