Sunday, November 20, 2005
Rabbbit, Run – John Updike
That I’ve read this, and not Pnin or Herzog, may be because it is the first in a sequence - I like the big canvas. Don’t get me wrong, I like stand-alone books too, certainly much more than I like films. Films are all too bloody long. The optimum length of any story you have to sit through and watch is fifty minutes. Films should all be cut, or split into mini-series, even if total running time is increased. Who can be bothered to watch Goodfellas now we have the Sopranos?
Anyway, Rabbit, Run: it’s brilliant and beautiful, of course. At parties you could say, “Updike instructs us that every life is worth celebrating, or at least chronicling. He writes of a quotidian heroism; the little guy does not do something special, the little guy is special. It is a democratic work, quintessentially American.” Someone may try and usurp alpha-status with that bluntest of instruments, a less well-known work by the same writer – Roger’s Version, for instance. Such a strategy leaves you with only one response: you invest even more on your side. You don’t move, but you fix this hellhound in your gaze. “The Rabbit Tetralogy,” you say, “is not only Updike’s finest achievement, it is the high water mark of twentieth century American literature.” “But what about…” “It is the high water mark of twentieth century American literature.”
You’ll get away with it.
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That I’ve read this, and not Pnin or Herzog, may be because it is the first in a sequence - I like the big canvas. Don’t get me wrong, I like stand-alone books too, certainly much more than I like films. Films are all too bloody long. The optimum length of any story you have to sit through and watch is fifty minutes. Films should all be cut, or split into mini-series, even if total running time is increased. Who can be bothered to watch Goodfellas now we have the Sopranos?
Anyway, Rabbit, Run: it’s brilliant and beautiful, of course. At parties you could say, “Updike instructs us that every life is worth celebrating, or at least chronicling. He writes of a quotidian heroism; the little guy does not do something special, the little guy is special. It is a democratic work, quintessentially American.” Someone may try and usurp alpha-status with that bluntest of instruments, a less well-known work by the same writer – Roger’s Version, for instance. Such a strategy leaves you with only one response: you invest even more on your side. You don’t move, but you fix this hellhound in your gaze. “The Rabbit Tetralogy,” you say, “is not only Updike’s finest achievement, it is the high water mark of twentieth century American literature.” “But what about…” “It is the high water mark of twentieth century American literature.”
You’ll get away with it.
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