tl;dr: more on Updike.
In our recent discussion of reviews of John Updike books, John Bullock pointed us to this essay by Claire Lowdon, who begins:
In the opening scene of Rabbit, Run (1960), John Updike’s second published novel, the twenty-six-year-old Harry Angstrom – aka Rabbit – joins some children playing basketball around a telephone pole. One of the boys is very good.
He’s a natural. The way he moves sideways without taking any steps, gliding on a blessing: you can tell. The way he waits before he moves. With luck he’ll become in time a crack athlete in the high school; Rabbit knows the way. You climb up through the little grades and then get to the top and everybody cheers; with the sweat in your eyebrows you can’t see very well and the noise swirls around you and lifts you up, and then you’re out, not forgotten at first, just out, and it feels good and cool and free. You’re out, and sort of melt, and keep lifting, until you become like to these kids just one more piece of the sky of adults that hangs over them in the town, a piece that for some queer reason has clouded and visited them. They’ve not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him. Yet in his time Rabbit was famous through the county; in basketball in his junior year he set a B-league scoring record that in his senior year he broke with a record that was not broken until four years later.
Are the kids reading John Updike now? Or is he, like his most famous creation, “just one more piece of the sky of adults”? For “adults”, in 2019, read Dead White Males . . .
Lowdon continues:
When we reread Rabbit, Run today, with almost 2020 vision [this review was published in 2019 — AG], the novel’s assumptions about men and women leap out at us. . . .
There are plenty of things I [Lowdon] could say in “defence” of these awkward moments. First, they are all thought or spoken by Updike’s characters, not by him. (Counter-objection: Updike is closely aligned with his own protagonists.) . . . Second, Updike himself balances the male gaze with powerful moments of insight into the female perspective. . . . I could go on – or, indeed, start to counter those counter-objections. . . .
So far, so balanced: after all, it would be an unusual choice in this era to review Updike and not address, in some way or another, the perception that he’s a sexist. This wouldn’t be quite on the level of reviewing Leni Riefenstahl’s cinematography, but you get the point.
But then Lowdon turns in a new (to me) and interesting direction:
In the third episode of the charming podcast “Medieval History for Pleasure and Profit”, Alice Rio and Alice Taylor give a surprising response to a listener’s question, “how badly did it smell, really?” They point out how relative smell is – how a medieval person travelling forward in time to today would be overwhelmed by the stench of petrol fumes, which we mostly don’t notice. The things we smell in Updike’s work, or Bellow’s, are as indicative of our own time as of theirs. And times change very quickly. . . .
Who knows – in another two decades, 2019’s heated discussions about race and gender may look equally quaint. The atrocities we’re unconsciously committing in our novels today are probably something to do with the environment. All those casual plane journeys in Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy! . . . If we lift our muzzles from the scent trail of sexism in Updike’s early work and look around, we find ourselves standing firmly in the past.
One reason we read fiction is to make sense of our world. Another reason is to learn about worlds other than ours. Updike, like all fiction writers, does both these things. Even bad writers are there to make sense of our world and tell us about other worlds. Bad writing can do this indirectly (by revealing an author’s unconsidered stereotypes) and tediously (so that it’s just not worth the effort to read), but they still do so in some ways. Recall my argument about works of alternative history.
Lowdon is making the point that anything we read will be presenting a different perspective. That said, some perspectives seem to date faster than others. Mark Twain, for example, seems strikingly modern to me, even though he was writing 150 years ago. Just to be clear, I’m not simply using “modern” as a shorthand for “interesting” or “relevant.” Shakespeare remains interesting and relevant, but I wouldn’t say he has a modern perspective: he has all this stuff about noble blood etc. which I guess is how most people thought back then but which today seems “faintly naff” (as Lowdon would say).
I’m also reminded of the point I encountered in some book about translation (maybe this one), about the tension when translating a book from another language: On one hand, you want your reading of the book to be similar to the experience of a native speaker of that language, hence you want a smooth translation into readable modern English. On the other hand, one reason you’re reading a book from another culture is that you want to get a feel for that culture, so you want the English translation to capture some of this.
To put it another way: when I read a book written in England, I don’t want words such as “lift,” local markers such as “Tesco,” and expressions such as “too clever by half” to be translated into American, any more than I’d want Lucinda Williams’s music re-sung by someone with a mid-Atlantic accent. The only difference with a book written in a foreign language is that some amount of translation is required—it’s just not clear how much.
I don’t think anyone’s proposing that we read a Bowdlerized Updike, shorn of its mid-twentieth-century sexual politics, any more than I’d want a hypothetical reader of this blog in 2100 to push the delete key because I refer too many times to airline flights, beef patties, and other signifiers of our current resource-devouring era.
Speaking of retro sexual politics, let me remind you that one characteristic of stereotyping is that it can go in any direction. Recall this example. It seems to me that the most important aspect of stereotyping is not its direction but rather in its strongly essentialist perspective.
That all said, it’s not just that Updike is old-fashioned and was a man of his time; his specific attitudes can affect how we experience his books. You can learn from his books, but that doesn’t mean you will like them, if his views are just too far from your own. I can enjoy novels from authors whose political and social views differ a lot from mine—it takes me out of my comfort zone, and that can be good—but if you go too far, and without any irony, eventually I’ll find it just too unpleasant to take. When I read supposedly humorous essays by people joking about how parents should be allowed to give their kids a good whuppin’, I don’t think it’s charming; I’m just repulsed. It’s just too much of a distraction, at least for me.
I think that’s the point about Updike’s male gaze etc. It doesn’t happen to bother me when I read the books, but I can see that it could bother you a little so that you have to come to terms with it (that’s Lowdon’s position), or it could bother you so much that you just don’t want to deal with it. I respect that last position as well.
All of this becomes more complicated because we’re talking about fiction rather than nonfiction or political speeches or journalism or whatever where statements can be taken literally. I have a friend who no longer enjoys football because he can’t stop thinking about the injuries. I respect that position, even though I’m not quite there yet.
P.S. My own take on Updike is different from most of what I’ve seen. I read Updike for the content, not the style. Or, to put it another way, I value Updike’s style because it’s a way for him to get to his content. To me, Rabbit, Run is not about the glissando of Updike’s descriptions or his male gaze or whatever; it’s all about Harry, this character who’s still young but with adult responsibilities that he doesn’t really want. Kind of like John Updike—or the United States—in 1960. On the back of my paperback copy of Rabbit Run is the following quote from a review . . . oh, I don’t remember it exactly, let me go to my bookshelf . . . it’s not there! I wonder what happened to my copy of Rabbit, Run? I like to reread this book from time to time. OK, let me do some web searching . . . here’s the blurb, I think: “a powerful writer with his own vision of the world.”
P.P.S. Let me again plug James Atlas’s book about the writing of literary biography.
