Chekhov’s Mistess

Updike’s Rules for Book Reviews

Kate posted some thoughts on John Updike’s rules for reviewing (as posted at the NBCC blog), so we thought we’d throw them out on the MetaxuCafe forums for discussion [visit the forum discussion]. If you want my opinion, they seem a little too nice, but then again, I’m not a book reviewer, or more importantly in this case, not a book reviewee.

comments

My comments are couched in a personal perspective on Updike. His review rules are excellent. I have been reviewing books for over 50 years and I can testify to the relevance of Updike’s presentation.

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UPDIKE

John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy chronicles reflectively the decades since I first had contact with the Baha’i Faith back in 1953.  With the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship Updike was working on the first of these four books, Rabbit, Run, when I became a Baha’i in October 1959.  The book was published a few months later in 1960 and is the story of a young man, one Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, from a small town in the USA. The book concerns Harry’s attempts to escape the constraints of life.  In my teens I, too, lived in a small town and, although I could see the attractiveness of escaping from social constraints, I also left the need for a set of limits.  I was only too well aware of just how easily I could go beyond the appropriate limits.  By the late fifties I could see what happened to those who did escape from life’s, from society’s, constraints. I knew from personal experience by my early teens, by 1957, what it was like to be caught stealing, breaking and entering, going too far sexually, misbehaving around the family home, at school or with my play-mates and pushing the envelope of life.  Had I read Updike’s book, Rabbit, Run I think I would have had my need, my desire, for limits reinforced.  The Baha’i Faith provided that framework, those limits, at a critical stage in my life, my mid-teens.  This Faith also provided that sense of the sacredness of life which is at the centre of Updike’s work.

When I was preparing to leave North America for Australia in 1970/1 people were watching the movie Rabbit, Run. It had opened just as I began planning to leave Canada in 1970.  Rabbit Redux, Updike’s sequel to Rabbit, Run came out four months after I arrived in Sydney for what became my life in Australia.  Harry Angstrom took to the road in 1971 in Rabbit Redux as I took to a different road in the southern hemisphere.  Updike’s final two Rabbit books took Harry Angstrom into the 1990s and his rather bleak retirement and old age.  The following prose-poem compares and contrasts my life with Harry’s. –Ron Price with thanks to “Articles on John Updike’s Works,” in The New York Times on the Web.

You didn’t think much about politics

back then in the ‘50s, did you John? 

Private destiny was your concern,

then and now--not that partisan game.

And your then theories about how

to write are now forgotten, eh John?

When Rabbit is Rich was set in ’79,

I was living in Tasmania fighting

another bi-polar episode; Harry was

fighting his many losses in life

or was it life’s pleasures--sex, booze,

marital infidelity and having fun?

Then Harry got old--at just 55--

in 1990 in Rabbit At Rest, a decade

before I headed into quieter pastures

where death and age awaited---

inevitably long down life’s road,

but not with fear, emptiness

and Harry’s downward slide

with its world inhabited by

ghosts and demons of his past.

Ron Price

June 24th 2006

    – RonPrice (06/24  at  10:03 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: June 13, 2006
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

• Comments:1
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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