![]() ![]() The plot here, as in the first novel, centers around an affair. Its refreshing to read and kind of a liberating way to think about writing: who cares if you don’t know what happens next? Just revert to memory and maybe something will come. There’s a plot, to be sure, but Updike lets characters remember and think their way through his scenes. As if the writer himself is just letting breath flow from his fingertips. Updike’s writing feels like some sort of exhalation. This later book, in contrast, is made of the specificity of memory. He aged into a love of nouns and happenings: “It takes Rabbit back to when he used to sit in the radio-listening armchair back on Jackson Road, its arms darkened with grease spots from the peanut butter cracker sandwiches he used to stack there to listen with.” The first Rabbit novel is all descriptions of scenery and place, insights into the connections between movement and color and time that are the basic stuff of metaphors. But Updike took eleven years between the first and second novels of the series and his writing changed. Or at least Rabbit, his long-running protagonist in a series of social novels, never did.Īnyway, that’s what I thought after I read the first book of Updike's Rabbit anthology, Rabbit, Run. Updike never met a metaphor he didn’t like. ![]()
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