The Secret Lives of Used Books (Rabbit at Rest, by John Updike)
I have fond memories of reading John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy — Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990) — particularly the last two installments.
But ever since David Foster Wallace, in a 1997 review, quoted a female friend saying that John Updike was “just a penis with a thesaurus,” that bon mot has been invoked as if it were a landmark Supreme Court opinion — damning and weighty. Belaboring the point, the headline of DFW’s review referred to Updike as a “Champion Literary Phallocrat,” and DFW began the review by characterizing Updike as one of “the Great Male Narcissists,” along with Norman Mailer and Philip Roth. (Would anybody get credit, say, for calling Eve Babitz just tits with a typewriter, a literary mammocrat, and so on? Babitz was not above promoting her ample bosom, but at their best her works, like the Rabbit novels, are “essential recordings of American life,” to quote from a begrudging review-essay on Updike. Both authors’ writings are much more besides.)
A dozen years after DFW’s review, Katie Roiphe wrote something of a rebuttal in The New York Times, giving the great male narcissists their complicated due and calling out both their critics and their literary heirs for exhibiting a lamentable humorlessness and joylessness. Roiphe says in several thousand shrewd, stylish words what can be summed up in a Christopher Hitchens bon mot: Their lack of humor compromises their seriousness. (I’m paraphrasing Hitchens slightly.)
Yes, of course, Rabbit is a scoundrel, a man of often low impulses, ones he can’t (or doesn’t even try to) govern. When we first meet him, he’s abandoned his pregnant wife and young son and soon thereafter takes up with a part-time prostitute. In time he casts an appraising eye not only on his friends’ wives but also on his illegitimate daughter and even his granddaughter. As a token of his limitless sleaze, he once engages in quasi incest.
Nobody anywhere, ever, from the first book to the fourth, mistook Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom for a role model. He plots and connives and trips over his own schemes coming and going, leaving a trail of disappointment — his own and others’. But he does so with what some legitimately consider a reckless charm, given Updike’s beautiful way with words (that copy of Roget’s tucked in his skivvies, you know), his use of free indirect style, and his conjuring of an “essential” comedy of manners (sometimes bleak and disconcerting) out of decades’ worth of life and social change in the fictional Brewer, Pennsylvania.
Some of that same slaphappy charm comes through in this inscription, of a piece with the festive, stilted penmanship. And those names! One’s a kind of déclassé country-club diminutive. The other’s like a vampy role-playing lover’s alias. Private lives always seem a bit ridiculous when they’re not your own.
