UPDIKE . . . IN THE AIR AND ON THE BRAIN

John Updike is in the air. Last weekend the Kennedy Library in Boston hosted a symposium on his work and the New York Times Book Review included a review of his posthumously-published book of stories My Father’s Tears. Prompted by his death earlier this year, I already had Updike on my summer reading list; I guess those further prompts put him on my brain, so I decided finally to sit down with his novel Rabbit, Run. For whatever reason, I have not tuned in much to Updike. I know that I read his much-anthologized short story “Lifeguard” when I was an undergrad . . . and I think that I must not have liked it: that might have been enough to put Updike on my “non-essential” list. But recently I re-taught his just-as-much-anthologized short story “A & P,” which I quite like. In between I’ve read odds and ends—his iconic piece “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” for example, on Red Sox legend Ted Williams’ last at-bat, in 1960: “Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark”—so it famously begins. And I've read quite a few of his book reviews in The New Yorker . . . though with those reviews I always felt like I was listening in on a conversation between Updike and his loyal readers that had begun decades earlier. . . .

Having now just finished Rabbit, Run, I can appreciate some of what I’ve been missing over the past few decades. Updike’s protagonist, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, is a thoroughly unlikable lout—an anti-hero in a literal as well as a literary sense—but the novel itself is compelling reading. I’ve never paid any attention to Updike as a poet (though I know he’s prolific) but there is certainly a lyric poet’s sensibility at work in the authorial eye for detail that defines the narrative. At the same time, there is a natural-born storyteller’s sensibility at work in the utterly persuasive symbiotic development of plot and character. And not just of Harry’s character: the Episcopalian minister Jack Eccles, his earnestness serving as an essential counterweight to Harry’s protracted adolescence, is fully engaging in his own right and steals several of the novel’s finely-wrought scenes. In fact, the novel comprises scene after scene that read as wonderful set pieces, with various characters coming to the fore, yet each and every one of these scenes integrates seamlessly into the narrative as a whole.

One of the scenes that I found particularly intriguing from a literary standpoint involves Ruth, Harry’s paramour (a far more polite term than Harry himself would use!). Is it just coincidental that her musings on Harry in a three-and-a-half page interior monologue about halfway through the novel remind me of Molly Bloom’s musings in the “Penelope” episode that closes James Joyce’s Ulysses? Perhaps . . . but factoring in that he names Harry’s foil “Eccles,” which is the name of the northside Dublin street where Molly and Leopold Bloom live, I suspect that Updike is giving a nod of acknowledgment in Joyce’s direction. Fueled by booze, Harry’s wife Janice’s interior monologue, later in the novel, is not quite so Molly-esque, though her resentment toward her husband’s sexual advance toward her shortly after childbirth also has a familiar ring to it: “Makes you feel filthy they don’t even have decent names for parts of you.” Hmmm . . .

Part of what makes Harry Angstrom so unlikable is his relative youth: he is in his mid-twenties . . . yet he wallows in an angst that would be a far better fit on a man twenty or thirty years his senior—Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe, perhaps, or even Larry McMurtry’s Duane Moore. Still, I will probably—eventually—revisit this character by way of Updike’s sequels to Rabbit, Run: Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. Maybe “Rabbit” redeems himself somewhere along the way . . .