What I said then:
I bought this years ago, and really only because I knew Updike’s name and at the time that seemed like reason enough.
What I say now:
Though slim, this book was a slog to get through. There's something about Updike's writing style that just doesn't chime with me: it felt too studied, like it was trying too hard or something. His tale is one of small suburban decay, and often he'd be caught reaching too far in his attempts to give the details of his mundane setting the metaphorical weight he so desperately wanted them to have. Does that make sense? It was like, the main character could never just walk home beneath a row of streetlights, the streetlights always had to be symbolising something profound about the way the character's life was in constant flux between darkness and light, or some bullshit like that. Everything was freighted with meaning, but the meanings were spelled out and too obviously artificial. If you make everything poetic, then nothing is, you know?
So the plot basically runs thus: Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is a massive selfish jerk who can't face the responsibilities of adulthood, and he proves this fact again and again. Rabbit was a star basketball player in high school, but those days are gone. Approaching his mid-twenties and stuck in a loveless marriage to a pregnant girl that drinks to escape her own boredom (and she is still a girl, as Rabbit is still just a boy), one night he snaps or something and just drives off and leaves her. He only makes it as far as the next town over, where he shacks up with a sorta-kinda prostitute for a few months. Having knocked the new girl up, he promptly ditches her and heads back to his wife when she has the baby ... only to argue with her and run out again (twice, somehow).
Seriously, Rabbit is a fucking arsehole.
You can write about arseholes, there's nothing wrong with that, but they've got to be interesting. I don't have to like your characters, but I do have to find them captivating. Rabbit was just an oaf, an uncomplicated oaf, and I found his company pretty much unbearable. Not because he was an arsehole, just because he was boring. It wouldn't have been so bad if Updike had seemed to have any insight into the guy, or was able to shed any light on his psychology, but he really didn't. At the moments of highest drama, the moments when Rabbit decided to turn one way or the other, it never illuminated anything. Those moments always sprang from moments of random impulse, and we never got a chance to properly understand them.
There were other things that bugged me. Updike has his (not particularly intelligent) characters participate in that silly literary convention where, in conversation with one another, they'll speak in 'meaningful' non sequiturs, giving poetic summations of something or other which have nothing to do with the conversation they're actually having. Also, when the sex scenes come, Updike switches modes completely, getting both deliberately vague and kind of breathlessly excited. That obvious excitement, coupled with his horribly old-fashioned gender politics, had me leaving those scenes feeling pretty scuzzy.
All in all, there just wasn't much to like about this book. At all. There are another three books about Rabbit Angstrom, but I've had my fill of him, and of Updike too.
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
books to go: 72
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