Rabbit's China, Gorbachev, Tiananmen Square . . .

"The nightly news has a lot of China on it—Gorbachev visiting, students protesting in Tiananmen Square, but not protesting Gorbachev, in fact they like him, all the world likes him, despite that funny mark on his head shaped like Japan. What the Chinese students seem to want is freedom, they want to be like Americans, but they look like Americans already, in blue jeans and T-shirts. Meanwhile in America itself the news is that not only President George Bush but Mrs. Bush the First Lady take showers with their dog Millie, and if that's all the Chinese want we should be able to give it to them, or something close, though it makes [Rabbit] miss Reagan slightly, at least he was dignified, and had that dream distance; the powerful thing about him as President is that you never knew how much he knew, nothing or everything, he was like God that way, you had to do a lot of it yourself."

~~ from Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

Mike Schmidt and Richie Ashburn

"On the radio on the way home, [Rabbit Angstrom] hears that Mike Schmidt, who exactly two years ago, on April 18, 1987, slugged his five hundredth home run, against the Pittsburgh Pirates in Three Rivers Stadium, is closing in on Richie Ashburn's total of 2,217 hits to become the hittingest Phillie ever. Rabbit remembers Ashburn. One of the Whiz Kids who beat the Dodgers for the pennant the fall Rabbit became a high-school senior. Curt Simmons, Del Ennis, Dick Sisler in center, Stan Lopata behind the plate. Beat the Dodgers the last game of the season, then lost to the Yankees four straight. In 1950 he was seventeen and had led the county B league with 817 points his junior season."

~~ from Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

Teju Cole on John Updike

"Had John Updike been African, he would have won the Nobel prize twenty years ago."

Rabbit at McDonald's

"[Roy] likes to pour salt out of the shaker until he has a heap and then rub the French fries in it, one by one. The French fries and about a pound of salt are all the kid eats; Harry finishes his Big Mac for him, even though he doesn't much care for all the Technicolor glop McDonald's puts on everything—pure chemicals. Whatever happened to the old-fashioned plain hamburger? Gone wherever the Chiclet went."

~~ from Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

Rabbit at Airport

"Airport prices, they nail you where there's no competition. Without competition, you get socialism and everybody free-loading and economies like they have in Cuba and Haiti. [Rabbit] pauses to glance at the magazines on the rack."

~~ from Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

Rabbit's last stop (sort of)

 

from Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

Whom or who, again?

"Number two: the 'who' or 'whom' business. This is very slightly trickier. 'John, whom I know to be an honourable man' is right; 'John, whom I know is an honourable man' is wrong. Here's what you do: you mentally recast the subclauses as main clauses — 'I know him to be an honourable man', 'I know he is an honourable man' — and your ear will guide you: 'him' demands 'whom', and 'he' demands 'who' . . . In conversational prose be wary of whom. In the closing pages of Herzog, Bellow writes, 'Whom was I kidding?' This is grammatically correct; it also leaves the sentence up on one stilt. 'Whom the fuck d'you think you're looking at?' Or even worse, 'At whom the fuck d'you think you're looking?' Never worry about ending a sentence with a preposition. 'That rule', Churchill famously said, 'is the kind of pedantry up with which I will not put.'"

~~ from Inside Story: A Novel by Martin Amis

an obvious moral and economic fiasco

"But Rabbit [Angstrom] was saying what almost all Americans say, or whisper: the more you earn the longer you deserve to live. For-profit healthcare is such an obvious moral and economic fiasco that only ideology — in the form of inherited and unexamined beliefs — could possibly explain its survival."

~~ from Inside Story: A Novel by Martin Amis

to free me from their grief

"The summer that my brother died, I moved home to be with my parents, until one day in August my mother told me to leave, to 'go and live your life.' What a gift that was, to free me from their grief. A few weeks later, I boarded an Amtrak train to New York City, my clothes and manuscript in a Hefty trash bag, $1,000 in my front jeans pocket."

~~ from Morningstar: Growing Up with Books by Ann Hood

the American novel as it was according to John Updike in 1989

In 1989, John Updike assessed the state of the American novel, and then he discussed some of his own books and related topics.

The Portrait Gallery

It's not as developed as her masterful "These Precious Days," but Ann Patchett's "The Portrait Gallery" is at least somewhat touching even as she unintentionally depicts John Updike as a bit of a creeper in his fixation on whether or not each prizewinner would get a kiss. Fitting that I tweeted a mention to his late seventies PA Rabbit is Rich yesterday without knowing I'd be reading about Updike toward his end this evening. Read "These Precious Days" if you have time for a longer piece of writing. 

Not Only On Moral Fiction

As has been reported here, reading John Gardner's Mickelsson's Ghosts led to my return to writing novels and from there, through effort and luck I was able to publish one, and then two, but Gardner was never my favorite writer. Based upon my reading of that one long acclaimed novel, he was fundamentally sound and usually interesting, but the book was not on the same level as Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, or John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor. I once read an interview where Gardner placed himself in a big three, which possibly included Pynchon and Norman Mailer, I can't remember exactly, but this wasn't evident to me from reading Mickelsson's Ghosts. The novel trended toward realism, but for American realism, I prefer Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, John Updike's Rabbit is Rich, Fred Exley's A Fan's Notes (I think of it as such), and several others. Gardner did have wider range than all of these writers though, working as a scholar and teacher even as he produced in many different genres although to the best of my knowledge none were what we would call "genre fiction."

Everyone knows that Gardner was the first to mentor Raymond Carver, but before reading this new piece in The Paris Review, I was unaware that he also taught greats like Charles Johnson and Toni Morrison. And the final motorcycle ride off the road makes it seem as if he was a far badder dude than writers like Bellow and Morrison who aged gracefully in the comfort and security that we imagine prestigious tenure lines ensure. I suppose that would have been Gardner's destiny too if he had lived. But he died at 49, only a year older than I am now. The Paris Review article mentions that he has remained "on the syllabus," although I've only read On Moral Fiction for a class. In twenty years of teaching literature classes, the majority of which were for Gardner's period (American, after 1945), I've never assigned any of his fiction, and I think I've only seen Grendel and On Moral Fiction assigned by others. (It's possible that Bellow, Barth, John Updike, and a few others have done even more of a disappearing act. I'm not sure.) The only time I've ever discussed Gardner, I'm almost certain, was in the context of his lending a hand to a young Raymond Carver, janitor, who needed quiet office space. Gardner was there for many other writers.

#tbs: Rabbit Is 1979

‪In Rabbit Is Rich, John Updike wrote,

"Poor old Eagles out of their misery, Jaworski went down flinging" (498).

Rabbit Is Rich takes place in 1979 and includes quite a bit of Philadelphia, including a funny paragraph about suburban white folks getting lost in a part of West Philly near where I grew up. 

In my University City in 1979, I remember my father as in and out of work during the late seventies. Once we found five dollars near the corner of 44th or 45th and Larchwood or Osage, and instantly, my father knew this could be gas money to get us to Hershey Park. I can't remember if he held a job at the time. If you're here now, you've probably seen my earlier reports about searching for an affordable Christmas tree. I have hundreds of pages written about my father, most of it written as rough draft in 2002, about a year after he passed, and I hope to get more of it into print.

some French Jews read Celine

According to an article published a few years ago in The Jewish Daily Forward, some French Jews continue to be fascinated with Celine. Here are two of the final paragraphs:

Decades later, other Jewish writers remain firmly fascinated by Céline, drooling or not. Parisian bookseller and writer Mikaël Hirsch, born in 1973, is a grandson of Louis-Daniel Hirsch, who served as Gallimard’s sales manager for more than half a century. The younger Hirsch’s 2010 novel “The Outcast,” out in paperback August 31 [from Les editions J’ai Lu], describes the true story of how, in 1954, Mikaël’s father, then working as a Gallimard messenger boy (he is renamed Gérard Cohen for the purposes of the novel), delivered printer’s proofs to Céline in Meudon, or what the novel calls “Célinegrad.” There, Céline’s “reprobate” status echoes with the young Cohen’s own feelings of exclusion for being too Jewish, or not Jewish enough, to please his compatriots.

 

Another French-Jewish author, Émile Brami, who is of Tunisian origin and once owned a Paris bookshop devoted to Céline, currently maintains a blog, “Le Petit Célinien,” and has also written studies on his favorite author. Last year, Brami produced a mystery novel, “Massacre for a Bagatelle,” published by L’Editeur and set in the murky world of collectors of Céline manuscripts and rare editions. Such books suggest that Céline is a permanent presence, albeit one incarnating for many readers the epitome of rabid hatred and prejudice, on the French literary landscape. Celebrate him or not, Céline is, for better or for worse — much worse in his case — here to stay.

Several years ago, I began Celine's Death on the Installment Plan but never finished it. I do hope to one day, along with Updike's Rabbit Is Rich and several other more recent "stuck in the middle" books. It was satisfying to read Malamud's A New Life in its entirety this summer, nearly 20 years after putting it down after 100 pages or so. 

For favorite books written by writers with somewhat rabid antisemitic tendencies (more than just the usual Jew joke), I'd go with Voltaire's Candide and Hamsun's Hunger. Those are the first two that come to mind. Alas, there's the taint of antisemitism and many other prejudices (misogyny, racism, etc.) in so much of the canon as well as many contemporary novels, even with a sense that most big-name publishers are far more "PC" in their tastes these days.