Rabbit at Rest

Back in college, the debate about the greatest American author centered around Philip Roth and John Updike, with Cormac McCarthy inexplicably left out.

I always fell on the Philip Roth side of the debate. While Updike's prose might have been more elegant, his books tended to focus almost solely on the yearnings of those who live in suburbia. Comfortable in this area of his expertise, Updike rarely ventured far away from the cozy suburbs.

Roth, on the other hand, was ambitious as hell. While Updike was content with ground rule doubles, Roth would go for the home run almost every time, missing sometimes, but often producing works like The Plot Against America or American Pastoral. These are two wildly diverging books about two very different subject that find common ground only in their author and their fate as everlasting American classics.

For this reason-- the ambition-- I always picked Roth.

But Updike is a close second (or third, if you count Cormac McCarthy), and that's not bad at all. Yes, he never ventured out of suburbia, and, when he did, it was a disaster (see Terrorist, where he tries to get into the head of a teenage half-American terrorist).

But when he wrote about suburbia, he was masterful. Updike would often forget periods existed. His sentences would sprawl, with modifier following modifier, until you got a sentence that looked something like Manet's impressionist paintings -- strangely diffuse yet clear as day.

I wish I could reprint this whole passage from Rabbit is Rich, his best book. But it is over two pages long. In this passage, "Rabbit" Angstrom is running, and at the end of two pages of magnificent imagery, Updike concludes thus:

"The meadow ends and Harry enters a tunnel, getting dark now, the needles a carpet, he makes no sound, Indians moved without sound through trees without end where a single twig snapping meant death, his legs in his fatigue cannot be exactly controlled but flail against the cushioned path like arms of a loose machine whose gears and joints have been bevelled by wear. Becky, a mere seed laid to rest, and Jill, a pale seedling held from the sun, hang in the Earth, he imagines, like stars, and beyond them there are myriads, whole races like the Cambodians, that have drifted into death. He is treading on them all, they are resilient, they are cheering him on, his lungs are burning, his heart hurts, he is a membrane removed from the hosts below, their filaments caress his ankles, he loves the earth, he will never make their mistake and die."

Ain't that amazing? "He will never make their mistake and die." Wow. The whole Rabbit series is like that, four books chronicling the life and death of an American Everyman, perfect lyrical epics that will be presented with reverence when people in two hundred years ask what life was like in the latter half of the American Century.

And it wasn't just novels. His essays were magnificent. A few months ago, I pointed to a piece about Ted Williams that Updike wrote for the New Yorker. Immortal lines like this one come every paragraph, where Updike recounts Williams' last home run:

"Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs -- hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted 'We want Ted' for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he refused. Gods do not answer letters."

And his short stories are nothing short of amazing. Go back an re-read A&P, his classic account of a checkout clerk in a supermarket falling in love with a beauty and executing a futile and inevitable act of pure heroism. Bruce, this is how you write about love in a supermarket.

But death has come and the fountain pen is dry and the tributes are pouring in, from the NYT to the New Yorker to every other publication in America that is still trying to wrap its mind around the unfortunate reality that, except for one or two surprises, we are done getting new books from John Updike.