Updike’s Rabbit

Here I am, pushing 81 years, and have just started John Updike’s famous Rabbit books. Wife Cynthia and her sister Nancy read those books many years ago, so long ago that they’ve forgotten most of it. My education is just beginning?

Daughter Kate is letting me borrow the entire series of four Rabbit books. She’s happy that I’m finally reading them. They made a profound impression on her young life, not so very long ago.

At the moment I’m on the last section of Rabbit Redux, having completed Rabbit Run. The section I finally completed last evening, called Skeeter, was breathtaking and heart rending. It captures the mood and issues of the 1960′s with great insight I think. The young black man and Vietnam vet, Skeeter is a devilishly complex bitter guy; the young rich girl Jill, escaped from her Stonington, Conn., home, is brilliant, guilt ridden and incredibly needy, Rabbit’s son Nelson is coming of age in all this, and Rabbit himself is getting an education and confronting reality and truth in spite of himself.

I looked up Updike on Wikipedia and it turns out his Rabbit books are considered his most famous and successful. My favorite author (until Updike?) Ian McEwan heaps high praise:

Updike is a master of effortless motion – between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalisation, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic. For his own particular purposes, Updike devised for himself a style of narration, an intense, present tense, free indirect style, that can leap up, whenever it wants, to a God’s-eye view of Harry, or the view of his put-upon wife, Janice, or victimised son, Nelson. This carefully crafted artifice permits here assumptions about evolutionary theory, which are more Updike than Harry, and comically sweeping notions of Jewry, which are more Harry than Updike. This is at the heart of the tetralogy’s achievement. Updike once said of the Rabbit books that they were an exercise in point of view. This was typically self-deprecating, but contains an important grain of truth. Harry’s education extends no further than high school, and his view is further limited by a range of prejudices and a stubborn, combative spirit, yet he is the vehicle for a half-million-word meditation on postwar American anxiety, failure and prosperity. A mode had to be devised to make this possible, and that involved pushing beyond the bounds of realism. In a novel like this, Updike insisted, you have to be generous and allow your characters eloquence, “and not chop them down to what you think is the right size”.

I copied the above from the Wiki on Updike.

Here’s John Updike in the 1060′s. He was three years younger than me.

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