. Spinning .

Backtracking here for a moment because this stuck in my mind.  Updike sets us up with a wonderful metaphor as Rabbit looks into his past, but the setting is wonderfully done; Rabbit goes to his mother’s house to pick up his young son:

He walks back as far as the lit kichen window and steps onto the cement without the sole of his shoe scraping and on tiptoe looks in one bright corner.  He sees himself sitting in a high chair, and a quick odd jealousy comes and passes.  It is his son.  (p. 25)

While it may seem cliche to look into the window of his childhood home and momentarily see himself, the window frame acts as a module within the story as well as one within the image of the house and the neighborhood.  I could well imagine seeing this on a computer screen, clicking on the window to zoom in on the film clip of life that’s going on separately from the house exterior, and the man who stands there looking in.

Updike appears to depend heavily on imagery to set both tone of setting and character:

Growing sleepy, Rabbit stops before midnight at a roadside cafe for coffee.  Somehow, though he can’t put his finger on the difference, he is unlike the other customers.  They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men sitting in zippered jackets in booths three to a girl, the girls with orange hair hanging like seaweed or loosely bound with gold barrettes like pirate treasure.  At the counter, middle-aged couples in overcoats bunch their faces forward into straws of gray ice-cream sodas. p. 36)

While some readers may find this an overdose, I love the color and movement the words evoke.  The place, the people, all telling of who and what they are and what makes them foreign to Rabbit.

Updike uses an omniscient third person point of view which naturally gives us good insight into a character.  As a matter of fact, everything seems to be about character here, and I like that.  It appears that this will be what drives the story and there’s already enough to see that troubles and conflicts will arise to produce a story just out of the information we have so far:

He goes to the closet and takes out the coat he hung up so neatly.  The clutter behind him in the room–the Old-fashioned glass with its corrupt dregs, the choked ashtray balanced on the easy-chair arm, the rumpled rug, the floppy stacks of slippery newspapers, the kid’s toys here and there broken and stuck and jammed, a leg off a doll and a piece of bent cardboard that went with some breakfast-box cutout, the rolls of fuzz under the radiators, the continual crisscrossing mess–clings to his back like a tightening net.  (p. 19)

So we’re not only given what Rabbit’s wife, Janice, is like, but how he looks at his world.  How he sees her, his "kid", his home, all becoming a "tightening net."  We can feel that Rabbit has thoughts of running.

And Janice:

She moves into the kitchen, angry but not angry enough.  She should be really sore, or not sore at all, since all he had said was what he had done a couple hundred times.  Maybe a thousand times.  Say, on the average once every three days since 1956.  What’s that? Three hundred.  That often?  Then why is it always an effort?  She used to make it easier before they got married.  She could be sudden then.  Just a girl.  (p. 17)

How typical of a relationship; the different point of views, the difference in priorities, the hostility held in and argued within oneself instead of with each other.  Janice obviously has an image of herself that doesn’t jive with Rabbit’s version.  She knows that she’s changed and yet the journey as she sees it is a path marked with street names unknown to Rabbit, as his are to her.

Um.  Don’t think I’ve ever read Updike before and I’m finding him quite likeable in his language use and style.

The frame houses climb the hill like a single staircase.  The space of six feet or so that each double house rises above its neighbor contains two wan windows, wide-spaced like the eyes of an animal, and is covered with composition shingling varying in color from bruise to dung.  The fronts are scabby clapboards, once white.  There are a dozen three-story homes, and each has two doors.  The seventh door is his.  The wood steps up to it are worn; under them there is a cubbyhole of dirt where a lost toy molders.  A plastic clown.  He’s seen it there all winter but he always thought some kid would be coming back for it.  (p. 12)

The similes used are amazingly precise: the houses like a staircase, the windows like the eyes of an animal.  The description of color, "from bruise to dung," goes along with the shabbiness Updike paints the neighborhood.  Worn steps, a cubbyhole of dirt, a lost toy–the incongruity of a plastic clown.  This scene has been decaying for years prior to Rabbit living here, yet he continues the neglect by noticing but not touching the toy.  He’s also one of many; the seventh door amid twenty-four.  No one, it would seem, has it better or worse than their neighbors.  All are ensconced here in a life of gradual decay.

Tells us an awful lot about Rabbit, and the way his story may unfold if we leave him to live it.

What can I say?  I haven’t read it yet.