Rabbit loses the race
Cooper, Rand Richards
RABBIT LOSES THE RACE JOHN UPDIKE'S 'SMALL ANSWER OF A TEXTURE' / RAND RICHARDS COOPER I n everything he writes, John Updike creates sentences that carry the feeling of having been cared for,...
...Rabbit Redux (1971) seems today the weakest of the Harry Angstrom quartet, a lurid, confused novel in which the author stumbles off the thoroughfare of his hero's spiritual life into a series of dead ends...
...Nothing is thrown away...
...So I found myself in St...
...as they turn onto Interstate 75--but doesn't trust himself not to eat it all and makes himself 320: Commonweal stand and look out the window instead...
...At the airport, Harry buys a candy bar, ostensibly for his soon-to-arrive grandchildren...
...Consider the following moment, early in the novel, when Rabbit leaves the house with his wife to pick up their son, Nelson...
...So, too, with Updike himself, a writer who has substituted for transcendental reassurances the small answers of texture, mastering the artistic paradox by which even deathly realities are redeemed in the vivid life of prose...
...My mind when I was a boy often or eleven," he writes in his memoirs, sent up its silent screams at the thought of future aeons--at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me...
...reader of the four Rabbit books confronts a steadily increasing bulk...
...Far from being disturbed by this, Rabbit is comforted...
...Still too hemmed in by liberal proprieties to utter these dark sentiments himself, Updike called in Harry Angstrom to do the job...
...like a touch of wilt the red light rims their fluffy hair...
...He now and then touches with his hand the rough bark of a tree or the dry twigs of a hedge, to give himself the small answer of a texture [italics mine...
...This "something" Rabbit is missing, he asks, what is it exactly...
...His running quarrel with Nelson, his wish to deny the boy a job at the car lot, turns out to be more than a wish to get his son out on his own...
...to my mind New Orleans remains the least assimilated of American cities, a place dark and riotous, tropical and latinate, a polar opposite certainly to the puritanical, Irish Boston where I make my home...
...O]n Sunday morning, when we go before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ, hot with Christ, onfire: burn them with the force of our belief...
...Since I have learned to appreciate Louisiana almost entirely through his writings, it was for me an appropriate meeting indeed...
...Detractors will surely continue to find this kind of writing trivial and sentimental--beautiful writing about nothing--while others will appreciate the satisfactions of an actual world accurately observed...
...It was a romantic moment...
...Garry Wills calls this "foisting onto this 'middle American' of Updike's own preciosity" an "egregious flaw in the depiction of Harry...
...That golf has lost its metaphysical function is a sign of how grave things soon will become in Harry's world...
...Rabbit at Rest peddles a vicarious mortality, giving the reader the vision of a man who looks out at a world in which he soon will not exist...
...you're looking like you lost your best friend," we sympathize with Rabbit's intuition that "things" are far more helpful friends than the boy imagines...
...its insistence on the importance of what Henry James called "the common, the immediate, the familiar" as opposed to "surprising and incongruous phenomena...
...that the news anchorman Peter Jennings betrays his Canadimmess in his pronunciation of the word "about" ("aboot...
...The noise spreads fear through the apartment....The tiny soft marbled body, weightless as paper, goes stiff against his chest and then floppy, its hot head rolling as if it will unjoint from its neck...
...There was considerable shrewdness, in 1960, in a novelist's taking God out of the church and putting him on the golf course, where so many suburban men were already spending their Edenic Sundays...
...Rabbit, Run can be seen as Updike's attempt, three decades earlier, to deploy this vital something and defend it against the gray conformity of the 1950s, with its cult of "mature" behavior...
...Harry's hapless preoccupation with junk food--eating is to this novel what counting gold was to the last--and the novel's grim glee in totting up the continuing orgy of toxins, seems a rebuke to the very idea of a soul...
...five humped segments of pure chocolate...
...But Rabbit, Run was not satire...
...God [has] shrunk in Harry's middle years," Updike writes, "to the size of a raisin lost under the car seat...
...Absent is any complacent optimism that the world can be improved...
...hanging around the kitchen, after his daughter serves him a low-cholestoral frozen yogurt dessert, to stuff himself with "three quick vanilla cookies and a broken pretzel...
...This is a novel of a medium-rich man whose favorite hobby--literally--is counting his gold...
...The music at the airport, where he goes to pick up Nelson and his family, is "a kind of carpet in the air, to cover up a silence that might remind you of death," and the innocent prospect of seashells on the beach reminds him of the "blobby hungry sluggy creatures" who once inhabited them, "eating each other, drilling through shells, sucking each other's guts out" in "a murky cold world halfway to death...
...Asked by Eccles to explain why he thinks his personal destiny so important, Rabbit answers, "It's just that, well, it's all there is...
...H~y, who can't help noticing that she has begun now and then to talk about him in the past tense, admires her newfound competence, yet senses in it a preparation for widowhood, and a rather brisk and happy one at that...
...Rabbit, too, experiences a kind of"inner dwindling," his spiritual desires waning as his waistline has grown...
...This is a comedy of fetishism, the visible standing in for the invisible, gold as love...
...Outdoors it is growing dark and cool...
...Similarly, the novel transforms the bleakness of death, rendering its depressing realities in a way that is anything but depressing...
...The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience...
...He has come home from church carrying something precious for Janice and keeps being screened from giving it to her...
...The pains, when they come, seem hostile and deliberate, the knives of a strengthening enemy...
...It is a struggle for dynastic succession...
...Notable is a scene in which Harry and Janice carry seventy-five pounds' worth of freshly purchased gold coins from the coin store to the bank, clutching their sacks of treasure in apprehension as they pass 318: Commonweal assorted down-and-outers...
...When he was younger and just taking up the game," Updike has him reflect, "...there were shots that seemed like a miracle, straight as an edge of glass and longer than any power purely his could have produced, and it was for the sake of collaboration with this angel that he kept playing...
...Theological assistance appears in the figure of Kruppenbach, a grim neo-orthodox Lutheran minister who, in contemptuously dismissing Eccles's hands-on, humanistic counseling of Rabbit, echoes the hard Christian message Updike himself has been drawn to in the writings of Karl Barth...
...For Harry, the path toward cardiac disaster is strewn with illicit satisfactions: noticing someone sicker than he is, and liking him for it...
...But the ultimate violence of Redux is directed at the reader, who, along with Rabbit, is subjected to endless ideological tirades that pour in vast volumes of tedium from the mouths of Jill and Skeeter...
...with the force of belief'--and his author's way to execute the ancient biblical function of praise...
...description expresses love...
...As the doctors crouch murmuring over him, Harry looks at an X-ray monitor where his heart appears as a "twitching pale-gray ghost" toward which a catheter moves "in little cautious jerky stabs...hardedged as a gun...
...Rabbit, Run, published in 1960, was the precocious twentyseven-year-old author's fourth book, and took up the life of the twenty-six-year-old Rabbit, a former high-school basketball star who, dismayed by the drab responsibilities of adulthood (he works demonstrating a kitchen gadget called the MagiPeel Peeler), briefly deserts his pregnant wife and young son to live with a prostitute...
...Percy died last May and is buried in Louisiana...
...In praise of the created world, Updike's "preciosity" and his hero's converge...
...its fondness for comprehensive detailing of the stuff of daily life...
...More recently, Garry Wills's scathing and intemperate essay in the New York Review of Books [October 25, 1990] criticized Updike's "reactionary dandyism," and blasted his novels as "profligate with pretty writing...
...Closing his eyes to pray, he finds he cannot: "it feels like a wrong occasion, there is too much crowding in, of the actual material world...
...This annual meeting of scholars of religion, although highly stimulating, is also predictably marred by careerism and commercialism...
...the memorable last pages see him running, "in a kind of sweet panic," away from her funeral...
...Beneath this playful comedy of getting and spending, however, lies an accumulating bleakness...
...all the while "hat[ing] himself, with a certain relish"--a relish that the reader shares...
...I stayed at a Benedictine monastery for the smaller gathering...
...The inconsistencies of Harry are not simply a "foisting" or a "flaw...
...All of this was an attempt to handle an era Updike would later describe in his memoirs as a "poisonous" time...
...is indeed hard to square with his blue-collar grittiness ("Oh, she can take care of herself," Rabbi~ says of his girlfriend...
...Like Jill in Redux, Updike's wife's friends, "pale" and "bleached," seem spiritually anemic, drained of some vital life force...
...The novels, each longer than its predecessor, are crammed with the furniture of Harry Angstrom's daily" consciousness...
...Increasingly, his Rabbit novel s have the feel of a time capsule-----of carefully collected daily realities sanctified by a knowledge that daily life will one day cease to be...
...The family continues to function...
...alliteration ("...a small rhododendron clothed in a pink of penetrating purity...
...The self," Updike writes, "is a window on the world we can't bear to think of shutting...
...in Rabbit's peevish anxieties Updike successfully explores the paradox of heredity, by which one is both perpetuated and replaced, the success of the son proving 17May 1991:319 the mortality of the father...
...Asceticism is to theology as root is to plant and leaf--it is the thorny, heavy, solid part...
...Thirty years earlier, his world was shattered by his departure...
...and, particularly in passages devoted to sexual relations, a good measure of mystical nonsense ("His sea of seed buckles, and sobs into a still channel...
...One would be hard put, for instance, to find a better evocation of the frustrations of a young husband than this: [Rabbit's] wish to make love to Janice is like a small angel to which all afternoon tiny lead weights are attached...
...With annoyance we begin to suspect that our sense of being trapped is exactly the point--that the author, who writes in his memoirs of feeling angered by the sixties' refusal to let him ignore politics, intends to browbeat us with politics until we, too, share his furious discomfort...
...Updike, we are told, is all medium and no message, a man who writes beautifully about nothing...
...Why won't it sleep...
...it is a place where business is conducted, contracts are signed, job interviews scheduled, and one's sensibilities consequently assaulted...
...Where the key metaphors of Redux were poison and rot, Rich addresses the inflation and scarcity of the Carter years and the midseventies' fear that the world, as the novel's opening line asserts, is running out of gas...
...and, perhaps, the seductive tug of memory, transforming experience into something ineffably precious...
...Now in his midfifties, Harry, jowly and sluggish, gorges on junk food and tries to ignore continuing bad news from somewhere within his chest, where he feels "as if a child inside him is playing with lighted matches...
...Even irresponsibility eludes Harry...
...Janice enrolls in real-estate courses, fires a laggard accountant at the car lot, and begins to emerge, "energized [and] businesslike," from two decades of country club indolence...
...No such solace is afforded Harry, however, who finds that not even a game of golf can rouse him from his existential gloom...
...There is a harrowing sequence in which Harry undergoes an angioplasty in an attempt to clear out his coronary arteries...
...in a particularly devilish passage, the two of them put several shiny new Krugerrands Harry has bought to a highly unusual use...
...Presentiments of his mortality swirl through the latter half of Rabbit Is Rich (the family used to worry about him running away...
...In the interminable rain of his prose, I felt goodness...
...When Rabbit watches the Mousketeer show on TV and finds himself deeply inspired by one of Mousketeer leader Jimmy's singing proverbs--"God doesn't want a tree to be a waterfall, or a flower to be a stone, God gives to each one of us a special talent...
...The result was a novel that seems driven by a longing on 17May 1991:317 the author's part to reach down out of his bourgeois decadence and shake hands with Rabbit's blue-collar, conservative toughness...
...that the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback of the mid- 1970s was Ron Jaworski...
...the prelude to death, he discovers, is inconsequentiality...
...But Updike is a twentieth-century writer, for whom the exalted optimism of nineteenth-century positivism is not an option...
...What Rabbit knows of God's grace, Updike suggests, he knows through his exploits on the court and on the golf course, where he approaches perfection, and his exploits in bed, where he touches bliss...
...Rabbit's susceptibility to bliss, his ability to be made "perfect in joy" by the cidery smell of a field in autumn, is his way of fulfilling the challenge to "burn...
...Improbably, Harry decides to invite these all-tooemblematic sixties figures into his home, where the three conduct, before the eyes of Rabbit's bewildered son Nelson (now fourteen), an experiment in radical realities featuring liberal doses of weed, lengthy readings from Frederick Douglass, tedious harangues and counterharangues on American imperialism, violent outbursts of racial, sexual, and class antagonisms, and the occasional mdnage ~ trois...
...This stylistic exuberance seems to trouble his various detractors, who over the years have seen in him a fin de siOcle aestheticism and, worse, a privileged complacency...
...caving in, he eats half of it, and decides to save the other half for the kids...
...Rather than attempting to describe God's grace, Rabbit tees off and hits a rare, perfect drive...
...The novel deals obdurately in the physical realities of the body, revealing the heart to be not the seat of desire but the sputtering engine of a "soft machine...
...Just as the ascetic withdraws from society to achieve detachment, we scholars depart from the Sheraton and the I MICHAEL O'LAUGHLIN, a translator and interpreter, lives in Medford, Massachusetts...
...In Florida, where he and Janice have a condo, he notes that palm trees grow by dropping their dying lower branches...
...throughout the novel, objections to Rabbit's irresponsibility are mown down as one character after another bows to his "strange gift...for life," and ethical arguments are revealed as a kind of spiritual bludgeon by which the weak (women, primarily, and "womanish" ministers) keep the strong down...
...The passage recalls the young Rabbit's naive belief in the tree and the stone and in God's gift of "special talents...
...As a kind of hedge against nothingness, the novels bulge with the efforts of a man desperate to get as much of the world in before it's too late...
...Each year a group of us meets to discuss ascetical practices in just such a monastic setting, fortifying ourselves before entering the "Sea of Tweed...
...He walks down hill...
...For a reader it is satisfying to hear this echo, cast forth over two decades and three novels, and posing, in the devolution of a metaphor, something like a life change...
...Temporarily abandoned by Janice, Rabbit takes up with a highly unlikely duo: Jill, a wealthy hippie drug addict, and Skeeter, a hip black revolutionary...
...But New Orleans is the polar opposite to almost any other American city as well...
...The "answer of texture" defines a kind of faith through sensibility...
...But the first half is so good he eats the second and even dumps the sweet crumbs out of the wrapper into his palm and with his tongue licks them all up like an anteater...
...This time, nothing happens...
...Though Updike later called the book an attempt to frame a moral dilemma by "making a case for running away from your wife," his sympathy was clearly with his hero...
...Although Rabbit, signing a check, can still feel like "a god casually dispensing thunderbolts," it is a rare moment, for the novel is a chronicle of his steady disempowerment...
...They arise, rather, out of a tension between "realistic" 316: Commonweal and religious purposes...
...It is no coincidence that Ruth, the woman Rabbit flees to, lives next to a church...
...There is your role: to make yourself an exemplar of faith," Kruppenbach thunders at the cowering Eccles...
...Surprisingly, a rereading of Rabbit, Run turns up not only the fine-tuned writing Updike is often praised for, but plenty of bad writing as well: awkward and jumbled metaphor...
...Fittingly, Harry's destiny catches up to him on a basketball court, returning him to where he started...
...This act of irresponsibility sets off a series of painful events culminating in the accidental bathtub drowning of his infant daughter...
...I came to Louisiana to attend a series of theological conferences, the first a small gathering, the second an enormous megameeting of six thousand brought together in the largest hotels of New Orleans...
...that the fruit of the tropical dynamite tree, Hura crepitans, explodes when ripe...
...And yet the novel is not merely the depiction of a "middle American" but of a state of spiritual crisis...
...When his son, now a college drop-out, smashes up Rabbit's car and then whines, "Dad, it's just a thing...
...Both the essay and the novel suggest an outburst of contempt for the "genteel bohemian" lifestyle in which Updike found himself involved in the late sixties, surrounded, as he saw himself, by "privileged members of a privileged nation [who] believed that their enviable position could be maintained without anything visibly ugly happening in the world...
...Anchoring Rabbit's spiritual life snugly in harbor, the novel--alone among the four Rabbit books--secures itself for sustained comedy...
...The remorseless pessimism of Proust's disquisitions on the heart [Updike writes], the abyss he makes of human motives, the finality of all our little deaths, did not appall me...
...Many readers have complained of inconsistencies in Rabbit Angstrom, whose exquisite sensibility ("The girls waiting under crimson neon have a floral delicacy...
...and that Rabbit, rising from their bed on a Sunday morning, enjoys watching the congregation file out into the sunshine...
...now, when he takes up jogging, they worry about his heart...
...One can imagine the kind of wicked fun another kind of writer--Vonnegut, say, or Joseph Heller--could have had with the notion that God lives in a wooden driver, and that the man wielding it does so with a mystic motion of faith...
...Rabbit's gold arouses him, and his wife too...
...that friendships have a provisional quality since people "might at any minute...up and die...
...Indeed, for the dying Harry Angstrom, the realization that the whole world, himself included, is merely "material" triggers a depressed sense of"stifling uselessness," and snuffs out prayer...
...Imitation is praise," he writes in Self-Consciousness...
...Fear of death powers it like a motor...
...Updike leads Rabbit through a series of golf games with Jack Eccles, a youthful Episcopalian minister who, trying to persuade Rabbit to do the right thing and return to his wife and family, begins instead to be tempted by Rabbit's urge to do the wrong and irresponsible thing, by his yearning intimation, as he gestures toward the town's dreary landscape, that "somewhere behind this.., there's something that wants me to find it...
...Redux is the work of an angry man who lets his main character do his tough talking for him...
...Nowadays, however, he no longer hits these miraculous shots, and the game has become "more like work...a matter of approximations in the realm of the imperfect...
...Now _ _ in his midf0rties, he has taken over his fatherin-law's Toyota dealership...
...The novel was originally meant to be bound together with a succeeding work, The Centaur, "to illustrate the polarity [Updike has explained] between running and plodding, between the rabbit and the horse, between the life of instinctual gratification and that of dutiful self-sacrifice...
...I abbitls Rich (1981), a persuasive return to the D themes of Harry Angstrom's inner life, presented a Rabbit grown fat and happy with such cess...
...Thus we learn, for example, that the ingredients ofa TV dinner include (among twenty-three other substances) cysteine and gum arabic...
...Indeed, Redux's operative metaphors are of corruption--the "sweetly stinking" sewers of Rabbit's carelessly engineered neighborhood, the "chemical sludge" of a vanilla shake he drinks, the "rot" and "black madness" of campus riots...
...Rabbit at Rest should be seen as the final campaign in a losing battle for faith, bespeaking substantial spiritual gloom not only for Rabbit, but, one senses, for his creator as well...
...fingering the bottle of nitroglycerin pills in his pocket and looking forward to the "cute little rush" of "inner loosening" they give him--made more delicious, it turns out, by a Nutter-Butter cookie and a big glass of milk...
...Becky, Becky, Becky," he says, "go to sleep...
...Tragedy lay in a certain filtered summer breath they admitted, the glint of sun along segments of the mesh, an overlooked fervor in their details--the bent screening, the sliding adjustable frame stamped with the manufacturer's name, the motionless molding of the window itself, like the bricks that all through Brewer loyally hold their pattern though the masons that laid them long ago are dead...
...Admirers of the novel will note that Garry Wills, in his haste to condemn, confuses this crucial scene with another one hundreds of pages earlier...
...This faintly ad hominem strain of criticism, having pursued Updike over the years, has been paralleled by powerful and repeated doses of official critical tribute as well, including the 199l Pulitzer Prize--Updike's second for the quartet of novels about Harry Angstrom of Pennsylvania, better known as Rabbit...
...Beneath the active wit of its surface, it took its religion very seriously, refusing to release us into farce, even when one felt a strong need to be released...
...The roots of his realism lie not in science or utilitarianism but in the rockier ground of religion mad faith...
...An unseemly air of savage satisfaction surrounds Rabbit's most vile behavior...
...And yet, for a reader, the consolations of the novel are manet...
...Updike has written admiringly of nineteenth-century realism, and one finds in his fiction some of the movement's guiding principles: its impartiality and inclusiveness...
...The baby squawks tirelessly...
...The torrent of pedestrian realities he lets loose through the Rabbit books is his attempt to "do" America...
...And on and on and on, until at times Rabbit's overburdened life seems like the monomaniacal production of some idiot savant...
...And yet against this "depressed" reality must be set the exhilarations of a prose that continues to take the world, despite all doubt and gloominess, as an object worthy of praise...
...Even the morbid messages of Harry's heart are converted, through the tribute of description, into a readerly pleasure: At times it seems a tiny creature, a baby, pleading inside him for attention, for rescue, and at others a sinister intruder, a traitor muttering in code, an alien parasite that nothing will expel...
...In an essay on Proust, Updike described the French writer as "one of those rare men...who lost the consolations of belief but retained the attitudes and ambitions of a worshiper...
...Updike's task, here as in the autobiographical essays of SelfConsciousness, is to reconcile this solipsism with a reverential instinct, a strong urge toward God...
...It lies in its crib all afternoon and makes an infuriating noise of strain, hnnnnnnah ah ah nnnnh, a persistent feeble scratching at some interior door...
...Alfred Kazin called him "someone wholly literary...the quickest of quick children...
...Don't you think...
...Unlike the fiction of his nineteenth-century mentors, Updike's realism is grounded in a reverential attitude, and expresses itself in explicitly devotional terms...
...In an essay in Self-Consciousness, "On Not Being a Dove," Updike looks back two decades to anatomize the sputtering anger he often felt during the late sixties when, alone among his circle of suburban liberals, he supported the Vietnam War...
...Rabbit flees from this, too...
...In his 1989 memoirs, Self-Consciousness, Updike writes of "something intrinsically and individually vital [in each of us] which must be defended against the claims even of virtue...
...ach of us, Updike remarked in Self-Consciousness, owes God a death...
...Updike, too, has come back to where he started, to a battle with faith and death...
...On the back nine Eccles subjects the derelict husband to a theological interrogation...
...and, above all, its sure sense that a real, objective actual world exists, and that the full powers of the writer should be turned not to remaking but to recording it, as truthfully and as completely as possible...
...All of this would seem to bear out Updike's own description of Rabbit at Rest as a "depressed book about a depressed man, written by a depressed man...
...On the golf course Harry is plunged into depression at the thought that "every blade of grass at his feet is an individual life that will die, that has flourished to no purpose...
...If these Nietzschean flirtations seem somewhat dated today, it is perhaps because the case for leaving one's wife, or one's husband, has been made so often since 1960, and in such unheroic circumstances, that it is difficult to encounter it as a source of spiritual inspiration...
...he and Janice, again reconciled, vacation in the Poconos and the Caribbean, and spend their ample leisure time at the country club...
...Here is Rabbit, waking from a nap and chancing to recall, as he looks out the window, other window screens in an apartment he and Janice lived in years earlier: They never precisely fit, leaving splinters of light through which the mosquitoes and midges could crawl...
...The 1970s have been kind to Harry...
...needless RAND RICHARDS COOPER is the author of a book of stories, The Last to Go (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
...But the novel itself seems tainted as well by a vindictive authorial agenda of gripes and fears...
...or, as Dreiser vowed over Sister Carrie, to "get it all in...
...Rabbit at Rest, published last fall, is a 512-page account of that final and ineluctable transaction, and seems like the novel Updike has been waiting all his career to write...
...its careful inspection of individual destinies and desires against the large backdrop of society...
...As it falls "with a kind of visible sob," he turns triumphantly to the minister and says, "That's it...
...Harry obsesses about the Lockerbie air disaster, about the declining powers of baseball players and the deaths of TV personalities...
...In its best moments, Rabbit Is Rich is a fond and spirited satire of the nouveau riche...
...The wisdom of middle age has turned his energies to real things, things that can not only be seen but, better, bought and sold...
...The black comedy of Harry's gluttony, which persists despite repeated doctorly warnings, is told with a wicked and miserable delight, as Harry again and again breaks down before the lovingly detailed attractions of Planter's Peanut bars, Double-Stuffed Oreos, Doritos, and fried shrimp...
...17May 1991:321...
...instead, Updike's writing flickers with the hope that the world was created, and thus merits the devotion of description...
...The Norway maples exhale the smell of their sticky new buds and the broad living-room windows along Wilbur Street show beyond the silver patch of a television set the warm bulbs burning in kitchens, like fires at the back of caves...
...Rabbit at Rest is not only a book about facing death, but about doing it, as Updike makes Rabbit, without benefit of faith...
...that a Sky Bar consists of"five different gooey fillings in...
...It is simply too French, too hot, charming, and sexual to be a real part of this most corn-fed, vigorous, and Protestant of countries...
...that Consumer Reports rates the ten-cup Krups coffeemaker over the twelve-cup Braun...
...RABBIT LOSES THE RACE JOHN UPDIKE'S 'SMALL ANSWER OF A TEXTURE' / RAND RICHARDS COOPER I n everything he writes, John Updike creates sentences that carry the feeling of having been cared for, and indeed deeply enjoyed, by their creator...
...our laughter is again checked by a confusing sense that something much like Jimmy's message forms the hook upon which the novel earnestly hangs its meaning...
...Health, work, and eventually even the pursestrings are taken away from him as Nelson assumes control at the car lot and Updike packs his ailing hero off to a series of locations wittily listed in the table of contents under the chapter headings FL, PA, and MI--witty because MI, Rabbit's ultimate destination, is not Michigan...
...What does it want...
...What remains vivid, however, is the novel's portrait of a young man's nervous and changeable inner being--now teetering with euphoria at the splendor of life, now recoiling in dread at the fact of death...
...Marriott to achieve our separateness, our own point of intense contact...
...Even after fifteen novels and ten short-story collections, Updike continues to elicit reactions as passionate as his prose style...
...Asceticism, as we define it, is that point where religion intensifies, touches down, "practifies...
...17May 1991:315 There was plenty of sex in Rabbit, Run, but mere sex was not what Rabbit---or what Updike--was after...
...Howells, calling a writer "a rapt witness to the world...an instrument, whereby a time and place make their mark...
...The novel closes on a note of bleak wit, as Harry, presented with an infant granddaughter, holds his son's baby in his lap and sees in her "another nail in his coffin...
...The partnership with death details an intimate secrecy the reader is privileged to share...
...Sleep, sleep, sleep...
...The day is gathering itself in...
...cluttered "interior" run-ons...
...In a neat irony, the last quarter of the novel has Harry abruptly driving off to Florida, reenacting his original flight from responsibility...
...Then he thinks of going back and buying another for his grandchildren and him to share in the car--"look what Grandpa has...
...Against modernism's (and postmodernism's) emphasis on the subjective and idiosyncratic, its preference for the partial, occluded view, and its romantic sense of the writer's godlike creativity, Updike has set himself squarely in the tradition of Theodore Dreiser and W.D...
...Far from being complacent or untroubled, Updike's prolific descriptiveness arises out of spiritual anxiety...
...Step by step, Harry's family unconsciously prepares itself to survive him, his wife and son making decisions about the family business that leave him out of the loop...
...3 TO DIE IN NEW ORLEANS REFLECTIONS AT WALKER PERCY'S GRAVE MICHAEL O'LAUGHLIN recently came face to face with Walker Percy, or what remains of him...
...Set among these excesses are fine passages, welltuned to the young Rabbit's fitful intentions and moods...
...He dies without consolation...
...Like its hero, the novel itself is "bothered by God," persistently rummaging about for some sort of transcendent experience upon which to fasten its devotional urges...
...Joseph's Abbey in the swampy woods of Louisiana...
...Incongruous phenomena form the spine of its plot...
...Rabbit, now thirty-six, has become a paunchy conservative busy defending Johnson's and Nixon's war against his wife, Janice, and other misguided liberals...
...The way he tries to do it is through his lyrical and richly descriptive prose...
...Theologians are at their worst when trying to make points in this sea of tweed...
...She didn't expect nothing...
Vol. 118 • May 1991 • No. 10
