Wikipedia says Updike’s fiction is distinguished by its
attention to the concerns, passions, and suffering of average Americans; its
emphasis on Christian theology; and its preoccupation with sexuality and sensual
detail.
I nominated one of the Rabbit oeuvre for my book group.
I intended to choose one of the two Rabbit books that won a Pulitzer prize, but my
friends wanted to start at the beginning. So Rabbit, run it was.
The book begins with an enigmatic epigraph from a Blaise
Pascal pensée:
The
motions of Grace, the hardness of the heart; external circumstances
Deciphering what to make of that is not straightforward, but in
an Author’s afterword published by Penguin (but no other print versions) he
said the book was meant as
“…a realistic demonstration of
what happens when a young American family man goes on the road—the people left
behind get hurt. There was no painless
dropping out of the Fifties’ fraying but still tight social weave. Arriving at so prim a moral was surely not my
only intention: the book ends on an
ecstatic, open note that was meant to stay open, as testimony to our heart’s
stubborn amoral quest for something once called grace...
The religious faith that a useful truth will be imprinted by a perfect artistic submission underlies these Rabbit novels…to convey the quality of existence itself that hovers beneath the quotidian details, what the scholastic philosophers called the ens. Rather than arrive at a verdict and a directive, I sought to present sides of an unresolvable tension intrinsic to being human. Readers who expect novelists to reward and punish and satirize their characters from a superior standpoint will be disappointed.”
The religious faith that a useful truth will be imprinted by a perfect artistic submission underlies these Rabbit novels…to convey the quality of existence itself that hovers beneath the quotidian details, what the scholastic philosophers called the ens. Rather than arrive at a verdict and a directive, I sought to present sides of an unresolvable tension intrinsic to being human. Readers who expect novelists to reward and punish and satirize their characters from a superior standpoint will be disappointed.”
Another
autobiographical essay notes that "Updike identified sex, art, and
religion as 'the three great secret things' in human experience. The grandson of a Presbyterian minister (his
first father-in-law was also a minister), his writing in all genres has
displayed a preoccupation with philosophical questions. A lifelong churchgoer and student of Christian
theology, the Jesuit magazine America awarded him its Campion Award in
1997 as a 'distinguished Christian person of letters' ".
The Rabbit , run story provoked a spirited discussion in our book group,
ranging among those who rejected the apparently gross and banal narrative,
those who were somewhat impatient with the detailed and lyrical descriptions of surroundings as
getting in the way of what happens, those (me included) who loved the writing
just for its own sake, and those (also me) who wanted to explore what Updike was saying and
implying about religion, specifically Christian religion, or whether he had a
message at that level at all.
We referred not only to the author’s testimony above, but to
an appreciation by Julian Barnes written in 2009, a theologian’s 2009 appreciation of the work, and a 1982 academic philological journal
article seeking to draw out implications of points in the text.
The moral is that nominator of the book for discussion at a book club is
likely always to get more from the book than anyone else.
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