Rabbit, Run by John Updike (novel #242)

There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first. ~ Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom

Rabbit, Run is the first of five in Updike’s “Rabbit” series, which follows the life of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom. Rabbit has been described as the “middle-class everyman,” presumably of the
American 1950s.

 

Ugh…I hope not. I would borrow from another commentator, different author, different character. For me, Rabbit is “one of the most feckless characters in literature.

 

But before I comment further on this novel, I want to mention that in addition to being a Pulitzer-winning novelist, Updike was a distinguished literary critic. The following are his personal rules for literary criticism:

• Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
• Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
• Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.
• Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.
• If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's œuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

I like these rules. They are fair and systematic. So, in deference to the author and the critic, I will attempt to review Rabbit, Run according to Updike’s rules.

 

Harry Angstrom, or Rabbit, a nickname picked up in childhood for a nervous flutter under his nose, is a married father of one, plus one on the way. He has an uninspiring job, demonstrating and selling kitchen gadgets. Rabbit was a big basketball star in high school and daydreams about his not-so-long-ago heroics. He reminds me of the characters from Springsteen’s Glory Days. His wife, is simple, alcoholic, and seven months pregnant.

 

So, I get the “everyman” designation. He has a deep sense of dissatisfaction; how could he not, following the world-saving exploits of the Greatest Generation, selling vegetable peelers, must have felt maddeningly impotent.

 

One evening, after work and getting his honey-do list from Janice…

Rabbit freezes, standing looking at his faint yellow shadow on the white door that leads to the hall, and senses he is in a trap. It seems certain. He goes out.

Meaning he runs. He intends to make it to the Gulf of Mexico and sleep on the sand, but he doesn’t have a map or much of a plan. He stops to ask directions, though Rabbit cannot say precisely where he is headed. He doesn’t get any helpful advice and prepares to leave…

[Rabbit] walks to his car door. He feels through the hairs on the back of his neck the man following him. He gets into the car and slams the door and the farmer is right there, the meat of his face hung in the open door window. He bends down and nearly sticks his face in. His cracked thin lips with a scar tilting toward his nose move thoughtfully. He’s wearing glasses, a scholar. “The only way to get somewhere, you know is to figure out where you’re going before you go there.”

 

Rabbit catches a whiff of whisky. He says in a level way, “I don’t think so.” The lips and spectacles and black hairs poking out of the man’s tear-shaped nostrils show no surprise. Rabbit pulls out, going straight. Everybody who tells you how to act has whisky on their breath.

I’m not very good at determining an author’s intent, and I’m not sure that Updike ever called Rabbit “every-man.” However, it does seem that he is trying to explain a dreadful ennui pervasive in mid-century American men. Did he achieve this? Powerfully, but I’m unconvinced that Rabbit was “every-man.” Most did not drive away, leaving wife and family.

 

I didn’t like Updike’s style of prose at first. There is never a break, never a pause. He doesn’t have chapters and only one or two blank passage of time sections. There might be a name for this, but I don’t know it. I’m certain this is not right, but it was almost like stream of consciousness by the omniscient narrator. I did grow more accustomed to his style, and I think it worked. It may have been intentional to show that life never lets up, leaving Rabbit feeling trapped.

 

I know this…I didn’t like Rabbit. I couldn’t even feel sorry for him most of the time. I just wanted to say, “Dude!?” An unlikeable character does not mean bad storytelling, but maybe Updike intended Rabbit to be at least a little likable. In that regard, for me, he failed. While reading this, I often thought of the eponymous character from Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. Augie was immature and his own worst enemy, yet somehow, I liked him. He says of himself…

Lord, what a runner after good things, servant of love, embarker on schemes, recruit of sublime ideas, and good time Charlie.

Now that I’m done, I think I’ve written a fine review. Updike was a clever fellow.

 

My rating:  3 1/2 out of 5 stars

 

 

This novel was my read for the Classics Club Spin #40

 

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Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth (novel #197)

Whew! Have I got grievances! Do I harbor hatreds I didn’t even know were there! ~ Alexander Portnoy

 

I vaguely remember the scandal over this book when it was published in 1969, which made me a bit wary of it now. But I enjoyed Roth’s later novel American Pastoral, so I decided to give Portnoy’s Complaint the benefit of the doubt.

 

Which turned out to be too beneficent.

 

I came very close to putting it in the DNF bin, but I kept hoping for something redeeming, or at least poignant, but no. Just a long, coarse, narrative of Portnoy complaining. 

 

At least it was well titled.

 

Jewish-American bachelor Alexander Portnoy describes to his analyst his upbringing, promising career, and excessive masturbation habits. Portnoy’s monologue describes the repression in mid-20th Century Jewish-American families, his struggle for identity in Christian, Anglo-Saxon America, and the inner turmoil caused by public respectability and private shame. I suppose these themes resonate with some, but they did very little for me.

 

I’m not in favor of banning books, but I am in favor of ignoring some. I think the scandal in 69 created notoriety for a book which is merely outrageous; some would say avant-garde. It’s a fine line in my opinion.

 

My rating 2 out of 5 stars

 

 

 

 

As I mentioned I liked American Pastoral, so I’m on the fence with Roth. I’ll read more, but with discretion. How do you feel about Portnoy’s Complaint? Philip Roth?

 

This was my SPIN book for TheClassics Club Spin #29.

 

Excerpts (all by Portnoy):

 

And then, of course my father is a man who has a certain amount of worrying to do each day, and sometimes he just has to forego listening to the conversations going on around him in order to fulfill his anxiety requirement.

 

Could I really have detested this childhood and resented these poor parents of mine to the same degree then as I seem to now…

 

The freak I am! Lover of no one and nothing! Unloved and unloving!

 

One rare bright spot…loved this:

Oh, and there is really nothing in life, nothing at all, that quite compares with that pleasure of rounding second base at a nice slow clip, because there’s just no hurry any more, because that ball you’ve hit has just gone sailing out of sight…

 

 

 

 

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof...a play by Tennessee Williams

This is probably Tennessee Williams best known play. It won a Pulitzer Prize, and Williams said
it was his personal favorite of his works. Fortunately for me, I had never seen a film or stage production, so it was all new to me.

 

I’ve always been intrigued by the title.

 

The play takes place in a single day, late 1950s, in a single room of the Mississippi cotton plantation of Big Daddy Pollitt. Big Daddy is dying of cancer, though he doesn’t know it. His dysfunctional family has just learned the truth, and intends to break the news to Big Momma after Big Daddy goes to bed.

 

Big Daddy is bombastic, rude, and bullies his family. Big Momma desperately wants to believe – and pretends – that all is well. Oldest son Gooper (Gooper? I know, right?) and his wife Mae, are two-faced and conniving to win the estate. Younger son, and clear favorite of Big Daddy is Brick, who is an alcoholic and lives platonically with his wife Margaret aka Maggie aka the cat on the hot tin roof. 

 

In short – they’re a mess. Ordinarily, I dislike stories about self-destructive people, and at first I didn’t like this one for that very reason. But somehow, Maggie grew on me. She was the closest to being morally or emotionally healthy – and she has her issues. But I felt sorry for her, and admired her determination to save Brick and her marriage. And Brick is even sort of likeable, as he is completely honest about his alcoholism, and utter uselessness. 

 

My copy contained two different versions of the 3^rdand final act. The first as Williams wrote it, and the second, with changes suggested by stage director Elia Kazan. In a note about the alternate version, Williams opined that Kazan’s suggestions improved the play. I agree. 

 

This play read pretty easy, almost like a novel. But plays are meant to be performed, not read. I watched two film versions: 1976 starring Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner, which was quite true to the play (version with Kazan’s suggested revisions). The 1958 version starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman is more iconic but far less faithful to the play, though I thought Taylor and Newman were more convincing as Maggie and Brick.  

 

Reading this play satisfies a classic play in the Back to the Classics Challenge 2021, and completes the challenge for me, having read all 12 categories.

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Big Trouble by Dave Barry (novel #169)

Detective Baker decided that this was probably going to be one of those cases where somebody shoots a gun and nobody ever finds out who or why, which is a fairly common type of case in Miami.

I usually read the classics, and even though there is no precise qualification for that distinction, I think it is safe to say Big Trouble does not qualify – and likely never will. 

 

Which is not to say it is not a delightful read.

 

In preparing this review, I realized one of the advantages of reading (and reviewing) dead authors – I never have to worry about them reading my review. I was literally worrying about that the first dozen or so pages of Big Trouble, because to be honest, I wasn’t loving it. I wanted to because I love Dave Barry, who is a Pulitzer prize-winning, humor columnist. He is cheerfully cynical, patently absurd, and endearingly self-effacing. I did not read his column regularly, but whenever I did, I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

 

But Big Trouble was just a little too cliché – at first – in the character of Puggy: loveable loser, simpleton, loafer, boozer, semiprofessional vagrant. 

 

But somewhere the story turned, just about the same time Puggy’s day turned. He was having a good day, making $45 easy, by voting at several different polling stations, but later gets beat up, but then gets an easy job and free beer. 

 

He was drinking his second free beer, feeling better again about how the day was going, except for peeing his pants, when the door opened.

 

People peeing their pants is a motif Barry uses repeatedly, but in a very tasteful way.

 

Besides Puggy, there are a pair of likeable hit men (I know, but yeah), maybe due to their utterly detestable target, international arms dealers (also nearly likeable), small time thugs, a couple good cops, a good but incompetently overzealous cop, awkward high school kids, their surprisingly intelligent parents, a dog, a poisonous toad, a python, and no gators (except those associated with the University of Florida).

 

It’s a marvelous farce. Patently absurd – in Barry form – and yet, just on the cusp of plausible...well at least within sight of being on the cusp of plausible. Great fun, highly recommend it.

 

My rating: 3 ½ of 5 stars

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The Stranger by Albert Camus (novel #155)

"I have never been able really to regret anything in all my life." ~ Meursault, The Stranger

I had no idea what to expect from The Stranger. I knew it was a thesis to some extent for Camus’ philosophy of absurdism, but that had very little meaning for me. Blissfully ignorant I began.

Blissful didn’t last long. It begins with the main character, Meursault, learning of his mother’s death and departing for her funeral. Set in Algeria, mid 1940s, it details a few days, and then a year or so in the life of French Algerian Meursault.

The reader begins to see Meursault is a man without great passion or emotion. He goes through some of the motions of mourning, but doesn’t really seem to mourn. It isn’t as though he had a bad relationship with his mother, he professes to have loved her and to have got along. He is just indifferent to her passing.

This blasé attitude is the mark of Meursault. The day after the funeral he begins, or perhaps renews, a relationship with a girl from work, goes to the beach, goes to a comic film, and shows no sign of mourning. When his girl, Marie, asks him to marry her, he flippantly agrees, but later when she asks if he loves her, he responds, "I suppose I don’t" – but he’s still willing to marry her. It doesn’t mean anything to him.

Meursault’s aloof attitude toward life culminates when he kills an Arab. The first fatal shot is probably self-defense, but after pausing…

…I fired four more shots into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace. And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.

Meursault is arrested and tried. The most damning evidence being his indifference to his mother’s death, and indifference to everything.

Meursault is Camus’ embodiment of absurdism – the futility of seeking meaning or value from life. As such, I thought Meursault and the novel do a fair job of portraying absurdism, but do nothing to convince me of its merits; in fact, quite the opposite.

I pondered the title, and I suppose Meursault is the stranger – a stranger from humanity. I can’t say I enjoyed it, but I did find it interesting and well written. I’ll read more by Camus, but certainly with a predisposition next time.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This novel satisfies square G5, Classic Science or Philosophy (Absurdism) in the 2020 Classic Bingo Challenge, and Classic in Translation (from French) for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020.

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The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (novel #126)

"Fish" he said, "I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends."

The Old Man and the Sea is a novella by Ernest Hemingway. It tells the story of Santiago – the old man – a Cuban fisherman who has not caught a fish for 84 days.

 

Santiago, well past his prime, and impoverished by lack of success, takes to the sea each day in a dilapidated skiff.

The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.

 

But in spite of his reduced estate, he is a seasoned fisherman, with a healthy respect for the sea and his prey.

…the old man always thought of her [the sea] as feminine and as something that gave or withheld favors, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.

 

His young apprentice, Manolin, just a boy who loves the old man, is prohibited from fishing with Santiago because the old man is considered bad luck.

 

On the 85th day of his draught, Santiago hooks an enormous Blue Marlin that will test his skill, stamina, and resolve. He battles the fish for three days and two nights. Santiago gets little sleep and must eat raw fish to maintain his strength. Although, he is not religious, Santiago prays and adds a little something to the standard Hail Mary…

Blessed Virgin, pray for the death of this fish. Wonderful though he is.

 

He considers the fish a friend or brother, even though he knows he must kill it, and he often talks to it.

“Fish” he said softly, aloud, “I’ll stay with you until I am dead.”

 

Santiago is a fan of the New York Yankees and admirer of Joe DiMaggio. He wonders if the great DiMaggio would be proud of his epic struggle. Being a Tigers fan myself, I smiled when Santiago worried about the Yankee’s chances…

I fear both the Tigers of Detroit and the Indians of Cleveland.

 

I’ll spare the spoiler – though you probably know how it ends. This is my first read of The Old Man and the Sea, though I have read several works by Hemingway. I always admire Hemingway’s writing, but I don’t always love his stories. This one however, was superb; it is now my favorite work by Hemingway. It is a tender, thoughtful story, heartbreaking and heartwarming.

 

Hemingway was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this work in 1953, and it was cited as one of the factors for his award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. Hemingway’s friend Charles Scribner wrote:

It is a curious fact of literary history that a story which describes the loss of a gigantic prize provided the author with the greatest prize of his career.

 

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

 

 

I read this for The Classics Club spin #20.

 

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All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (86 down 14 to go)

…what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of bad and the bad out of good, and the devil take the hindmost. ~ Jack Burden

This is the first time I’ve read All the King’s Men or Robert Penn Warren. The book is a modernist novel with existential themes. It is the tale of Jack Burden and Willie Stark, because as Jack, the first-person narrator put it

...the story of Willie Stark and the story of Jack Burden are, in one sense, one story.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Before reading All the King’s Men, I didn’t know it won a Pulitzer or that the 1949 movie adaptation won the Academy Award for best picture. I’m glad I didn’t know, as that would have set expectations high. I much prefer to have no expectations.

Jack Burden is a history researcher and aide to Governor Willie Stark – the popular and powerful governor of an unnamed Southern State in the 1930s (unnamed but most likely Louisiana). Jack is a crafty cynic, and worldly wise Jack-of-all-Trades for the governor.

In a flashback, the two meet when Willie is a petty county bureaucrat. Willie attempts to expose a crooked construction deal for a new school, but the old political machine is untouchable, until an inferior fire escape at the school gives way during a fire drill and kills several students and cripples others.

According to Jack:

It was a piece of luck for Willie.

(cynic…I told you)

It launches Willie’s political career, and he runs for governor, or again as Jack put it…

he was running for Governor. Or rather, he was running in the Democratic primary, which in our state is the same us running for Governor.

In his initial campaign, Willie is naïve and politically inept. He is also initially a man of honesty and integrity, until he learns he is a stooge of the political machine, trying to split the support of another candidate.

Willie does not win that primary, but he does eventually become governor. He is wildly popular with the people, despised by political opponents, and feared by his stooges. His staff all call him Boss. Jack calls him boss, but is no stooge. Jack’s job included many things, such as digging up dirt on people that needed persuading.

Jack had other, less sordid, duties. He said: 

I was supposed to do a lot of different things, and one of them was to lift up fifteen-year-old, hundred-and-thirty-five-pound hairy white dogs on summer afternoons and paint an expression of unutterable bliss upon their faithful features as they gaze deep, deep into the Boss’s eyes.[photo-op at the old family farm]

The tale is about Willie’s growing political savviness – and slow corruption, and simultaneously about Jack’s philosophizing of the entire saga. I couldn’t and wouldn’t attempt to recapitulate Jack’s philosophy. The quotation at the top of this post is one example, and here are a couple more:

The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can’t know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn’t got and which if he had it, would save him. There’s the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope, for the end of man is to know.

And…

If the human race didn’t remember anything it would be perfectly happy. I was a student of history once in a university and if I learned anything from studying history that was what I learned. Or to be more exact, that was what I thought I had learned.

As Jack implies, there are definite parallels between his story and Willie’s. Both are pragmatic and have no qualms with the seedier aspects of politics. Jack is able to justify his role because as a historical researcher – he loved truth. If it was the truth he dug up – so be it. The Boss did the dirty work with it. And even the Boss’ dirty work – well, they told themselves they were doing it for the greater good.

Several distinct but related violent events shake both Willie and Jack to the core of their beliefs. It comes too late for one, and perhaps just in time for the other.

I really enjoyed this novel. First, for the philosophical dilemmas, or moral ambiguity, or conflicted consciences, or situational ethics, or well you see – the complex business of life.

But secondly, Robert Penn Warren uses fabulous dialogue and narrative that is simply a lot of fun and entirely believable for his characters (examples in the excerpts at the end). Jack in particular likes to string together a half-dozen or more adverbs or adjectives in describing people and events.

There are several great tragedies in this novel – more than several, but in spite of them, there is a very satisfying ending.

Once more, in Jack’s words: 

This has been the story of Willie Stark, but it is my story too. For I have a story. It is the story of a man who lived in the world and to him the world looked one way for a long time and then it looked another and very different way.

Have you read All the King’s Men? What did you think?

Excerpts:

There’s a reference to Moby Dick as Jack describes the alluring look a love interest gives him. [she]

…sunk her harpoon deeper than ever Queequeg sunk it…

Then the boss spied a fellow, a tall gaunt-shanked, malarial, leather-faced side of jerked venison, wearing jean pants and a brace of mustaches hanging off the kind of face you see in photographs of General Forrest’s cavalrymen…

My god, you talk like Byram was human! He’s a thing! You don’t prosecute an adding machine if a spring goes bust and makes a mistake. You fix it. Well, I fixed Byram. I fixed him so his unborn great-grandchildren will wet their pants on this anniversary and not know why. Boy, it will be the shock in the genes. Hell, Byram is just something you use, and he’ll sure be useful from now on. ~ The Governor discussing how to deal with a corrupt bureaucrat

He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide.

That is what all of us historical researchers believe. And we love truth.

For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-filed pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar’s gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

The second day I was in Texas. I was traveling through the part where the flat-footed, bilious frog-sticker-toting Baptist biscuit-eaters live. Then I was traveling through the part where the crook-legged, high-heeled, gun-wearing, spick-killing, callous-rumped sons of the range live and crowd the drugstore on Saturday night and then all go round the corner to see episode three of “Vengeance on Vinegar Creek,” starring Gene Autry as Borax Pete.

I had seen three hangings and one electrocution, but they are different. In a hanging you do not change a man’s personality. You just change the length of his neck and give him a quizzical expression, and in an electrocution you just cook some bouncing meat in a wholesale lot.

I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future.

Film Rendition:  There is a 2006 version but it didn’t receive great reviews so I passed. The 1949 version however won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Actor (Broderick Crawford), and Best Actress in Supporting Role (Mercedes McCambridge). It also received four other nominations. So, it should go without saying it’s very good.

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American Pastoral by Philip Roth (63 down 37 to go)

You’re craving depths that don’t exist. This guy is the embodiment of nothing. I was wrong. Never more mistaken about anyone in my life. ~ Nathan Zuckerman’s thoughts regarding Seymour “Swede” Levov 

This is the first time I’ve read American Pastoral or Philip Roth. American Pastoral is a post-modern novel, one of the more contemporary on my list, published in 1997, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. It is the story of an all American boy and the American dream.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

 

This novel satisfies square O1 of 2015 Classics BINGO: Literary Prize of My Country

The story begins in 1995 with Nathan Zuckerman attending his 45 year high school reunion. Zuckerman appears in several of Roth’s novels and is an apparent alter-ego, as Zuckerman is also a published author. Zuckerman, the Swede’s brother Jerry Levov, and other classmates naturally reminisce and through them the reader learns of the legend of Seymour “Swede” Levov and his mystique. The high school and community in Newark, New Jersey, is predominantly Jewish, including The Swede who earned the nickname by his uncharacteristic blonde hair.

Seymour Levov, known as Swede to his friends and neighbors, is a three sport hero in high school, destined for greatness. He is admired by everyone and seems on a fast track to the American dream, or quiet, comfortable, American Pastoral until his only child commits the unimaginable and plunges Swede into the indigenous American berserk.

Swede is quiet and unassuming. He is a pro-prospect in baseball, but shortly after graduating in 1945, he eagerly does his duty by joining the Marine Corps. This is the Swede’s life. He does the right thing, the admirable thing, the expected thing, and continues to win everyone’s respect and admiration. The respectable life seems to be the one driving force in Seymour’s life.

After Zuckerman frames the story at the reunion, Roth switches to an omniscient narrator and flashes back to narrate the Swede’s life, also using a good deal of stream of consciousness by Swede and other characters. After his stint in the Marines, the Swede enters his father’s successful glove manufacturing business. The business thrives, Swede becomes rich, marries Miss New Jersey, buys a stone house in the country, has a daughter, and is living a perfect pastoral life.

But then a few threads in the exquisite tapestry begin to unravel. His daughter Merry develops a stutter and grows obese. A bit inconsistent with the façade, but nothing the unassailable Swede feels will not be overcome. And then, Merry becomes increasing belligerent, rebellious, and even hostile in her disgust with American involvement in Vietnam. Again, exasperating to the Swede, but likely just a phase.

And then – she does the unimaginable, something there is no dismissing, something there is no recovering from. Considering his and his wife’s parenting Swede wonders:   

How could their innocent foibles add up to this human being?

The daughter who transports him out of the longed for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral – into the

...indigenous American berserk.

I felt bad for the poor guy. I’m rather a straight and narrow sort myself and could sympathize when it all unraveled. He kept looking for answers, what he did wrong, what his wife did wrong – and for the most part coming up with nothing.

And – in my opinion – nothing did explain it. They weren’t perfect parents, but they did the best they knew. At some point, kids will make their own life, for good or for bad.

At the very end of the novel, the Swede and his wife host a dinner party, still trying to reclaim the pastoral.  The guests include Swede's parents and several friends. It falls on the very day Swede encounters his fugitive daughter for the first time in years. She is living in squalor, but a life of her own choosing. He tells no one at the party, puts on a respectable façade, and learns of yet more human folly in his loved ones. He wonders: 

What kind of mask is everyone wearing?

He had been cracking up in the only way he knew how, which is not really cracking up at all but sinking, all evening long being unmade by steadily sinking under the weight. A man who never goes full out and explodes, who only sinks…

This is a complex novel with numerous themes: The American Dream, the Jewish-American pathos, blended families (Jewish and Catholic in this case), anti-war activism, respectability, and the “sub-stratum of the mind”. It’s a bit depressing, but also a keen insight.

There are a few pages that would be rated R, though most of the book is PG-13.

Other excerpts:

Perhaps by definition a neighborhood is the place to which a child spontaneously gives undivided attention…

One price you pay for being taken for a god is the unabated dreaminess of your acolytes.

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach – that it makes no sense.

References to other classic literature:  Zuckerman quotes Tolstoy and The Brothers Karamazov, and later the narrative refers to a minor character as having escaped his Dostoyevskian family.  I guess Roth likes the Russian authors.

One last excerpt that particularly amused me, and came with an odd experience of synchronicity.

At the dinner party, Swede’s father, who is outspoken and opinionated, possibly a bit senile, and who usually turns every discussion to the glove manufacturing trade, describes Jackie Kennedy:  

Thank God in 1960 Jackie Kennedy walked out there with a little glove to the wrist, and a glove to the elbow, and a pillbox hat, and all of a sudden gloves were in style again. First Lady of the glove industry. Wore a size six and a half. People in the glove industry were praying to that lady.

At the very instant I was reading this, I was on a treadmill at the gym. The treadmills have TVs, but I wasn’t watching, obviously because I was reading. But when I glanced up briefly to turn the page, who was on the TV but the exquisite Jackie Kennedy. I had the sound muted, so I don’t know what was said, but it was a news channel, and the story was definitely more about Jackie than President Kennedy, and I’m fairly certain it had something to do with her impeccable taste. She wore gloves in the news footage.

Film Rendition: 2016 with starring Ewan MacGregor is pretty good, and pretty faithful. It didn't do well at the box office though.

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A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (62 down 38 to go)

When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve. ~ the Priest
I don’t love. ~ Tenente Frederic Henry

This is the first time I’ve read A Farewell to Arms and the third I’ve read by Hemingway. A Farwell to Arms is a modernist novel, first-person narrative of Lieutenant (Tenente) Frederic Henry, an American serving in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army during WWI.  Of course, it was not known as WWI at the time, but rather the War to End War. The Tenente falls in love with a British nurse, Catherine (Cat) Barkley. So, it’s a war story and a love story – or more precisely, the story of lovers trying to escape war. It’s also very depressing. If you saw the movie The Silver Linings Playbook you already knew that.

My rating: 3 1/2 of 5 stars

 

In spite of it being depressing, I found it quite engaging. A shocking review thus far, no? A war story that is depressing and a Hemingway novel that is engaging. To avoid further spoilers…

Spoiler Alert:  The following contains a minor spoiler.

After some preliminary narrative to develop setting, characters, and the love story, Tenente Henry is badly injured and most of his crew killed by a mortar blast. He is taken to a hospital well away from the fighting and Catherine is transferred to work in the same hospital, thus allowing their love to grow. After major surgery to repair his knee and a long recuperation, Henry is sent back to the front, just in time to take place in a massive Italian retreat. In the chaos, a group of self-imposed Battle Police, “arrest” retreating officers, and summarily execute them for the shame they have brought upon Italy. Even though he is American, Henry is arrested and will likely be executed, but he makes a daring escape. During his flight he decides he is finished with the war – hence the title. He eventually finds Catherine and the two spend several relaxing days as if they haven’t a care in the world. Henry learns that the authorities have discovered his whereabouts, and intend to arrest him. Fortunately, Henry and Catherine were staying on the Italian-Swiss border, so they plan a sudden and daring escape: An all-night rowboat trip across the lake into Switzerland. Oh and by the way, Catherine is several months pregnant. I’ll spare further spoilers and let you read it yourself. It’s worth a read.

I liked this much more than The Sun Also Rises, but not as much as For Whom the Bell Tolls. I only had one complaint. The love dialogue between Catherine and Henry is so cloying as to be unbelievable, such as this exchange, with Catherine speaking first:

Oh, darling, I want you so much I want to be you too. 

 

You are, We’re the same one.

I know it. At night we are.

The nights are grand.

I want us to be all mixed up. I don’t want you to go away. I just said that. You go if you want to. But hurry right back. Why darling, I don’t live at all when I’m not with you.

I won’t ever go away, I said.

I’m not good when you’re not there. I haven’t any life at all.

I want you to have a life. I want you to have a fine life. But we’ll have it together, won’t we?

There was one other complaint I might have had. As a veteran myself, I would have been prepared to dislike this novel, for the soldier deserting his unit and duty, but the arrogance and idiocy of the Battle Police made Tenente Henry’s decision perfectly reasonable.

Hemingway served, and was injured in the Italian ambulance corps, and he did fall in love with a nurse, but that’s about as far as the similarities go. I don’t think it would be accurate to call this autobiographical, or even semi-autobiographical. It was just Hemingway doing what writers are always admonished to do – writing about what he knew.

In the end, like the character in The Silver Linings Playbook, I wondered what was the point? Just a theory, but pointlessness may have been the point. Of all the stupid wars, WWI was one of the stupidest. Frederic and Catherine were caught up, in a war that just sort of got caught up, drawn out, and badly concluded by circumstance. 

Film Rendition: Starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes. To be honest, I thought this was awful. Hemingway reportedly hated it as well. Skip the movie, read the book.

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