Category Archives: First Person Singular

Novelist Ajay Close names Rabbit her favorite character

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Novelist and dramatist Ajay Close (Official and Doubtful, A Petrol Scented Spring, The Daughter of Lady Macbeth, What We Did in the Dark) was asked by The Herald (U.K.) to share her favorites, which included:

  • Favorite book read as a child:  The Owl Service, by Alan Garner
  • First book that made an impact:  The Complete Shakespeare
  • Books that made her laugh/cry: Man or Mango? by Lucy Ellmann, The 5 Simple Machines, by Todd McEwen; Janine by Alastair Gray, Underworld, by Don DeLillo
  • Favorite character:  Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom
  • Book you wish you’d written:  The Green Road, by Anne Enright
  • Guilty pleasure: Iris Murdoch and her “20-odd novels”

In naming her favorite character she says, “Twenty years ago it would have been one of Philip Roth’s or Saul Bellow’s mouthy egomaniacs, but as I get older I find myself bored by larger-than-life characters, on and off the page. John Updike’s novels are too priapic to be fashionable these days. His attempts at writing women are, frankly, insulting. Nevertheless, I choose Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, fleshed-out over four novels, Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest.

“A superannuated high-school jock still thinking with his groin, a meathead car salesman who despises his wife Janice (‘the little mutt’) and sees his admittedly repellent son Nelson as a rival threatening his identity as the family alpha. Updike smuggles us inside Rabbit’s skin, gives us every venal impulse and selfish thought, the politics he’s picked up from reading Consumer Reports. Why should we care about him? Because every few pages Updike shows us the tender boy buried underneath all that.”

Updike a misogynist? Not according to these writers

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Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom and several of John Updike’s other male characters have a stratospheric sex drive and a habit of pursuing sexual gratification so often that their antics have led to charges of misogyny in the #MeToo era. But not according to two women who recently considered several of Updike’s novels.

In reviewing Updike Novels 1968-1975 (LOA edition, ed. Christopher Carduff), which includes Couples, Rabbit Redux, and A Month of Sundays, Kate Padilla writes on Author Link that “Harry doesn’t appear that bothered” when his wife leaves to move in with her lover in this “dark and disturbing novel, laced with sensual details, common in the other Updike novels in this volume.” But Padilla adds, Updike’s “descriptive, voluminous prose is both dazzling and racy. . . . He skillfully blended extraordinary details in character-driven stories, and the chronology included in this volume offers insights into how he developed his fictional interactions.”

Meanwhile, in her thoughtful consideration of “the best books about female artists,” Annalena McAfee considers a later Updike novel: “John Updike trained as an artist and turned his observational gifts to fiction, using words with the gorgeous precision of the finest sable brush. In Seek My Face, his meta-subject is Amerian art since the 1940s, but the focus is a female painter, Hope Chafetz, unfairly but predictably known less for her work than for the men she married (two celebrated artists). There is a roman-à-clef element, summoning echoes of Lee Krasner impatiently batting away questions about Jackson Pollock, as Updike’s elderly painter is interviewed by a thrusting young female art historian. It’s hard to detect in Updike’s extraordinary portrayal of both women the die-hard misogynist depicted by recent critics. He’s as good on female ageing as he is on art, and behind the unsparing observations of humanity, with all its flaws and vulnerabilities, lies a rueful compassion.

“‘All a woman does for a man…’ Hope reflects, ‘is secondary, inessential. Art was what these men had love—that is, themselves.'”

Blogger writes of Quarantines and Updike

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Blogger Ed Newman (Ennyman’s Territory: Arts, Culture and Other Life Obsessions) posted an entry today titled “Quarantines and Updike’s Four Life Forces.” It begins with a consideration of Leviticus 8:35 and the author revealing he once wanted to write a one-act play about the seven days and nights that Aaron and his sons were “quarantined” by the Lord so they “will not die.” Newman wonders (like so many who are suddenly seeing a lot more of family members than they’re accustomed to), “What did they talk about for seven days?”

“One of the positive’s of the Covid-19 pandemic may be how it forces us into some reflective thinking about who we are, and perhaps some deeper levels of communication with one another,” Newman writes, pivoting to “John Updike’s Four Life Forces” and sharing a blog post he wrote on the topic back in 2012.

“John Updike once suggested that there are four life forces: Love, Habit, Time and Boredom. This morning’s ramble (reference to my daily blogging) is the product of Habit. I’m not sure I have that much to say, and the proper thing to do when you have nothing to say is to shut your mouth. But then, I digress.

“When Updike speaks of love he is referring to passion. Passion is the driver that impels us to make sacrifices in order to accomplish great things. Passion is what makes Olympians, not simply skill. There are plenty of pianists with skill, but it’s passion that sets apart the cream from the rest. It’s passion that leads them to make the sacrifices necessary to sharpen their virtuosity,” he says of the first life force. Skipping ahead,

“Boredom is another of those interesting forces that surprised me when Updike placed it in this list, but it’s a real force. Bertrand Russell once observed, ‘Boredom is… a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.’ What strikes me is that last part of this statement. People really do fear boredom. And this may be why some people fear death. What if there really is an afterlife and it was boring? Eternal boredom would truly be hell.

“It’s this last life force that our current quarantine brought to mind. I wonder how well we’d all be doing if we did not have Internet connections and television sets or iPhones and were truly quarantined from one another. Would our actions be primarily driven by efforts to stave off boredom? Or would we motivated by the Passion driver, seeking to fulfill our purpose in being?

An insider’s thoughts on Updike and Roth

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As Charles McGrath explains in an essay on “Roth/Updike” that was published in the Autumn 2019 edition of The Hudson Review, he had the privilege of knowing John Updike well enough to play golf with him and Philip Roth enough to visit him in his home. Those privileges came to him because he was a literary insider, one whose essays appeared in The New Yorker (where he was deputy editor) and The New York Times Book Review (which he formerly edited).

His thoughtful consideration and comparison is perhaps the best essay written on the topic of Updike and Roth. Reading it, you get a pretty fair summary of each writer’s career but also an assessment of their relationship:  “They weren’t enemies, but neither were they friends, exactly. They were rivals who also happened to be mutual admirers—two of America’s greatest living writers, peering over each other’s shoulders.”

McGrath doesn’t shy away from assessing Updike’s and Roth’s careers, either. “Overnight, Roth and Updike became the two dirtiest book writers in America, or the two dirtiest with serious literary credentials. Then, in mid-career, each of them wrote a four-volume masterwork about a single character—Zuckerman in Roth’s case, Rabbit in Updike’s.”

“The two men weren’t in lockstep, and they weren’t imitating each other, certainly, but each was reading the other—with interest, admiration, maybe a tinge of envy—and surely they were both aware that each of them was assembling a major body of work and that (with the possible exception of Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison) no one else in America was writing at the same level.”

Continuing with a horse race analogy, McGrath writes,”Updike shot out in front with the first two Rabbit books; then, with The Ghost Writer, Roth caught up and even edged ahead a bit, before stumbling a little in mid-career while Updike, with the second two Rabbit books, took a big lead, practically lapping Roth. Then, just when Roth seemed to be out of gas, he got a second wind—probably the greatest late-career burst in all of American literature—with Sabbath’s Theater and the American Trilogy, and now Updike was struggling to catch up.”

Those assessments are wonderful, but it’s McGrath’s insightful perceptions of the two writers that makes this essay so poignantly powerful. He misses them and their book-a-year regimen, and so do many readers.

Read the full essay

 

Writer-actress picks Rabbit for her desert island companion

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TV watchers know British actress Katy Brand for such series as Katy Brand’s Big Ass Show, Nanny McPhee Returns, Psychobitches, and a very funny performance as Queen Elizabeth I on the U.K. version of Drunk History. Readers know her for her recently released I Carried a Watermelon: Dirty Dancing and Me, described as “a warm, witty and accessible look at how Katy Brand’s life-long obsession with the film has influenced her own attitudes on sex, love, romance, rights, and responsibilities.” And she’s also at least somewhat obsessed with John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy.

Brand—who told The Daily Mail that she just finished reading The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (she prefers The Handmaid’s Tale), confessed that she finds Charles Dickens “too perfectly realized and described–it feels as if there’s no room for me,” and finds Virginia Woolf “difficult to get along with”—named the full Rabbit collection by Updike as the book she would take to a desert island. “The first one is Rabbit, Run, then there are several more. I love the way he creates that mood of the American Dream without fully endorsing it.

“If I were allowed a couple more, I’d take Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth, which is funny and filthy and I love it, and also a couple by Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper, to cheer me up.

“They are two authors who always improve my mood if I’m feeling a little bleak. And maybe I’d sneak in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4, by the comic genius Sue Townsend.”

Read the full interview

Rabbit finds his way into a Sam Riviere poem

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In the U.K., Penguin’s Modern Poets Five: Occasional Wild Parties—featuring poems by Sam Riviere, Frederick Seidel, and Kathryn Maris—includes the poem “Year of the Rabbit,” by Riviere. The poem is also available to view online through Poemhunter.com, and so we include the full text here:

Year of the Rabbit

there is no purer form of advertising
than writing a poem
that’s what the monk told me
if I were a conceptual artist
I would make high-budget trailers
of john updike novels but no actual movie
the scene where angstrom drives towards
the end of his life down a street in the suburbs
lined with a type of tree he’s never bothered
to identify and laden with white blossoms
reflecting slickly in the windscreen
I would fade in the music
as the old song was fading out
keeping the backing vocals at the same distance
kind of balancing the silence
the word RABBIT appears in 10 foot trebuchet

Sam Riviere

 

Baby Boomer Report Card references Updike

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In his op-ed piece published in the Friday, August 9, 2019 New York Times (A23), David Brooks grades the Baby Boomer generation on Politics (C-), Social Movements (A), Pop Culture (A), High Culture (C-), Technology and Innovation (A-), Lifestyle (A), Manners and Morals (C), and Overall Grade (B).

In giving boomers a C- for High Culture, Brooks writes, “The boomers entered college just as universities were expanding and becoming more specialized and professionalized. This produced the most educated generation up to that time, but the specialization and ghettoization of intellectual and artistic life took its toll on the nation’s culture.

“It’s not that people aren’t producing good work, but its influence tends to be confined to the academy or specialized subcultures. Art, classical music and novels have lost cultural influence. Boomer writers do not play the same roles as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Maya Angelou, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Larkin, John Updike, and Toni Morrison. Many of the most influential living philosophers are pre-boomer—like Amartya Sen, Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre.”

Brooks concludes, “As a generation, boomers have excelled at the material things that make life pleasant, convenient, long and fun. They have struggled in the realms that other civilizations would have considered more profound: governance, philosophy, art and public morality.”

Golfer’s Journal features a personal consideration of Updike and golf

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A subscription is required, but if you’re high on golf and John Updike, as Matt Chominski is, you can plunk down the cash and read Chominski’s personal essay “Peculiar Bliss: Navigating family, marriage and golf with John Updike” that appears in the print-only Golfer’s Journal No. 9. Also in the issue is “The Bard’s Butter Cut: A Meeting and a match with Billy Collins, America’s rock-star poet.”

Of his Updike essay, Chominski wrote The John Updike Society in an email, “I actually start the piece referencing a lost Dante and his guide Virgil, and then place myself in the role of the pilgrim with Updike as my guide. The essay then dips in and out of his work from Golf Dreams, following the tripartite structure of the Divine Comedy. As the essay ends with the joys of a golfing life, it is fittingly titled ‘Peculiar Bliss,’ a phrase taken from Updike.”

Here’s the link to subscribe or purchase the current issue.

Updike’s booksigning generosity recalled

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Writer-artist-blogger Tim Lemire just published “Yours, John Updike,” a fun piece about signed books, recalling a time in high school when he visited a friend’s house and saw shelf-upon-shelf of books written by John Updike—all of them signed, though his friend’s father wasn’t a professor, a book reviewer, or a fellow novelist. He was an Updike lover . . . and collector.

Lemire tells how that friend’s father and another man showed up at a Harvard event with two duffel bags full of books they wanted Updike to sign.

“I get in line. Updike signs my books; I think him. Turning, I see that Sidney and Charlie have positioned themselves to be the very last in line. . . . Later that night, at home, I get a call from Sidney, who announces with a victor’s pride: ‘He signed them all.’

“Sidney describes the scene: While Mrs. Updike looks on with glowering impatience, John Updike sits in astonishment as one book of his after another is produced like an endless string of colored handkerchiefs from a top hat. As Sidney tells it, Updike delights in re-encountering foreign editions of his books or one-off publications that he had totally forgotten about.

“The story does not end there. The following year, Updike releases yet another book of short stories, and to promote it, he will be reading at the Borders bookstore in Boston’s Downtown Crossing. The newspaper ad for the event reads: ‘One signed book per person. No exceptions.'”

Writer describes living in Updike country

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Writing for Literary Hub, Thomas E. Ricks shared what it was like “Growing Up Inside a John Updike Novel” in the “Shadows at the Edge of Updike’s Work.”

Ricks said his first word—”boat”—was spoken “about the time that John Updike was moving into a small house a few miles to the north of Essex.”  But, “It was only recently, when reading Adam Begley’s biography of Updike, that I realized how much Updike and I breathed the same disconcerted air in those years. . . . Updike’s beaches were my beaches—Crane and Wingaersheek, both located between Gloucester’s rocks and Ipswich’s marshes. As newlyweds, Updike and his first wife had worked at the YMCA Family Camp on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, while my family around that time spent a week of the summer at Squam Lake, the next body of water to the west.”

“When old and wealthy, Updike spent some of his royalty payments golfing at the venerable Myopia Hunt Club, where my grandparents sometimes took me to dinner when I was a child,” Ricks writes. And getting even more into the territory of family myth he says, “My mother told me that once at a cocktail party, Updike poured a drink down the front of her dress. She was not sure if it had been on purpose.”

The writer considers how “At one point in Couples, one half of an adulterous couple contemplating having sex on a pile of dirty clothes in a basement laundry room in a house on the outskirts of Ipswich looks up at the cellar window to check if a ‘child’s watching shadow cleft it.’ I would have been seven years and eight years old in the year in which the novel is set, from early 1963 to early 1964. That might have been my shadow there,” he muses.

Read the full essay.