1% Well-Read: Rabbit Redux

I will admit to an irrational and totally unfounded (former) dislike of John Updike. As the Hubby is able to testify, (but perhaps is loathe to admit for fear of retaliatory oversteeped green tea the next morning), I can be pretty unreasonable in some of my long-held prejudices, and none die harder in me than skepticism about lauded male writers and whiny male singer-songwriters. I do like to think, however, that I can admit when I'm wrong. It happens often enough, goodness knows I get my practice in. And I was wrong about John Updike.

So wrong, in fact, that I could compare my former opinion of Mr. Updike to the year spent in Italy neither dating nor eating meat (Fool!). So maybe not having read any Updike until my mid-thirties doesn't quite rise to the level or skipping prosciutto in Parma or Romans in Rome (what was I thinking?), but it's pretty close. From the first page of Rabbit Redux, I knew that I would love not only the book, but also the author's dialogue, descriptive phrases, and probably even the pacing of the narrative. If Blade Runner is the planner's movie (although I think Pleasantville should be up for a shot at the title), then Updike, like Pratolini and Russo, was a planner's writer. Updike "got" cities, and particularly how to describe different neighborhood and the slow, disintegrating sprawl out to the suburbs. Updike's language is so rich in visual and emotional cues that reading is almost as vivid as walking down the street in a city that you are just getting to know. I'm sure I could get all undergrad lit-crit here and wax on about urban form and the construction of the main characters, but that would really be pushing my credibility. I read because I love to and because it is almost a compulsive need, not because I do the best analysis on the block.

I have to admit that I am glad I started with Rabbit Redux and not Rabbit, Run. Given that the beginning of the Rabbit series features the death of a child, I would have put the book down and never returned, even skipping the sequels. Updike does such a wonderful job of building up and tearing down his characters, however, that I didn't feel as if I had missed any key pieces. Another sign of Updike's mastery was that I also didn't notice clunky "backstory inserted here" passages. Instead, the story was well-paced, readable, inventive without stretching the limits of plausibility, and hinted at myth and archetypes without becoming pedantic. The language fit the characters, even as dated and racist as their notions could be. Rabbit is a figure that I can both loathe and love. I already have Rabbit is Rich waiting on the bookshelf.

So here's to long-held assumptions disproved and discarded. The 1% Challenge got me to read Updike, and I'm so glad that I did.