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 . . .

DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS . . . AND OTHER SUMMER READING

Summertime . . . and the reading is easy—or at least easier than during the other seasons of the year. I had no particular goal or plan for summer reading when I got started in June, but looking back over the past three months, I see that I’ve taken a decent run at my fiction bookshelf in particular.

I began by devouring in pretty much one sitting Steve Martin’s novella Shopgirl—a wistful tale of loneliness and love: an odd but engaging little book. Then I read Don DeLillo’s novella Pafko at the Wall; it is actually the prologue to his novel Underworld, but it was published in a stand-alone edition in 2001, the 50th anniversary of “the shot heard round the world,” Bobby Thompson’s pennant-winning home run for the New York Giants against the Brooklyn Dodgers on October 3, 1951, which the narrative focuses on. I started with those two shorties because I wanted to establish some readerly momentum early in the summer.

Next up was Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men—as dark and as grim and as gripping as anything I’ve ever read (including Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, which I read a number of years ago and still have not recovered from). I’m not sure when I’ll be ready for the movie. . . . After that I stayed deep in the heart of Texas with Larry McMurtry’s Texasville, the sequel to The Last Picture Show, which I read in the summer of 2007. I had been surprised by how unsophisticated (in a narrative sense) The Last Picture Show is—Texasville is even less sophisticated (and much longer), and I have to admit that I almost gave up on McMurtry’s yarn-spinning a number of times . . . but then there would be some little plot twist or character quirk that kept me going. And I guess the ongoing midlife (mis)adventures of protagonist Duane Moore must have me sufficiently intrigued, as I’ve already picked up a copy of the next installment, Duane’s Depressed. (Apparently there’s a fourth installment too, but the reviews of it are so bad that I’ve promised myself that I’ll not go there.)

If, in a sense, McMurtry’s version of Texas helped to dilute the bleakness of McCarthy’s version, in which the human capacity for utter evil is truly palpable, then Richard Ford’s Independence Day (the sequel to The Sportswriter, which I read two years ago) helped to add some gravity to the male midlife wistfulness of Texasville. Like McMurtry’s novel, Independence Day focuses on a man in his late 40s trying to make sense of life as he knows it—and trying (not always successfully) to live a decent life: trying to be a decent parent and a decent ex-husband and a decent citizen within his community, and so on. . . . McMurtry’s vision is mostly comic—Ford’s is not. . . . Independence Day is long and slow-moving, but altogether compelling, and I already have on the shelf the next installment of the adventures of Ford’s Frank Bascombe—The Lay of the Land.

After those two doorstoppers, I needed something a bit shorter and a bit less dense, and Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher fit the bill: it is deftly plotted with engaging characters and a thematic center with something at stake (the way that “the religious right” would take over even our youth soccer fields). A very satisfying read: entertaining but also thought-provoking. Perrotta will be visiting UMass Boston on Sunday afternoon, November 16th to read from his work under the banner of the fourth annual Shaun O’Connell Lecture.

Speaking of UMass Boston, the next book I picked up was Inland, the fourth novel by old friend and now-retired UMB colleague K. C. (Chet) Frederick. Unlike his first three novels, which are all set in unnamed countries in eastern Europe, this one is set at a graduate school in the American Midwest in the late 1950s. The novel captures the early Cold War paranoia of its time and place: populated by interesting characters and punctuated by finely executed scenes, Inland is well worth reading.

As soon as I put down Inland, I picked up another book engaging with the Midwest in the 1950s: Bill Bryson’s often-hilarious memoir of growing up in Des Moines—The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. I plucked that book off the shelf in a summer house in Rhode Island where I was visiting for the weekend; I was enjoying it so much that when the weekend ended I was tempted to steal it (well, borrow it . . . ) from our absent hosts, but I opted to get it out of my local library instead and finish it off.

After a few good laughs compliments of Bryson, I guess I felt ready for more denseness and darkness as I then returned to Cormac McCarthy—this time to his mostly-south-of-the-border-down-Mexico-way novel All the Pretty Horses. What a terrific book! I think I would include it on my Top 10 list of all-time favorites. The personal quest undertaken on horseback by young John Grady Cole takes on a mythic edge that cut deep into my readerly marrow. And reading this novel helped to underscore for me the difference between a yarn-spinner like McMurtry and a true storyteller like McCarthy: the world of McMurtry’s Texasville is mostly a projected pseudo-Texas, at times really a caricature of Texas, whereas McCarthy’s Texas-Mexico border country feels altogether grounded in “the real world.” Coming soon to a bookshelf near me: the other two volumes of “the Border Trilogy.”

Meanwhile, back at the ranch (as it were), I decided to expand my range and so picked up The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Junot Diaz. The hype surrounding this novel—specifically the fact that it took Diaz upwards of 10 years to write it—reminded me of the hype that accompanied the publication of Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim Two Boys a few years ago: put off by the hype, I was mildly skeptical about O’Neill’s novel . . . until I starting reading it. Ditto for my experience with Diaz’s novel: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is really an impressive piece of writing. In effect an exegesis of Dominican-American culture and society, the novel is both thematically and stylistically rich (much of the narrative as well as much of the dialogue is written in Spanglish); at times horrific in its depiction of “La Era de Trujillo” in the Dominican Republic, it is yet both humorous and poignant. In other words, it is very satisfying in every respect.

With August winding down, I concluded my summer reading with something completely different: Out Stealing Horses by Norwegian novelist Per Petterson. I have to admit that despite the critical acclaim this novel has received, I found it rather plodding and shapeless: not uninteresting . . . but hardly riveting. Still, I can’t complain, given the wealth of books that I did manage to work my way through from June through August.