. Spinning .

Just as Updike helps us to understand Rabbit, accept his leaving his pregnant wife and child, he throws in the inevitable twist: his wife is having the baby.

It didn’t sit well with the reader that Rabbit just drove off that day and yet we came to understand his motivation–he’s not a bad person, he just felt hemmed in and hopeless and seeing an opportunity, broke out.  Like most of the characters in the books I’ve read recently, he receives help from friends–his former coach, and then Ruth.  (Hum: I get by with a little help from my friends) The problem I see here is that it weakens the character; the perk, I suppose, is that it makes them more real. Such a huge difference between these protagonists (Updike’s Rabbit, Ruiz’s Daniel, Murakami’s Kafka) and those of the fantasy genre in which they are kings, princes, (or queens, princesses) and lead armies.  These characters face no wars, just the daily battles that wear us down.  The outcomes don’t lead to treasure and acquired lands, but more towards a realization, an understanding, often resigned acceptance.

He feels the truth; the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it.  No flight would reach it.  It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him.  The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her.  Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk.  Flower stalks.  (p. 208)

Rabbit, having decided his path once again on the spur of the moment when visiting his wife at the hospital having their baby, is still thinking not of her, not of Ruth–whom he has also left without notice, laying in bed in the middle of the night when he rushes off to the hospital–not even of his three year-old son, Nelson, but of himself. 

We’ve come to expect parents to give up themselves for their children; Rabbit, who hasn’t, may have just seen what is expected of him.

In the meantime, the reader, who has come to reverse his own thought pattern of expectations and truly sympathize with Rabbit’s choices if not in agreement with them, is left to wonder how futile it is to fight against expectations.  Self versus society.  Society versus Self.

"Even so.  I saw you that way tonight and I felt a wall between us and this is the one way through it."
"That’s pretty cute.  You just want it, really." She yearns to hit out at him, to tell him to go.  But that time is past.
He repeats, "Is it so awful for you?"
"Well it is because you think it is."
"Maybe I don’t."
"Look, I’ve loved you."
"Well I’ve loved you."
"And now?"
"I don’t know.  I want to still."
Now those damn tears again.  She tries to hurry the words out before her voice crumbles.  "That’s good of you.  That’s heroic."
"Don’t be smart.  Listen.  Tonight you turned against me.  I need to see you on your knees." (p. 174)

Harry and Ruth, out for the evening, meet up with someone out of Harry’s past school days, a rival of sorts.  Ruth knows the man too; from her life as a hooker.

So the stage is set here for Harry to fight one of his battles, his own sense of helplessness and hopelessness.  But he will use Ruth, demean her by asking her for a blowjob because he knows she’s given that to the other man, because he needs to see himself at least at that level of the other man in her eyes. 

And Ruth cannot deny him.  For Ruth, as well as the reader, knows something that Harry does not.  That ties her to him in a subservient manner that has taken away her own sense of freedom.  Strangely enough, the freedom that Harry found in her she must give up herself.

Men  do see a reinforcing of power, control, self confidence in the sexual act.  Harry, at least here, is being honest about it.  And the sex must be of a different manner, leaving us to assume that in the relationship with Ruth, as in his marriage to Janice, plain old sex had lost its worth as a tool. (No pun intended.)

Post-reading of Murakami, Marquez, O’Brien with the forced suspension of disbelief required brings to mind Updike’s near insistence on the realities of existence.

The setting, the interaction of characters, the getting inside to see the motivations, all beat home the notion of the indecision of our lives on a day-to-day basis.  The recognition of reality with its options, its possibilities, its hope and its hopelessness. The emotional swings that follow a major decision finally made is the core of this book, and our job as readers is the same as that of the characters: to make some sense of it all if there is sense to be made.

Updike’s concentration on description, I believe, is to involve the reader in that reality–in Rabbit’s reality.  To make the reader care enough for him and those he affects as if he were a friend that’s taken a path we’re not sure is for the best.  The way Updike fits everything together in a manner that leaves us a world that we can believe exists–forgetting that all fiction is just that, an appearance of reality that doesn’t exist–keeps us tied to the tale, anxious for the story.  It tickles somewhere in the back of the mind where we aren’t required to act, and yet can’t ignore the situation.

Is that Updike’s intention?  Does an author always know, much less plan, who will get our attention?

Updike gives us characters that he understands–if not agreeing with their choices–and allows us that same insight.  As I’ve shown in a previous example, we follow Rabbit’s motivations by knowing his thought processes, his dreams, his desires.  He becomes a full rounded character by our understanding of how he thinks–or sometimes ignores events and people–in his situation. 

What we’re being treated to now is another point of view, that of Rabbit’s inlaws’ minister, Eccles, as he interacts with Rabbit and others affected by Rabbit’s decision to leave his family. Here he is visiting Rabbit’s mother, and by their conversation as well as getting inside Eccles’ head, we become more involved with the story:

Eccles smiles, wondering if the Lutheran church gives everyone such ideas.  Luther himself was a little like this, perhaps–overstating half-truths in a kind of comic wrath.  The whole black Protestant paradox-thumping maybe begins there.  Deep fundamental hopelessness in such a mind.  Hubris is shoving the particular aside.  Maybe: he’s forgotten most of the theology they made him absorb.  It occurs to him that he should see Angstrom’s pastor.  (p. 150)

What this gives us in another point of view, a character trying to understand another character. At the same time, we begin to understand that character as well.  These are all very different people and their reactions to what Rabbit has done is going to give us all the different angles.

That is, besides our own reader response.

The timing of the reading of this section, where Rabbit goes to work part-time as a gardener, couldn’t have been better for me.  It echos the gardener’s love of the earth and growing things, the whole idea of rethinking life as spring rebuilds itself:

Funny, for these two months he never has to cut his fingernails,  He lops, lifts, digs.  He plants annuals, packets the old lady gives him–nasturtiums, poppies, sweet peas, petunias.  He loves folding the hoed ridge of crumbs of soil over the seeds.  Sealed, they cease to be his.  The simplicity.  Getting rid of something by giving it to itself.  God Himself folded into the tiny adamant structure, Sef-destined to a succession of explosions, the great slow gathering out of water and air and silicon: this is felt without words in the turn of the round hoe-handle in his palms.  (p. 127)

There seems to be a change in Rabbit, a mellow acceptance, a seeing of life as a continual renewal of itself.  Oddly, he didn’t seem to see this in the birth of his son, the imminent birth of his second child. 

Updike has made this first break in the narrative; there are no chapters, no other sequencing of note.  Is this then a turning point?  Does Rabbit feel as I do when my fingers are stained with the good earth?

Along the lines of psychological realism, Updike has some more character insight that comes closer to stream of consciousness:

Holding a three wood, absorbed in its heavy reddish head and grass-stained face and white stripe prettily along the edge, he thinks O.K., if you’re so smart and clenches and swirls.  Ahg: when she tumbled so easily, to balk this!  The mouth of torn grass and the ball runs, hops and hops, hides in a bush; white tail.  And when he walks there, the bush is damn somebody, his mother; he lifts the huffy branches like skirts, in a fury of shame but with care not to break any, and these branches bother his legs while he tries to pour his will down into the hard irreducible pellet that is not really himself yet in a way is; just the way it sits there in the center of everything.  (p. 123)

I’m not concerned here with what this means, what his thought process is but more with the fact that it is a throught process.  The only italicized phrase is "O.K. if you’re so smart" and yet the third person narrative here is of the stream of consciousness form, as if taken from Rabbit’s head and explained in a more psychological manner. As if to form the random thoughts into a more cohesive, more telling statement of Rabbit’s thinking.  Not to explain, but to show that Rabbit is at last allowing himself to admit his feelings to himself and to try to understand them.   

I’m not sure that I quite understand the definition of psychological realism–in many places it appears to have more to do with the interaction of the reader rather than characterization–yet it’s the first thing I thought of in Updike’s depth of portrayal of Rabbit.

His day had been bothered by God: Ruth mocking, Eccles blinking–why did they teach you such things if no one believed them?  It seems plain, standing here, that if there is this floor there is a ceiling, that the true space in which we live is upward space.  Someone is dying.  In this great stretch of brick someone is dying.  The thought comes from nowhere: simple percentages.  Someone in some house along these streets, if not this minute then the next, dies; and in that suddenly stone chest the heart of this flat prostrate rose seems to him to be.  He moves his eyes to find the spot; perhaps he can see the cancer-blackened soul of an old man mount through the blue like a monkey on a string.  He strains his ears to hear the pang of release as this ruddy illusion at his feet gives up this reality.  Silence blasts him.  Chains of cars creep without noise; a dot comes out of a door.  What is he doing here, standing on air?  Why isn’t he home?  He becomes frightened and begs Ruth, "Put your arm around me."  (p. 108)

Rabbit is obviously going through some mental gymnastics.  His decision to leave his pregnant wife and two year-old son was spur-of-the moment; the scene the original "I’m going out for a pack of cigarettes" that indicates not the immediate, but the built-upon.

Yet as with Kerouac’s hero in On The Road, he comes back to the area, depends on friends, hovers near, looking at his life positioned just around the corner from it, or peeking in through a kitchen window.

At the side of her neck where it shades into her shoulder there is a shallow white hollow where his attention curls and rests.  (p. 69)

Alliteration: shades into her shoulder and shallow white hollow. Beautiful, soft, smooth.

Personification: where his attention curls and rests.  As if it were a tired toddler settling comfortably into his bed.

Some wonderful stuff here from Updike; a writer’s writer.  He sneaks these in among metaphors and similes that appear so naturally and yet I’m sure have been if not thought out and planned, a language that has become a part of the way Updike thinks.