Susan Gerstein's Blog - Posts Tagged "john-updike"
Rabbit Revisited
Half way through reacquainting myself with Rabbit Angstrom, having just finished the second of John Updike’s four Rabbit books, I am stunned by the power of a great book to reinvent itself and hold up a mirror to the reader reflecting a remembered world and remembered emotions from a half a century ago. For Rabbit shook us up and astonished us back in the sixties and seventies when the shimmering mirror reflected reality; and yet, if possible, he is more powerful now when we look back from a reality changed beyond all recognition and what we are being shown is simply The Way We Were.
In a sense I grew up with Rabbit. Still quite new to this country, I discovered, with delight, the New Yorker magazine and begun to devour it at the end of the fifties, and there I discovered John Updike and his short stories. “Rabbit, Run” was published in 1960 and I happened on it in 1961, shortly after I had escaped a short-lived, disastrous period of my life in Paterson, a city in New Jersey not unlike Brewer, Pennsylvania. By 1961 I lived in my beloved Manhattan, and it was from that safe-seeming perch that I read of Rabbit’s adventures. I was stunned, by the bone-chilling truth describing the physical environment, by the emotional truth of the trapped characters’ flailing attempts at finding their own center, the daringly truthful descriptions of sex – but more then anything else, by the glorious, poetic language that makes you stop in mid-sentence over and over again to re-read a paragraph and try to commit it to memory. Later, reading all of Updike’s writings over the years, I understood that the masterful use of the English language is his tradecraft, so to speak; that, no matter what the subject matter is, who the characters are, the language shimmers. English was a new language to me at the time of “Rabbit, Run”, therefore I was even more appreciative of the clarity and beauty of the very words I was reading. It was sad to say goodbye to Rabbit at the final pages, for I would have liked to know which direction his life was going to take. The author did not tell us at the time.
Ten years passed. While, for most of us, life went on, people married, divorced, had children, prospered or ailed, the country was going through one of its most traumatic periods. A president was killed, a contentious war at the other side of the planet was fought, race riots, civil rights battles raged, the emergence of the feminist revolution shook up the existing social order while American astronauts landed on the Moon: these were the events that shaped the Sixties.
Updike continued to write prolifically, novels, essays, short stories, as the decade wore on. I read them as they appeared. When I heard news in 1970 that a sequel to “Rabbit, Run” was about to be published, I was jubilant: now I will find out whether Rabbit returned to his forlorn young wife, joined his pregnant lover – or took an unexpected third road and ran off to Brasil by himself.
“Rabbit Redux” came out in 1971, and I still retain the memory – now reinforced – of coming to its last page with a physical knot in my insides, as if I had been punched. This, I thought then, and still think now, is one of the great books of all times. Nowhere else, then or since, had I encountered a more brilliant description of the decade, its traumatic effect on the lives of all who lived through it. Rabbit, the Everyman, is both witness and actor in the metaphoric events that he, both passively and wittingly, participates in. Through his eyes we watch the death of the small city, the boiling-up of racial anger, the self-destruction of a drug-addicted generation. In the background, we half-hear the nightly news on television, benumbed by the casual mention of deaths by riot, by battle, by drugs. And yet, there is a Man on the Moon. Janice, Rabbit’s mousy wife of ten years ago, comes into her own here: in perfect symmetry to Rabbit’s attempt at escape from domesticity in “Rabbit, Run”, here Janice is the one to make the attempt. Very rarely had I read as acute and insightful a description of a woman’s growth from scared mouse to self-assertion. Janice in love, and finally, stepping away from that love to return to husband and child and “right the ship” is given the full dignity of someone who had attained a degree of wisdom. While Updike writes from a male viewpoint of necessity and it is Rabbit himself who is the stand-in for the author, he is also unsurpassed at depicting women, and Janice in her renunciation is magnificently done.
In the flick of an eye another ten years will pass: I am about to read “Rabbit is Rich”. Rabbit will be middle aged, as we were when he originally reappeared in our lives; and then, another decade will pass, "Rabbit At Rest" will appear; Rabbit will age and die. But not really: one will be able to conjure him up over and over again at any point of his life, as boy, as young parent, as hapless lover, as comfortable burger; and he will learn, with new readers, to find his way in a confusing, difficult world. May he live forever.
In a sense I grew up with Rabbit. Still quite new to this country, I discovered, with delight, the New Yorker magazine and begun to devour it at the end of the fifties, and there I discovered John Updike and his short stories. “Rabbit, Run” was published in 1960 and I happened on it in 1961, shortly after I had escaped a short-lived, disastrous period of my life in Paterson, a city in New Jersey not unlike Brewer, Pennsylvania. By 1961 I lived in my beloved Manhattan, and it was from that safe-seeming perch that I read of Rabbit’s adventures. I was stunned, by the bone-chilling truth describing the physical environment, by the emotional truth of the trapped characters’ flailing attempts at finding their own center, the daringly truthful descriptions of sex – but more then anything else, by the glorious, poetic language that makes you stop in mid-sentence over and over again to re-read a paragraph and try to commit it to memory. Later, reading all of Updike’s writings over the years, I understood that the masterful use of the English language is his tradecraft, so to speak; that, no matter what the subject matter is, who the characters are, the language shimmers. English was a new language to me at the time of “Rabbit, Run”, therefore I was even more appreciative of the clarity and beauty of the very words I was reading. It was sad to say goodbye to Rabbit at the final pages, for I would have liked to know which direction his life was going to take. The author did not tell us at the time.
Ten years passed. While, for most of us, life went on, people married, divorced, had children, prospered or ailed, the country was going through one of its most traumatic periods. A president was killed, a contentious war at the other side of the planet was fought, race riots, civil rights battles raged, the emergence of the feminist revolution shook up the existing social order while American astronauts landed on the Moon: these were the events that shaped the Sixties.
Updike continued to write prolifically, novels, essays, short stories, as the decade wore on. I read them as they appeared. When I heard news in 1970 that a sequel to “Rabbit, Run” was about to be published, I was jubilant: now I will find out whether Rabbit returned to his forlorn young wife, joined his pregnant lover – or took an unexpected third road and ran off to Brasil by himself.
“Rabbit Redux” came out in 1971, and I still retain the memory – now reinforced – of coming to its last page with a physical knot in my insides, as if I had been punched. This, I thought then, and still think now, is one of the great books of all times. Nowhere else, then or since, had I encountered a more brilliant description of the decade, its traumatic effect on the lives of all who lived through it. Rabbit, the Everyman, is both witness and actor in the metaphoric events that he, both passively and wittingly, participates in. Through his eyes we watch the death of the small city, the boiling-up of racial anger, the self-destruction of a drug-addicted generation. In the background, we half-hear the nightly news on television, benumbed by the casual mention of deaths by riot, by battle, by drugs. And yet, there is a Man on the Moon. Janice, Rabbit’s mousy wife of ten years ago, comes into her own here: in perfect symmetry to Rabbit’s attempt at escape from domesticity in “Rabbit, Run”, here Janice is the one to make the attempt. Very rarely had I read as acute and insightful a description of a woman’s growth from scared mouse to self-assertion. Janice in love, and finally, stepping away from that love to return to husband and child and “right the ship” is given the full dignity of someone who had attained a degree of wisdom. While Updike writes from a male viewpoint of necessity and it is Rabbit himself who is the stand-in for the author, he is also unsurpassed at depicting women, and Janice in her renunciation is magnificently done.
In the flick of an eye another ten years will pass: I am about to read “Rabbit is Rich”. Rabbit will be middle aged, as we were when he originally reappeared in our lives; and then, another decade will pass, "Rabbit At Rest" will appear; Rabbit will age and die. But not really: one will be able to conjure him up over and over again at any point of his life, as boy, as young parent, as hapless lover, as comfortable burger; and he will learn, with new readers, to find his way in a confusing, difficult world. May he live forever.
