He plots and connives and trips over his own schemes coming and going, leaving a trail of disappointment-his own and others’. Nobody anywhere, ever, from the first book to the fourth, mistook Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom for a role model. As a token of his limitless sleaze, he once engages in quasi incest. In time he casts an appraising eye not only on his friends’ wives but also on his illegitimate daughter and even his granddaughter. When we first meet him, he’s abandoned his pregnant wife and young son and soon thereafter takes up with a part-time prostitute. Yes, of course, Rabbit is a scoundrel, a man of often low impulses, ones he can’t (or doesn’t even try to) govern. Roiphe says in several thousand shrewd, stylish words what can be summed up in a Christopher Hitchens bon mot: Their lack of humor compromises their seriousness.
Both authors’ writings are much more besides.)Ī dozen years after DFW’s review, Katie Roiphe wrote something of a rebuttal in The New York Times, giving the great male narcissists their complicated due and calling out both their critics and their literary heirs for exhibiting a lamentable humorlessness and joylessness. (Would anybody get credit, say, for calling Eve Babitz just tits with a typewriter, a literary mammocrat, and so on? Babitz was not above promoting her ample bosom, but at their best her works, like the Rabbit novels, are “essential recordings of American life,” to quote from a begrudging review-essay on Updike. Belaboring the point, the headline of DFW’s review referred to Updike as a “Champion Literary Phallocrat,” and DFW began the review by characterizing Updike as one of “the Great Male Narcissists,” along with Norman Mailer and Philip Roth. I have fond memories of reading John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy- Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990)-particularly the last two installments.īut ever since David Foster Wallace, in a 1997 review, quoted a female friend saying that John Updike was “just a penis with a thesaurus,” that bon mot has been invoked as if it were a landmark Supreme Court opinion-damning and weighty. The Secret Lives of Used Books (discards, dedications, ex libris)
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