John Updike
Photo by Jill Krementz
So, I watched Doubt this afternoon, and on proclaiming it ‘amazing’ on Twitter, my friend Sam replied immediately with “Is it wrong that I really wanted to do Streep while I was watching that film?”
Yes Sam, it is quite wrong.
Although she is amazing, as is future hubby PSH.
It’s interesting because I’m reading a John Updike book at the mo that deals with faith through the generations of a family, In The Beauty Of The Lilies. (Title’s a bit shit, I know.) The first dude was a pastor who went on to be a salesman when he lost his faith suddenly one day. So far I’m about halfway through, and it’s (typically, for Updike) quite brilliantly written. Doesn’t have the same take-your-breath-away sentences that Cormac McCarthy or Ali Smith do, but he writes real characters that you simply do not want to leave. You want them to stay in your lives so you can get to know them or help them out or tell them they’re idiots or whatever.
I think I’ll read it aloud to Phillip Seymour Hoffman when we’re married.
I feel this massive sense of guilt when I give up reading a book, even if it’s Virginia Woolf levels of terrible. However, Martin Amis has given me several reasons to throw in the towel with Money.
Firstly, I’m nearly half way through and nothing - nothing - has happened. At all. And it’s not like the main dude is having these massively complex thought processes all the time either. Amis barely tells you who anyone is, never mind what they’re thinking about.
It’s just like American Psycho, except nobody feeds any urinal cakes to prostitutes. I never thought I’d say this, but even some kind of needless Patrick Bates violence would lift this drivel of pub crawls and erm, some more pub crawls.
I’ve run out of things to even say about it, it’s that bland. It’s not like I can rail against some aspect or other that has offended me, because the book would have to be about something for that to happen.
And finally, I received a copy of Licks Of Love by John Updike in the post today, which features the novella sequel to the Rabbit Angstrom books, Rabbit Remembered. CANCEL EVERYTHING, DRAW THE CURTAINS, READ THAT SWEET SWEET AMAZINGNESS UNTIL YOUR EYES FALL OUT.
So, after about a decade of my mother recommending White Teeth to me, I’m finally reading it. I always knew it was going to be good because, you know, everyone says so. Like Life Of Pi, I knew I would eventually get round to listening to everyone and giving it a go. I like funny stuff. I like stuff set in the 70s. Being white and middle-class, I like books about people who aren’t just white and middle class. (See you never, Holden Caulfield.)
Zadie Smith is pretty damn talented, and she phrases things just so. Just sort of knowing and amused, like her narrator understands the irony in life.
Having said that (and it must be said that I am only on chapter three so far, and must not pass judgement prematurely), I have encountered a problem.
Zadie Smith is not John Updike. She is not writing an installment of the Rabbit Angstrom books. I am struggling to see past these two major flaws right now.
This is John Updike doing a bit of recreational juggling.
I stayed in all last night and read Rabbit At Rest until I couldn’t focus anymore.
My other half and I have decided to have a trial separation. I guess I fell in love pretty hard when we first met, but when we snuggle down in bed together now, it feels like things have gone stale. I know all his moves, and what he’s going to say. The wry sideways glances at the meaningless of human existence just don’t mean the same thing to me anymore. It’s not his fault; it’s probably because I’ve changed and I need someone who understands my reality, but I feel like I need to break out and try new things for a while.
It’s time for Kurt Vonnegut and I to take a break.
I finished Cat’s Cradle last night and I know that I enjoyed it more than most other books I’ve read. I know that its portrayal of the apocalypse was trying to tell me so much about human motivation, about religious fallacies and about the ethical treatment of midgets, but at the end it just felt like another book by Kurt Vonnegut about our ultimate selfishness. So I am going to give it a year before I read anything else by him, to see if those heart-flutterings that I first felt when I read Slapstick will return.
On the bus home from work today I was trying to decide what I should read next, and I narrowed it down in my head to either Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, in keeping with the examining-our-path-as-human-beings theme, or White Teeth by Zadie Smith, because I’m not sure why I haven’t read it yet. Then when I opened the front door, Rabbit At Rest had arrived from the great Ebay depot in the sky and I was genuinely surprised by how excited I got. I’m four books into the Rabbit series by John Updike now, and I have fallen in a big way. It’s not magical realism, it’s just realism realism.
So, I made my tea downstairs, and I was standing over the cooker, moving bits of pork around in the pan, and I was thinking about the synopsis on the back of Rabbit At Rest. “His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending out mixed signals…” And I was surprised to find that, ten years after Rabbit Is Rich, those two were still together at all. I mean, they never even would have got married if they’d got pregnant today. And I started thinking about how marriage has changed over the decades and how I’m generally pretty lucky to have my folks still happily together. And then I thought that it wasn’t marriage that did that, it was the fact that they love one another. It took some work of course, but they also kinda dropped lucky, meeting the right person at a young age.
And then I got on to thinking about my three failed relationships, and how maybe my blind faith in complete tosspots could stem from the influence of my folks, because my relationship model has been a pair of hippy drop-outs who met as teenagers and went off to have adventures together, in India and the rugged highlands of Scotland, before having a kid and settling down in a nice market town. I mean, isn’t that the way all relationships turn out?
So yeah, it’s sometimes kinda hard to know who reflects life most accurately; John Updike’s enduring marriages or Kurt Vonnegut and the end of the world?
I am desperately trying not to finish this book. I have enjoyed each one of the Rabbit series more than the last one, and I’ve now got to the point where I actually like the guy, whereas I think I wrote before about how he needs to grow a pair of balls. Now it’s his son that infuriates me for being such a seething little angry weakling. Harry seems to have grown up at last, even if I am just up to a bit where they’re all wife-swapping in the Caribbean.
You may remember a little while ago I posted a little section from Rabbit, Run by John Updike, because I was reading it on the bus home from my house-hunting trip to Leicester and I was all like OMG LIFE IS SO TRAGIC and then when I finished the book I made an iPod playlist full of Radiohead and Regina Spektor and wallowed in the fact that my life will pretty much end on the 13th of September this year.
Well, because I loved that shit so much I’m reading Rabbit Redux right now. John Updike wrote five books about Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom before he died, and they are totally brilliantly written, if you can stand the unspeakable tragedies. Even without distress and heartbreak and trauma and death, there’s this suburban sense of sheer hopelessness from the very beginning. Rabbit Angstrom is the kind of stupid loser who just lets stuff happen to him. Other people live his life for him. He’s taken advantage of and shat upon but because he has this misguided Arthur Fowler sense of a quiet life being best, it’s hard not to resent him for being such an idiot pussy. Fucking man up! But then, Updike has actually made him into a physically tough guy. When he’s threatened for letting a black guy live in his house (“in a decent white neighbourhood” - Redux is set in the late 60s, against moon landings and race hate) he’s quick-witted and stands his ground, but then his house is burned down anyway and you just get the impression that he shrugs his shoulders and adds this to the list of bad stuff that he guesses he just has to deal with.
It’s frustrating to read sometimes, but the writing is astonishingly good; the kind of poetic observations that don’t often appear in the kind of books I read. And John Updike puts loads of sex in there but it’s normal, real, everyday sex, where Rabbit notices how fat people are and thinks about other stuff till he loses his erection. I normally hate reading sex scenes because they so often seem to just be thrown in there so the writer can tick some box on his list of audience demographics, and it’s always so Hollywood and crap. Rabbit has crap sex, but it’s proper crap sex, not crap sex that some misguided writer has tried to turn into the greatest lovemaking of all time. Makes me cringe.
I’ve not finished the book yet, but there’s not a whole lot left. Judging by the chapter titles, his sister’s about to return, and there are another three books after this one, so I very much doubt he’s going to experience some epiphany of empowerment and take control of his own destiny in the middle of dinner at Burger Bliss. It’s such a shame. He’s such a massive loser.
A little bit of Rabbit, Run that I marked in my book last night and then forgot to include in today’s earlier post
“When you twist a rope and keep twisting, it begins to lose its straight shape and suddenly a kink, a loop leaps up in it. Harry has such a hard loop in himself after he hears Eccles out. He doesn’t know what he says to Eccles; all he is conscious of is the stacks of merchandise in jangling packages he can see through the windows of the phone-booth door. On the drugstore wall there is a banner bearing in red the one word PARADICHLOROBENZENE. All the while he is trying to understand Eccles he is re-reading this word, trying to see where it breaks, wondering if it can be pronounced. Right when he finally understands, right at the pit of his life, a fat woman comes up to the counter and pays for two boxes of Kleenex. He steps into the sunshine outside the drugstore swallowing, to keep the loop from rising in his body and choking him.”
Amazing.
Three things for Monday:
One
Congratulations to the team behind Black Watch, my all time favouritest play ever ever EVER and now winner of four Olivier Awards! Whoop! It (quite rightly) got Best New Play, Best Sound Design, Best Director and Best Theatre Choreography. 
John Tiffany directed Black Watch, and I’ve got a ticket for his new play Be Near Me, which comes to the Lowry at the end of next month. I’m trying really hard not to get over-excited about it, because I have a habit of building things up and up until I come out of the theatre feeling like shit because even a brilliant performance could not reach my inflated expectations. Still, I can’t fucking wait to see Be Near Me (which I keeping wanting to call Be Here Now like the Oasis album - hope that’s not a sign of things to come…)
The dude who did the choreography was a guy called Steven Hoggett, and I tell you, that guy deserves a tribute tattoo across my forehead, he’s that good. You wouldn’t think that a play about a group of soldiers dealing with their harrowing experiences would warrant much dancing, but that’s what makes Steven Hoggett’s choreography so special. You barely notice it. He uses set pieces to tell the story of the Black Watch regiment through the ages, and to communicate the endless routine and boredom of being on a tour of duty when you’re seeing little action. That’s what makes it so affecting, and so dark; a few twists and turns and a country dancing step or two can bring about this massive sense of oppression. The expectation of the past on these young men who have joined an ancient regiment is just so stifling, and Hoggett turns it all into movement. BRILLIANT.
Well done Team Black Watch.
Two
I have found somewhere to live in Leicester - whoop! It’s an attic room in a six bedroom house and, during the ten minutes spent in the company of my new housemates, none of them demonstrated any personal hygiene problems, kleptomania or an affinity for hard house music. And when I got off the bus yesterday morning, the Café Nero near the bus station was playing John Martyn so this is clearly MEANT TO BE.
Three
I read the final chapters of Rabbit, Run on the way home last night, while listening to () by Sigur Rós in order to drown out the commercial radio on the driver’s stereo. It pretty much turned me to emotional pulp and I had to face the window so no-one could see me quietly sobbing about how totally unfair life is sometimes. I’m not going to tell you what happens in Rabbit, Run, but I can say that it’s a story about someone with whom you alternately empathise and become enraged, and Updike leaves it up to the reader to decide whether he’s a victim of circumstance or his own worst enemy. It’s a story of complex realtionships and the pressures of being a grown-up, and it’s written for an audience who are the same; a bit good, a bit bad, a bit uncertain of the future. It’s the kind of book that makes you examine yourself a little more deeply, and to be honest, that’s not always the kind of fiction I go for, let alone enjoy. 
Well done John Updike.
Running away to a suburban wonderland
The recent advent of Mad Men series two on BBC4 has reminded me that I never watched the first one, and this has been an omission I’ve been rectifying, thanks to LoveFilm. Annoyingly, they’ll only send me one disc of the box set at a time, but at least I’m not going on enormous telly binges like when me and Andy got The Wire and then neglected to wash or get dressed until we’d seen all sixty-plus hours of it.
I love watching American stuff about ‘wholesome’ families in the sixties. I love the glamour and well-roundedness of it all, even if things are distinctly darker below the surface. I love Mad Men for the secretary’s hairstyles as much as the plot intricacies. There’s one woman (a satisfyingly shapely woman, in these size zero times) who has the most incredible hair. It seriously must be glued in place. There’s no hairspray strong enough to maintain such perfection.
Coincidentally, I’m reading Rabbit, Run by John Updike at the moment, another tale of young wholesome 1960s families who fall apart at the seams, albeit in gorgeous lace nightgowns and with ribbons in their hair. In keeping with my ability to discover authors via their obituaries (see also Kurt Vonnegut and Iris Murdoch) I’m new to Updike, but I chose Rabbit, Run as my introduction because of I kept seeing it referred to as the suburban equivalent of a Kerouac novel. I hated On The Road, partly because I don’t think the man can string a decent sentence together, but also because I already know what it’s like to get pissed and sleep on someone’s floor. It seems silly, considering all these books and films and TV shows about 1960s America are about society’s dysfunction (I daren’t go anywhere near Revolutionary Road in case it depresses me too much), but when you live in one of the more notorious districts of south Manchester, where gun crime is rife and rainfall is above the national average, the idea of wearing a ribbon in my hair and cooking dinner for my white collar husband in upstate New York feels like the very epitome of escapism.
(Yes, I know that Rabbit’s wife is a alcoholic and he runs off to live with a whore, but at least she’s a shapely whore! She has hips and tits and ass, and that gives this fat woman hope.)
