Category: Updike

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Reading….and then not so much

It’s a wonderful book, beautifully written by an author I admire. So why is it languishing on my night stand while I finish two others plus the Janet Malcolm piece in last week’s New Yorker?

The book in question is “The Adventures of Augie March,” by Saul Bellow. Undeniably a Great Work by an Important Writer. But, more than that, a book I’ve meant to–wanted to–read, looked forward to reading, and now, night after night, can’t seem to get myself to pick up.

One of the reasons I wanted to read the book just now is that I recently read an excerpt of a collection of Bellow’s letters. He revealed himself to be not only, of course, a meticulous and thoughtful writer, but also an astoundingly generous one. Letters to a just-starting-out Philip Roth, to Martin Amis feeling distanced from his father, to a young wannbe at a writers’ conference–uniformly kind, encouraging, large-hearted, helpful.

But now that I’m reading “Augie March,” instead of “just one more chapter” being the mantra that reins me in, it’s the one that’s prodding me forward. What’s going on here?

There is the overwhelming maleness, true. Sometimes it feels like a different language, right from those uber-muscular opening words, “I’m an American–Chicago born.” But I love those words. There is something exhilarating about them. And I got over the Y chromosome factor enough to love the Updike Rabbit books.

There’s that overstuffed quality, with so much going on in each sentence. So much elegant and precise language, but also so many esoteric words and references that are the hallmark of Bellow’s writing. Maybe this is reading not for bedtime, but for a more energetic time of day.

I know I’ll finish it eventually. And I’m sure I’ll love it. And I guess it is convenient to be reading a book that doesn’t seem to compel me to put down everything else. But what makes a book put-down-able or not? And, in the long run, does that interfere with our appreciation of it?

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Reading the “Rabbits”

I had promised myself I wouldn’t start my first post with “welcome to my new blog.” So here are those words, in my second. I picture that sentence being written a hundred, maybe a thousand, times every day, often by people in exactly my situation: I’m an outcast from old media.

For seven years I wrote a literary column for The Boston Globe. But now that my section of the paper has been shut down, here I am, jumping into the deep end of new media. Ready to see if I sink or swim or simply tread water. What I want to do here is what I did in my newspaper column, have a conversation about reading and writing. But the exciting thing here is that it can be an actual conversation. You jump in, too!

Have you read the Updike “Rabbit” books? I hadn’t and, after Updike died in January, I decided it was time I did. So I set myself to reading all four.

I have to confess, I didn’t love the first, “Rabbit, Run.” It is beautifully written, yes, but it seemed so, well, male. All those sports images, that casual male sexuality, that clueless aimlessness. With the second, too, “Rabbit Redux,” I felt I was slogging through a lit course assignment. I took a little break. But now I’m reading “Rabbit Is Rich” and that’s really grabbed me. In fact, I can’t wait to stop writing this and get back to it.

Still more male than I can easily relate to. But there’s that tenderness, those poignant descriptions of flawed human beings stumbling through the mundane dailiness of a flawed world. Updike seems to feel love not only for his characters, but for the millions of people in the real world whose lives are no more exciting or ennobled than those he’s writing about. He observes our daily lives in all their smallness and forgives the countless ways in which we fall short.

I’m sad to think that, after I finish this, what is ahead is “Rabbit at Rest.”