I'm a little late posting this, but must draw attention
to a brilliant article by Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the New York Times Book Review published Nov. 18, right after I had made
some similar points regarding the works of Louis Begley, comparing him to the
subject of Tanenhaus' article, John Updike as a social historian.
Just to quote a couple of paragraphs from my earlier entry: For me, Begley sort
of picks up where Updike left off, following one character and setting that
character against the backdrop of the times in which he lives. Updike updated us every ten years in the
Rabbit tetrology while Begley's trilogy is a more compressed time frame. Nonetheless, there are many similarities,
particularly the novel as memoir, a kind of history of our times, and the
intellectual level at which both Updike and Begley operate, their erudite prose
befitting of their excellent educations.
Rabbit and I shared
many commonalities, and now I find myself in Schmidtie's shoes, thinking
similar thoughts and of course witnessing the same events. It makes these novels living breathing
documents to me.
Updike strikes a special synapse in my solar plexus as he
wrote not only about my times but about the middle class of my youth. Although he grew up in (or around) Reading
PA, a town different than the middle class town in Queens, NY where I grew up,
the people were of the same hard working and church going composition. I could sense that when during my first job as a
production assistant at a New York publishing company I used to regularly go to
Arnold's Book Bindery in Reading, PA. Arnold's was the choice binder of short runs of scholarly
reprints. (Arnold's founder, Leo Arnold, used to deliver books locally by
wheelbarrow!) It was a town I felt a connection
with although I was not from there. I am
sure I would not recognize it today as it has undergone sweeping ethnic changes just as my old Richmond Hill neighborhood has, but that is a good thing in
dynamically changing America.
Tanenhaus draws on one of my favorite Updike novels from
the Rabbit series, Rabbit Redux, to examine
Updike's uncanny ability to record the history of his times in his novels. Although the link to the entire article is
cited above, I also take the liberty of quoting two key paragraphs (my emphasis
in bold):
“I don’t think
about politics,” Harry Angstrom (nicknamed Rabbit in his high school basketball
days) insists during a mealtime quarrel. “That’s one of my Goddam precious
American rights.” But he becomes apoplectic when the topic is the Vietnam War,
which he supports with a worshipper’s faith. “America is beyond power, it acts
as in a dream, as a face of God,” he believes. “Wherever America is, there is
freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness
strangles millions.” He defiantly puts a flag decal on his car, as potent a
symbol to him as the flag the Apollo 11 astronauts plant on the moon.
The moon landing is
replayed in the pages of “Rabbit Redux” among the flooding images of the
nightly news: “Vietnam death count, race riots probably somewhere.” Updike doesn’t simply record all these
facts. He elevates them through a kind of social realist poetry, what John Dos
Passos might have written if he had the help of T. S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens:
“Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an
instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant
indoor light clinging to them,” the novel begins, Updike’s celebrated
pointillism refreshing a moribund cityscape: “The row houses differentiated by
speckled bastard sidings and the hopeful small porches with their jigsaw
brackets and gray milk-bottle boxes and the sooty ginkgo trees and the baking
curbside cars.” Harry, one of the lumpen pale men, works as a linotypist at
Verity Press at a time when Verity and all the moral verities that undergird
Rust Belt America seem to be corroding.
Tanenhaus makes his case so poignantly and persuasively. These were our times and no historian can
capture its Zeitgeist better than our some of our novelists, Updike having been
on the cutting edge.
