Category Archives: First Person Singular

Of Hub Fans, Red Sox Nation, and the Chicago Cubs

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Christopher Borrelli‘s Chicago Tribune think piece on “Building a baseball story: 7 lessons Red Sox can teach Cubs” invokes that most famous of sports stories, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” which Borrelli calls “a kind of gospel of the Red Sox, as hallowed as a prayer in New England,” written, of course, by John Updike.

“Like the New Englander he became, Updike romanticized the Red Sox, both ups and downs.

“He fed the narrative,” Borrelli writes, offering ideas on how the Chicago Cubs can “serve its narrative and wrangle its history, broaden its reach and nurture its relationship with fans” and it involves the celebration of pop culture’s baseball embrace. He recalls one saturated moment in Boston:

“Driving to Fenway from the diner, I flipped through the radio: On a sports station, a former Red Sox player was telling stories about how former manager Terry Francona would sit naked on the toilet during meetings in his office. Someone on local NPR was reading from Updike’s classic. On music stations, songs about the Red Sox, songs that have become synonymous with Fenway, ‘Dirty Water’ and ‘Sweet Caroline’ and ‘Shipping Up to Boston’ and Jonathan Richman’s ‘As We Walk to Fenway Park in Boston Town.’ A Budweiser commercial has a bro doing a bad Boston accent, giving an opening-day rally speech that makes no sense in 2017: ‘We’re Boston! We’re not supposed to win!”

Part of that pop-cultural narrative includes the story of how Theo Epstein and the team’s new management “slapped Updike’s words on that wall, alongside the water cooler” to inspire players.  He might as well have broken into a chorus of Fiddler on the Roof‘s “Tradition”. . . .

Rabbit, as viewed by the left wing of the AltRight

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Altleft.com, which bills itself tongue-in-cheek as “The left wing of the AltRight,” recently posted a piece by Brandon Adamson titled “An Aversion to Quagmires—A Collective Desertion Toward Our Future.” Though it’s not all about Rabbit, Harry does turn up in a discussion of “Beatnik Fascism”:

“The more idiosyncratic identitarians like myself lead extremely detached lives,” Adamson writes. “Most of us seek a kind of escape from what passes for everyday life for most people. . . .”

“John Updike once claimed in an interview with Penguin Classics that he wrote Rabbit, Run in response to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Updike said:

“Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” came out in 1957 and, without reading it, I resented its apparent instruction to cut loose; “Rabbit,Run” was meant to be a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road – the people left behind get hurt.

“Yet, despite Updike’s intentions, while reading Rabbit, Run as a young man, I identified much more with the character of Rabbit. Sure, the people he leaves behind do get hurt, but it didn’t appear to me to be any huge loss for the world. After all, his wife was an alcoholic that made him miserable, and his girlfriend was a prostitute, not exactly the type of people you’d feel like he owes some huge commitment to. There are his young children of course (one of which dies as a result of a careless accident committed by the drunken wife). Yet, Rabbit would have been unable to prevent this even if he hadn’t ran out. It would have probably happened anyway while he was busy at work one day, in his totally meaningless sales job that Updike implies should ahve been his duty to remain at. Rabbit meanwhile points out the hypocrisy in all the people who attempt to tell him how to live. ‘Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.’ This is the problem with Updike’s world. He frowns upon the runners, reformers and rockers of the boat for what he perceives as the messes left behind and the plight of the abandoned, the weakening of the church . . . etc., yet beneath the forced facade of cohesion which he insists is imperative that we maintain at all costs, those who look closely still see an outline of the same puddle of puke, obscured only by having been swept partially under the rug.”

Read the entire article.

Writer thinks Rabbit, Run a mock heroic tale

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The Guardian posted an April 21, 2017 opinion piece by Sarah Churchwell in the books section titled “John Updike’s Rabbit, Run—another American story of men escaping women,” with the pull-out quote “US culture is riddled with stories of men who yearn to be free—by Updike’s time, all that was left was the mock heroism of suburban tragicomedy.”

In a sense, Churchwell writes, “Rabbit, Run is a clever subversion of an old US motif: the man on the run from the suffocating effects of society, as if a tragicomic western had lost its way and ended up trapped in southeastern Pennsylvania. But this tradition is also endlessly troped as men escaping the domestic snares of women, a tradition which Rabbit, Run cheerily joins. From Huck Finn lighting west for the Territory to escape Aunt Polly’s efforts to ‘sivilize’ him, to Charles Ingalls, with his itch for travel and his wife who insists they build a little house on the prairie for their girls, to Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty taking off on the road: US popular culture is riddled with stories of men who yearn to be free, and the women who yearn only for them not to be. These are doubtless very enjoyable stories for men to read, but for women they can be quite irksome. Always cast as the smothering presence, the old ball-and-chain pinning men down who would otherwise roam wild, women end up symbolising dependence and paralysis while men get to symbolise independence and liberty. I know which one I prefer.”

Churchwell writes, “But by 1960, there was nowhere to run: the frontier was well and truly closed, and all that was left for men was the mock heroism of suburban tragicomedy, running in circles.

“Part of the problem for women reading Rabbit, Run is that Updike made the decision to have Harry choose between two stereotypes: after returning home Harry leaves Janice again, this time moving in with a prostitute. Janice, the asexual mother, is small, childish, bony; the prostitute Ruth is voluptuous, large, welcoming, and fecund. . . . Either way, to judge it against a modern metric, it’s fair to say Rabbit, Run fails the Bechdel test (requiring that two or more female characters discuss a topic other than men.”

Read the full article.

Maverick Philospher considers John Updike’s Christianity

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The Maverick Philosopher blog recently responded to Gerald R. McDermott’s “‘A Rather Antinomian Christianity’: John Updike’s Religion,” which was posted March 13, 2015 on The Witherspoon Institute website, Public Discourse. 

Highlighting McDermott’s assertions that “Updike ‘radically divorced’ Christian theology from Christian ethics,” that “Updike’s religion helped build the theological scaffolding for mainline Protestantism’s baptism of gay marriage,” and “Sex is one of the means—maybe the foremost means—whereby the [moral and religious] search is conducted,” Maverick Philosopher writes,

“We are concupiscent from the ground up. So it is no surprise that even Christianity can be so twisted as to serve the sex monkey by one who apparently was it’s slave. But if truth be told, I just now ordered Couples to see how the brilliant Updike makes his case. Updike is a master of social phenomenology as I discovered when I read Rabbit Is Rich in the early ’90s.

“As for the radical divorce of theology and ethics, there cannot be anything salutary about splitting them asunder. But if split them you must, it would be better to jettison the theology and keep the ethics for the sake of our happiness in this world, which we know, as opposed to the next which we merely believe in. It is an empirical question, but on balance the sexual revolution has not improved human eudaimonia. Our predicament post-pill is hardly a paradise.

Updike looks to be a poster boy for the false dichotomy of spirituality versus religion.

Read the entire response: “John Updike’s Christianity.”

Literary Hub includes Updike in birth control “history”

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Ellen Feldman offers “A Brief Literary History of Birth Control from George Orwell and John Updike to Grace Metalious and Alice Munro” in an article posted 23 March 2017 at Literary Hub. The entry on Updike credits Rabbit, Run as a touchstone:

“Rabbit Angstrom of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, has an aversion to contraception, but unlike Orwell’s character, he objects to it on physical and aesthetic rather than political grounds. When Ruth Leonard, the ‘hooer’ to whom he’s giving fifteen dollars ‘toward [her] rent,’ is about to slip into the bathroom to insert what he calls a ‘flying saucer,’ he stops her with the argument that he’s ‘very sensitive.’ ‘Do you have the answer then?’ she asks. ‘No, I hate them even worse…If you’re going to put a lot of gadgets in this,’ Rabbit, who has abandoned his pregnant wife and child, goes on, ‘give me the fifteen back.’

Couples is also cited:  “Eight years after the publication of Rabbit, Run, Updike not only espoused birth control but also identified it by brand name. The first time Piet and Georgene, married to other people, have sex, he worries about ‘making a little baby,” and she’s surprised he doesn’t know about Enovid. ‘Welcome to the post-pill paradise,’ she tells him, and the ‘light-hearted blasphemy . . . immensely relieved him.'”

With only nine entries you’d have to call it a very brief history, but it’s still a fascinating round-up.

Liberty Conservative takeaways from The Coup

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On March 17, 2017, Larsen Halleck shared his thoughts about John Updike’s satirical novel, The Coup, for The Liberty Conservative—another political consideration of an author who, in his lifetime, was often criticized for not being political enough.

“In his life,” Halleck begins, “John Updike was considered to be one of, if not the, premier American novelists of the 20th century—his Rabbit Angstrom books are still considered to be one of the best satires of the archetypal downtrodden American husband and father (the genre arguably started by Sinclair Lewis’ Babbit), full of broken dreams and mediocrity as he struggles against the changes of the world around him.

“But that’s not what I’ve come here to discuss:

“My favorite of his works is the 1978 best seller The Coup, an excellent read in its own right, but so much more than that: For The Coup is quite possibly the only satire of post-colonial Africa (or at least, the only one I’m aware of). More to the point, in satirizing latter 20th-century Marxist states, The Coup shines a light on some aspects of modern leftist ideology that confuse and infuriate us today, and shows that even back then there were competing camps in the leftist ‘big tent.’ And of course, there is an implicit message of ‘Imperialism will hurt the empire in the long run,’ which is most relevant to America in its current decline.”

Read the full article.

Rabbit at Rest, Updike remembered

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Today John Updike (1932-2009) would have celebrated his 85th birthday, and notable among the remembrances published in commemoration is one by Steve King, written, fittingly, for a books site:  Barnes & Noble.

In “Something Intricate and Fierce,” King begins with a quote from Updike and follows with this quote from reviewer Jonathan Raban:  “Rabbit at Rest is one of the very few modern novels in English . . . that one can set beside the work of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Joyce and not feel the draft.”

Birthday tributes are a testament to Updike’s cultural importance, but King’s post illustrates something that would make Updike smile if he were still around to blow out the candles:  that he has political relevance, something that in his lifetime, ironically, critics never appreciated.

“Whatever Updike’s own politics—biographer Begley notes that Updike on his deathbed rejoiced at President Obama’s inauguration—some commentators say that Updike lives on as spokesman for embattled Middle Americans, whose current angst and anger he saw coming.” And King concludes with a quote from Charles McElwee, written for The American Conservative magazine:  “‘Revisiting Updike’s Rabbit novels is a rendezvous with prescience, for no collection of postwar fiction could help us better understand how working-class populism—in the form of Donald Trump—prevailed on Election Day 2016.”

Updike—and irony—are still very much alive.

Happy 85th, Mr. Updike!

Sportsblogger reviews Rabbit, Run

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Rabbit-RunRESIZED-280x393Rabbit, Run has been reviewed hundreds of times, but this one—posted on Sportsblog January 5, 2017—is a little different:  “Book Review: Rabbit, Run, by John Updike; Running in Israel.”

Or, rather, not running. As the author writes, “In Rabbit, Run, the protagonist’s method for dealing with feeling trapped is to run away. In my case, not being able to run has been among the chief factors contributing to my feeling trapped.

“It was a rough December for Jerusalem—cold, wet and dark. . . . Early in the month I missed almost a full week of work with what might have been pneumonia or bronchitis—probably weather-induced. . . . The whole rest of the month the respiratory issues lingered, making it difficult to sleep and to function in general,” the author writes.

“Very little running was going on all this time. Winter had like a battering ram broken through my defensive fortifications, work held me prisoner in my chamber, and there they gave me Rabbit, Run to read, to gnaw away at my spirit from within.

“John Updike’s 1960 novel is that powerful. It spreads through the reader like a tea bag in hot water. Consciously, I didn’t like the first half; yet the story had seeped into the seedbed of my subconscious, where it settled, established itself, germinated, grew. I felt it there during the day, felt Harry Angstrom’s character moving, doing things, haunting like a ghost. I read on without enjoyment, annoyed, frustrated, but also strangely captivated, drawn in against my will.”

The author found Rabbit, Run depressing enough to Google “cheerful novel” in order to have “something encouraging to look forward to after Rabbit. Alas, what I ended up reading was The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty, an infuriatingly bad book that somehow won a Pulitzer in 1973.”

The author concludes, “Rabbit, Run gets four stars. If it weren’t for that quagmire of a first half, it would be a must-reread.”

Is Updike’s Rabbit rare, or common?

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In a January 5, 2017 post on The Guardian, writer Matt Lewis notes that “Rabbit, Run is about a rebel we all know; John Updike’s disappointed young man dreams of escaping a workaday existence in a way that’s still familiar nearly 60 years on.”

Updike famously intended Rabbit, Run as a “riposte to Jack Kerouac’s 1957 beatnik classic On the Road,” Lewis writes. “Rather than beating morality into his readers, Rabbit gives Updike a means to explore the urges that exist in everyone—however secretly.”

That’s the common part. But as Lewis observes, “Like James Joyce and DH Lawrence before him, Updike treats sex and sexuality with a frankness that was uncommon among his contemporaries. The descriptions of sex have retained their raw freshness. In an essay, David Foster Wallace named Updike one of three Great Male Narcissists in U.S. postwar fiction and said that friends had criticized Updike for being ‘just a penis with a thesaurus.’ But that feels grossly unfair when considering his early novels like this one.

“For all of the prose’s curlicues and self-conscious prettiness, there is undoubtedly meat on the bone. Through Rabbit, Updike confronts major topics in a minor way: unravelling the tapestry of the suburban American male psyche and reweaving it into beautiful images. On reading, we become like his protagonist: restless strivers yearning for something different and altogether bigger than ourselves.”

Blogger considers Updike, Rabbit and Tolstoy

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screen-shot-2016-12-26-at-9-22-47-am‘Twas the night before Christmas, and blogger Richard Smith (Richard Smith’s non-medical blogs) spent the evening pondering the connection between John Updike and his alter ego, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom—specifically, by reading, considering, and including quotes from the novella Rabbit Remembered, with a comparison to Tolstoy thrown in for good measure:

“One of the characters in Rabbit Remembered says of the detective novels she is always reading, ‘How do they make all this up? They must have a screw loose.’ John Updike I feel is mocking himself. I’m sure that he thinks he has a screw loose, and he’s glad about it. He wouldn’t have wanted to have all his screws tight; who does?

“I came to read Rabbit Remembered by mistake. I’ve been slowly—here and there, for a shot of humor, color, and inventiveness, like a glass of Cognac—been reading my way through Updike’s Licks of Love. When I started reading Rabbit Remembered I thought I was reading another short story, but it’s a full novel, or at least a novella. I read more than half of it in one go on the plane yesterday from Bengaluru to London. That’s the way I read. (I seem to have given up watching films on planes: they almost always disappoint. My novels, never—I’m too choosy.)

“Every sentence of Updike carries poetry and sharp observation—and often a joke as well. I’ve been reading Rabbit Remembered at the same time as reading Anna Karenina, and most sentences of Tolstoy contain insights—but they don’t have the fizz, the joy of words, the poetry of Updike (they probably have more poetry in Russian). The beauty of Tolstoy is in the vast range and the deep and timeless psychological understanding. In Anna Karenina marriage (“that bloody business”) is examined from every angle. Updike too exams relationships acutely, but in a lighter, funnier way. Perhaps some would find Updike overwritten, but his sentences sing and seem effortless, which, of course, they can’t be.”

The full post can be found here:  “Rabbit and Updike remembered.”

Those intrigued by Smith’s insights may want to also read his Dec. 25, 2016 post, “John Updike on the demented as a ‘dead weight’ on society,” also sparked by his reading of Rabbit Remembered.