Flashback Friday: Rabbit Reborn

Since I've been reading and listening to a lot of John Updike lately, I thought I'd pass along a review of Licks of Love that I originally wrote for the Charleston City Paper.

John Updike continues an ongoing exploration of family and infidelity in his collection of short fiction, Licks of Love. Updike resurrects old themes, old times, and his favorite Pennsylvanian everyman, Rabbit Angstrom, in a book containing one novella about Rabbit’s family and twelve short stories about cheating spouses, fathers and sons, mothers and cats, Henry Bech, and banjo licks.

The best of the twelve tales, Metamorphosis, involves an infatuated man, an attractive Asian surgeon, and the removal of a facial carcinoma. The smitten patient, Anderson, feeds his fixation of Dr. Kim by having encore reconstructive procedures – unnecessary surgeries performed by a medicinal geisha unaware of her lustful objectification. Updike rewards Anderson’s vainglorious ruse with an ironic twist of fate; Anderson is not transformed into a gigantic insect, but Kafka would almost certainly approve of the transformation.

In New York Girl, Updike moves from the operating room to the bedroom, where a two-timing husband finds warm solace in a city known for cold anonymity. The adulterer is enraptured the morning after an extramarital escapade, and Updike flawlessly depicts his immoral bliss:

…I was joyful to the point of tears. My body, wrapped in a loose wool bathrobe of hers, felt stuffed with the spiritual woolliness of contentment. At my back, just off the kitchen, she was setting up our breakfast. Paraboloids of orange juice and a cylinder of marmalade glowed with inner light…The morning moment kept overflowing, on and on…

Infidelity has appeared repeatedly in Updike’s writing and is a central theme in Licks of Love in the Heart of the Cold War - a short story that sums up Updike’s fascination with adultery:

You can go to the dark side of the moon and back and see nothing more wonderful and strange than the way men and women manage to get together.

And getting together is found at the heart of Licks of Love. In Rabbit Remembered, the fifth decadal installment of Updike’s Rabbit series, Rabbit’s two children meet knowingly for the first time. Nelson Angstrom finally gets to know his half sister, Annabelle Byer, who was conceived illegitimately when Rabbit first ran back in 1960.

Since the times of Rabbit at Rest Nelson has kicked cocaine and is now clean, sober, and alone. Annabelle enters his life at a time when he needs someone to pry him loose from his mother’s home and his father’s shadow. Nelson counsels others as a social worker and needs someone to counsel him in turn; he understands what a massive feat of neuron coordination just getting through the dullest day involves, and Annabelle is there to help him through the hours.

The siblings get to know each other through a series of lunches and dinners, and their conversation often leads to Rabbit.

When Nelson tries to think back to what it was like growing up he keeps getting a picture of his father and him in the front seat of a car, both of them having nothing to say but the silence comfortable, the shared motion satisfying.

His father had been a rebel of a sort, and a daredevil, but as he got older and tame he radiated happiness at just the simplest American things, driving along in an automobile, the radio giving off music, the heater giving off heat, delivering his son somewhere in this urban area that he knew block by block, intersection by intersection.

Nelson wants to give [Annabelle] her father, his father, but when he holds out his hands the dust pours through them, too fine and dry and dead to hold. Time has turned the spectacular man to powder, in just ten years.

Even though Rabbit may be turning to dust, Rabbit Remembered turns the award-winning Rabbit tetralogy into an even stronger quintology. Since 1960, Rabbit and his family have returned faithfully every ten years. The head of the household may be gone, but the perfection of his story continues - as does the perfection of Updike’s prose.

Download:
Edward Champion | John Updike Interview [MP3]