"Rabbit is Rich" by John Updike

 

The third novel in the Rabbit tetralogy. Awarded the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

It's written using the interior monologue of Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, the American Leopold Bloom. He thinks of sex (he can scarcely see any woman without undressing her in this mind), the people he knows who have died, and money, even to paragraphs in which he calculates profits and margins. His conversation is of the outlook for business (the oil crisis of the mid-1970s is hitting America hard) and the shortcomings of others. I presume he represents the soulless Everyman of the USA.

The narrative sometimes slides into the thoughts of Nelson, the son whose life journey is too similar to his father's for their relationship to be anything but antagonistic. The young lion is trying to supplant the head of the pride who is using every trick in a social animal's to stay dominant.

The lives of the characters are documented with unblinking honesty to produce a bleak portrait of suburban America of that time. Is it so different today?

Trigger warning: racist words are used by racist characters.

The first two books are:

• Rabbit, Run
• Rabbit Redux.

Selected quotes:

• “The great thing about the dead, they make space.” (Ch 1)
• “He and the kid years ago went through something for which Rabbit has forgiven himself but which he knows the kid never has. A girl called Jill died ... But the years have piled on, the survivors have patched things up, and so many more have joined the dead, undone by diseases for which only God is to blame, that it no longer seems so bad, it seems more as if Jill just moved to another town, where the population is growing. ... Think of all the blame God has to shoulder.” (Ch 1)
• “They say you should encourage reading, but they never say why.” (Ch 2)
• “What a threadbare thing we make of life!” (Ch 2)
• “His sentences seem to keep travelling around the corner after they are pronounced.” (Ch 2)
• “If a meaning of life was to show up you'd think it would have by now.” (Ch 3)
• “The thing about those Rotarians, if you knew them as kids you can't stop seeing the kid in them, dressed up in fat and baldness and money like a cardboard tuxedo in a play for high school assembly.” (Ch 3)
• “That's why we love disaster ... it puts us back in touch with guilt and sends us crawling back to God. Without a sense of being in the wrong with no better than animals.” (Ch 4)

In the final chapter Rabbit muses about "some professor at Princeton's theory that bin ancient times the gods spoke to people directly through the left or was it the right half of their brains, they were like robots with radios in their heads telling them everything to do, and then somehow around the time of the ancient Greeks or Assyrians the system broke up ..." I presume this is the theory advanced in 1976 by Julian Jaynes in his book The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Given that this book follows Rabbit's stream of consciousness, this theory has substantial implications for the narrative.

October 2025; 285 small print pages

First published in the USA  in 1981

My 'Rabbit Omnibus' edition was issued in the UK by Penguin in 1991.

Also by Updike and reviewed in this blog:

• Brazil
• Terrorist

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"As I Lay Dying" by William Faulkner

 Addie Bundren has asked to be buried not near her home but over in Jefferson; this necessitates the family making an epic journey with the coffined corpse. The journey takes far longer than it should have done, because the river has flooded and the bridges cannot be crossed, and because of the attitude of Addie's husband Anse, who repeatedly refuses help because he will not be beholden to anyone. "It's like a man who has let everything slide all his life to get set on something that will make the most trouble for everybody he knows." (p 78)

The story is told in a multiple perspective stream of consciousness, a bit like Ulysses by James Joyce, except that Faulkner uses fifteen narrators while Joyce used only three and, importantly, because Faulkner's characters sometimes know things they cannot know, transcending time and place, including the by-then-dead Addie, who has a chapter reflecting upon her life.

Once again, the fifty per cent rule works: Darl articulates secrets about both Jewel and Dewey Dell exactly half way through the book.

Characters

I was immensely confused about who was who after the first thirty pages. Each chapter is headed with the name of the character who is narrating. To be helpful, here are the main characters.

• Addie Bundren, the dying woman, later a corpse.
• Anse Bundren, her husband. He repeatedly describes himself as a 'luckless' man but it is his dogmatism, his delaying and refusal to seek help that causes many of the problems the other characters face.
• Addie and Anse have five children:
• Cash the eldest boy, a skilled carpenter, methodical and careful, and incredibly stoical.
• Darl the second eldest, the main narrator, a character who is much more fluent and articulate than any of the others, so much so that he transcends the limitations of his education.
• Jewel, the third eldest, who loves horses; it turns out that he is not Anse's son but, apart from Addie and his biological father, and perhaps Darl, and maybe Jewel himself, no one else seems to know.
• Dewey Dell, the girl, who has got herself pregnant and is secretly seeking an abortion.
• Vardaman, the littlest boy, whose stream of consciousness displays his immaturity.
• Other characters include Vernon Tull, the neighbouring farmer, and his hyper religious wife Cora (Vernon's relationship with Cora is summarised when he muses on how God could leave the Universe to Core: “I reckon if there's ere a man or woman anywhere that He could turn it all over to and go away with His mind at rest, it would be Cora. And I reckon she would make a few changes, no matter how He was running it. And I reckon they would be for man's good. Leastways, we would have to like them. Leastways, we might as well go on and make like we did.”; p 65); Peabody the doctor; and Reverend Whitfield the local pastor.

There are stupendous descriptions:

• “Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the sockets of iron candle-sticks.” (p 5)
• “It would be black, the shelf black, the still surface of the water a round orifice in nothingness.” (p 7)
• “The horse snorts, then Jewel sees him, glinting for a gaudy instant among the blue shadows.” (p 8)
• “He flows upward in a stooping swirl like the lash of a whip, his body in mid-air shaped to the horse.” (p 9)
• “The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads.” (p 34)
• “She looks at us. Only her eyes seem to move. It's like they touch us, not with sight or sense, but like the stream from a hose touches you, the stream at the instant of impact as dissociated from the nozzle as though it had never been there.” (p 37 - 38)
  
• “He looks like right after the maul hits the steer and it Ed no longer alive and don't yet know that it is dead.” (p 54)
• "Motionless, the tall buzzards hang in soaring circles, the clouds giving them an illusion of retrograde." (p 82)

There are thought-provoking observations:

• “When I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind - and that of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.” (p 37)
• “Now and then a fellow gets to thinking about it. Not often, though. Which is a good thing. For the Lord aimed for him to do and not to spend too much time thinking, because his brain it's like a piece of machinery: it won't stand a whole lot of racking. It's best when it all runs along the same, doing the day's work and not no one part used no more than needful.” (p 63)
• "I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn of He don't take some curious ways to show it, seems like." (p 95)
• "You can't tell about them. Just about when you decide they mean one thing, I be durn if you not only haven't got to change your mind, like as not you got to take a raw-hiding for thinking they meant it." (p 102)
• "A fellow can see every now and then that children have more sense than him, But he don't like to admit it to them until they have beards." (p 123)
• "My father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time." (p 153)
• "How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-strings: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls." (p 188)
• "I ain't sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he ain't." (p 214)
• "Some folks have the smooth, pretty boards to build a court-house with and others don't have no more than rough lumber fitten to build a chicken coop. But it's better to build atight chicken coop than a shoddy court-house." (p 215)

This was one of the novels Faulkner had written before being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is a read which challenges the reader to work out who is who and what their back stories are, and I'm not sure after a single read-through that I haven't missed some of the subtleties, but the inevitability of tragedy builds up and builds up until you can hardly bear to find out what must happen next.

One of those books I need to think about and re-visit.

September 2020; 240 pages

Books and plays written by Nobel Laureates that I have reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Vanishing Acts" by Jodi Picoult

Delia, expert at tracking lost people with her dog Greta and mother of four-year-old Sophie, is preparing for her wedding with Sophie's father, alcoholic attorney Eric, when her father, Andrew, is arrested for abducting her as a child twenty-eight years ago. With their best friend, journalist Fitz, they travel to Arizona where Andrew experiences the gangland hell that is US jail and Delia rediscovers her mother while preparing for the trial.

It's a typical Picoult story, told from multiple perspectives, in the present tense (which creates more tension by permitting the narrator, and the reader, not to know what's coming next) with twists all the way to the end, but I felt that the prison gang scenes and the Hopi Reservation scenes tangential to the main thrust of the story. They were a distraction. If I worked hard enough I guess I could unpick the metaphor linking them to the theme but the story of Andrew seemed designed to sensationalise, and critique the US fixation of crime and incarceration, and certainly diffuse any moral there might have been or any sense that the goodies won. But I suppose that was all on a par with the very post-modern message about truth and memory:

• "A witness is defined through what he sees, not what he says." (Part 1, Eric)
• "It takes two people to make a lie work: the person who tells it and the one who believes it." (Part 2, Delia)

But it felt as if the jail scenes had been added either to spice up the narrative or because Picoult wanted to say something about society. There were other socio-political statements I thought were more subtly done:

• "I pass a plethora of child-care centres - the hallmark of a town whose inhabitants have to pawn their kids off on someone else so they can be teachers and nannies and cops in upscale neighbourhoods where they can't afford to live." (Part 2, Fitz)
• "I was one of the ghosthood of Mexican-Americans  who lurked in the background of other people's lives - as chambermaids and busboys and gardeners." (Part 3, Elise)

I also found the occupations of these characters a little too contrived. That Delia did search and rescue was a great metaphor but belaboured. As for Andrew, he has two useful skills: one as a pharmacist whose thirty year old studies are still so fresh in his mind that he can quote the recipe for crystal meth from memory; the other as a magician (another not-so-subtel metaphor)

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Picoult can write page-turners in which you are emotional;ly invested in the characters. There is a fantastic hook as the closing line of chapter one when Delia, as her father is being arrested for kidnapping Bethany Matthews, asks who she is and he replies: "You are." Wow.

There are several fabulously original descriptions:

• "Rearranging themselves like some kind of cog puzzle every time a new entrant arrives." (Part 2, Andrew)
• "I found myself watching a shaft of sunlight play Elise's skin like the bow of a violin." (Part 4, Andrew)

Other great moments:

• "This time, though, she wasn't leaving on her own behalf but someone else's." (Part 1, Eric)
• "Attentive mothers tended to be the ones with the most helpless babies: humans and chicks and mice." (Part 3, Delia)
• "When your mother is made out of dreams, anything real is bound to disappoint you." (Part 3, Delia)
• "I knew men. My mother had taught me how to ... keep away the ones who only saw you as a single step, rather than a destination." (Part 3, Elise)
• "Not everyone understands how you can spin two lassos at the same time, one of hope and one of grief." (Part 3, Elise)
• "For someone who can't remember very much, there seems to be a lot I can't forget." (Part 6, Delia)
• "We always say that children belong to their parents when it's really the other way around." (Part 6, Delia)
• "Most of us are just doin' life on the installment plan." (Part 6, Andrew)

May 2020; 420 pages

Other Picoult books I have enjoyed and reviewed in this blog are:
Songs of the Humpback Whale
Small Great Things

"The Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tan

This is a book about mothers and daughters. Four Chinese women, living in San Francisco, meet every week to play Mah Jong and to discuss their jointly invested shares as members of the Joy Luck club. This book holds their stories and, for each woman, a story of one of their daughters. The book is in four quarters, each quarter having four stories although not all of the characters is represented equally. There is no formal plot to the book: each story is complete in itself, but each connects with the others of its dynasty, and together they combine to create a sort of bricolage on the theme of the experience of the Chinese woman, especially regarding those who live in America.

As an example of ethnic literature it reminded me very much of There, There by Tommy Orange who uses a similar collage-type effect to chart the lives of American Indians in modern urban America, although in Orange's book all the stories interweave to form a more conventional plot.


There are a lot of Chinese proverbs and ways of putting things:

• "The doctor said she died of a cerebral aneurysm. And her friends at the Joy Luck Club said she died just like a rabbit: quickly and with unfinished business left behind." (1.1)
• "We were a city of leftovers mixed together ... Everybody looked down on someone else. It didn't matter that everybody shared the same sidewalk to spit on and suffered the same fast-moving diarrhea. We all had the same stink, but everybody complained someone else smelled the worst." (1.1)
• "You think you can see something new, riding on top of a new cart. But in front of you, it is just the ass of the same old mule. Your life is what you see in front of you." (4.1)
• "Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth." (4.1)

There are some delightful descriptions:

• "A summer night that was so hot even the moths fainted to the ground, their wings so heavy with the damp heat." (1.1)

Other wonderful moments:

• "My mother used to say, 'Auntie Ying is not hard of hearing. She is hard of listening'." (1.1)
• "After the baby died, my mother fell apart, not all at once, but piece by piece, like plates falling off a shelf one by one." (2.2)
• "Faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control. I found out the most I could have was hope." (2.3)
• "As if inspired by an old, unreachable, itch." (2.4)
• "We expect the best and when we get it we worry that maybe we should have expected more" (3.1)
• "All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way." (4.1)

A beautifully written book with some wonderful characters but the sixteen stories are hard to comprehend as one so, for me, no overall picture emerged from the collage.

April 2020; 288 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Brooklyn" by Colm Toibin

Longlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the Costa Award in 2009.

Eilis, younger daughter of a widowed mother, grows up in a small town in  1950s Dublin. Despite her intelligence, she can only get a part time job serving in a shop. Father Flood, a priest visiting his home town from Brooklyn, NY, arranges for her to go to New York and for a room and a job to be waiting for her. She realises that Rose, her elder sister, has sacrificed her own future to look after the mother, what with the three boys working in England and all. Eilis proceeds to fall in love in New York; then she is called back to Ireland.

At times this novel read like a documentary. Every last detail is lovingly recorded, from brother Jack's handwriting to seasickness on the Atlantic crossing to how to get through immigration to the nervous Jewish law professor. I found this rather over the top. I understand that the modern dictum is that the author should know every last detail about the characters down to what they carry in their pockets but I am not sure how much it needs to be shared: Shakespeare's stage directions are minimal compared with those in eg Pinter's The Homecoming or Osborne's Look Back in Anger; does this not then leave more for the audience to fill in. Certainly there were an awful lot of details that didn't add to the plot and I didn't think you needed that level of detail to make me know the character of the protagonist.

There were delightful moments: I loved the split in the boarding house between the prim and proper young ladies and those who wanted a good time; and Father Flood was reassuringly practical and empathetic. But the plot as a whole didn't really grip me until the conflict began between the mother who seemed to be manipulating Eilis to force her to stay in Ireland and Eilis missing her fella. This wasn't until the last quarter so the book was a slow burn.

Eilis had a very pedestrian inner life as well. Every dilemma she faced was spelt out clearly. This actually was a brilliant feature of the book because it made you follow her uncertainties. Did she love the boy or not? Even at the end you're not exactly sure but isn't that the way we all are? We weigh up our options (perhaps a little less cold-bloodedly than Eilis) based on our perceptions (which are perhaps a little less clear than Eilis) and we come to a conclusion which we will never know is right or wrong and which we might in any case change later on down the line. This was a tremendous strength of the book.

A carefully constructed jewel.

May 2016; 252 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God