Perpetual Change

Rabbit, Run

I recently finished this book by John Updike. It was interesting, but even more interesting than the book itself was that it reached such critical acclaim. It seems from online research that each book in the series came out at a time when its main issue particularly resonated with the common person of the day. That is even more amazing. The book was so predictable and yet I was never sure what was going to happen. It was quite suspenseful and depressing.

Here are two interesting passages:

[response to the doctor's news of a normal baby from the expectant father]
"That's wonderful. Thank you. Good grief, thank you."
Dr. Crowe stands there smiling uneasily. Coming up from the pit of creation, he stammers in the open air. Strane: in these last hours he has been closer to Janice [the wife] than Harry ever was, has been grubbing with his hands in her roots, riding her body in its earthquake, yet he has brought back nothing to confide, no curse, no blessing. Harry dreads that the doctor's eyes will release with thunder the mystery they have absorbed; but Crowe's gaze contains no wrath. Not even a reprimand. He seems to see Harry as just another in the parade of more or less dutiful husbands whose brainlessly sown seed he spends his life trying to reap.
----

[then when Harry takes his older child to the park]
Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roofball and the click of checkers call to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistlechains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children's murmuring. 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.
----
fun stuff, huh? (to be read with strong, bitter sarcasm)

Labels: book

posted by jjs @ 8:09 PM