Representative Men

New England Journal of Public Policy Volume 7 | Issue 2 Article 9 9-23-1991 Representative Men Shaun O'Connell University of Massachusetts Boston, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp Part of the American Literature Commons, and the Public Policy Commons Recommended Citation O'Connell, Shaun (1991) "Representative Men," New England Journal of Public Policy: Vol. 7: Iss. 2, Article 9. Available at: http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol7/iss2/9 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. It has been accepted for inclusion in New England Journal of Public Policy by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Representative Men Shaun O'Connell The works discussed in this article include: A Book About Men, by Robert Bly. 268 pages. Addison-Wesley, 1991. $18.95. American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis. 399 pages. Vintage Books, 1991. $11.00 Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man, by David Lehman. 318 pages. Poseidon Press, 1991. $21.95. Amongst Women, by John McGahern. 184 pages. Faber and Faber, 1990. $25.00 Lies of Silence, by Brian Moore. 194 pages. Bloomsbury, 1990. $25.00 Chicago Loop, by Paul Theroux. 196 pages. Random House, 1990. $20.00 Rabbit at Rest, by John Updike. Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. 512 pages. $21.95. Iron John: idway through 1991, with intentional hyperbole, I with irony, Newsweek declared that "the men's in a tone combining wonder movement is dawning, the movement, meaning one that stems from a deep national malaise that hardly anyone knew existed until they saw it on a PBS special." That is, until the Public Broadcasting System presented Bill Moyers's^4 Gathering of Men, a 1990 television documentary on Robert Bly, a poet and an apostle of male selfawareness. Bly's book on this matter, Iron John, stayed on the best-seller list for more than fifty weeks in 1991; at the same time, Sam Keen's provocatively titled Fire in the Belly was also a best-seller. Both Bly and Keen were inspired by Joseph Campbell's pop mythic mysticism, and both Bly and Keen, like Campbell before them, were celebrated on PBS by Bill Moyers. As Richard Stengel wittily noted in Time, "What Oprah is to books like Men Who Hate Women and the Women WJto Love Them, Moyers is to intellectual fare like Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces." Yet clearly a nerve was struck, by Bly's iron and Keen's fire, in the national psyche in the year of Desert Storm, though both Bly and Keen saw the war against Iraq as evidence of George Bush's problems with manliness.' (When The Nation solicited responses from luminaries to the question "What is patriotism?" Bly wrote, in response to celebrations over the Gulf War victory, "The yellow ribbon is the last first postmodern social 1 2 refuge of a scoundrel.") 4 Both Bly and Keen argue that modern men are assigned roles that train them to succeed and grant them power, but these roles also cut them off from their fathers, Shaun O'Connell is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. 113 New England Journal of Public Policy and their own families. The "father-hunger" of modern men results in development and their inability to deal with the world as mature men. a range of surly behaviors which for Bly Bly urges men to put away childish things and regain their even includes the "deconstructing" of English department elders mislaid manhood. Like Campbell, Bly searches myths to find salvific models of maturation. "Ancient stories are a good help, because they have endured the scrutiny of generations of women and men, and because they give both the light and dark sides of manhood, the admirable and the dangerous. Their model is not a perfect man, nor an overly spiritual man." However, valuable as Bly's approach might be, ancient stories cannot answer the question: What models of man are offered by contemporary stories? What do they tell us, as Tolstoy once put the question, about what a man should do? their feelings, their arrested — — 5 men — one — emerged from the pages works of fiction. They were offered up as representative men of the 1980s, an era when the worst were full of passionate intensities, particularly among men. Each antiheroic man in these works was selfish, domineering, dangerous to women, and deceitful, yet each was also committed to a values which, system of values and ideas that made him an interesting case history Early in the 1990s, six of telling texts: one work of literary actual, five fictional criticism, five — in some instances, redeemed his failings. Though these figures are presented with — depending on the extent to which each author sees representative man as trapped or the extent to which each of these ures rebels against confining roles — each of these male authors takes a varying degrees of sympathy literary fig- his his six sharply critical view of traditional male traits: their lust for power, their assumption of authority, their drive for self-fulfillment, and their romantic idealism. In Some American Men, Gloria Emerson says it is still largely assumed to be "a man's world," though she also documents the "penalties" men pay for such assumptions. "In a country whose insistence on delusion seems without clear limits, the old definition of masculinity still persists. And it persists because of hidden and unspoken expectations." 6 The works here under discussion, written by and about American and European men, reexamine "the old definition of masculinity" in striking, occasionally brilliant ways. Paul de Man was a leading advocate of the school of "deconstruction," an approach to language and literature that has had significant, if indirect, influence on the American mind. After de Man's death in 1983, it was revealed that he had written pro-Nazi tracts as a young man in Belgium, early in World War II. This story, man and idea, is brilliantly told in Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man by David Lehman. Paul de Man, who died before his wartime journalism became public, perpetuated a fraudulent image of himself as a former anti-Nazi resistance fighter; at the same time he self-servingly promoted a theory that separated language from action, history from judgment. Harry ("Rabbit") Angstrom, antihero of four novels spanning the Eisenhower- Reagan eras, came to the end of the road in Rabbit at Rest by John Updike. Rabbit was consumed by all of that which nourished him the consumer culture of middle America, where he lived out his failed dream of success. Patrick Bateman, villain of American Psycho, a controversial and lurid novel by Bret Easton Ellis, represents a horrific vision of the young urban professional; he personifies solipsism, consumerism, self-seeking, moral inertia, and violence against women. Parker Jacoda, dubbed by the press — 114 "The Wolfman," is a similarly savage and pathetic victimizer of women in Paul Theroux's far better novel, Chicago Loop. Michael Dillon is at once a betrayer and rescuer of women in distress in Brian Moore's political parable of Northern Moran, an obscure farmer in the west of John McGahern's supreme work of fiction, Amongst Women, is a petty tyrant over a family whose women return his bitterness with love and grow all the stronger for their efforts. These six unattractive but compelling (in several Ireland, Lies of Silence. Finally, Michael Ireland, portrayed in senses) men represent, then, aspects of the age, signs of the times. what certain representative modern men want and They hint at do. whose whose enthusiasts have come to dominate important or ambitious English departments in American universities, whose academic strike force has even seized control of the Modern Language Association (MLA). These heady revisionists hold that there is no clear link between language and the world or, in their jargon, between sign and meaning. (Paul de Man in Blindness and Insight: "Sign and meaning can never coincide." And: "Instead of con7 taining or reflecting experience, language constitutes it.") They discuss, or have "discourse" about, "texts" not discussions of literary works as we had known them: works written in distinct genres, works composed by various writers, under different circumstances, works reflecting a range of intentions and bearing different degrees of success. Such texts, argue deconstructionists, are autotelic, or self-referential, selfcontradicting artifacts, removed from the real world. (Of course there is no real world for deconstructionists; what we might think of as the real world they treat as yet another text, a place where we send each other "messages" cryptic signals whose minimalist meanings are quite different from what they appear to be, meanDeconstruction the trendy literary theory of language and literature is advocates have taken over many literary journals, — — ings for which deconstructionists have, they claim, the code. Deconstructionists, no single meaning; rather, they "problematize" all texts, literal naturally, arrive at and figurative.) Deconstructionists (or "decons" of the rhetorical considerations first, new anticanon) place linguistic and seeking contradictions rather than coherence within literary works, thus "liberating" readers from what deconstructionists take to be the common readers' naive expectations of literary representation, morality, and coher- ence. "It is not difficult to see the attractions" of deconstructive readings, notes Jonathan Culler, a leading proponent, no ultimate or absolute justification it," the critic is "Given that there is from of interpretation itself rather than any in Structuralist Poetics . for any system or for the interpretations free to value "the activity . . . which might be obtained." 8 In other words, literary criticism, in their fast hands, has become an autoerotic act. Such moral relativism and critical license, however, do not add up to compelling intellectual attractions for all critics. "Readers interested in the moral dimension of a novel or poem, or in elevating the degree of artistic success, or in treating the ideas and values it promotes, can forget it. What you get with deconstruction isn't knowledge but a reflexive suspicion of all sources of knowledge a suspicion extended to art and culture more generally," writes David Lehman in his withering attack on deconstruction, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. 9 Deconstruction like est, its trendy therapeutic counterpart, which also argues that results — — thinking makes things so — is indeed a sign of the times. 775 It represents a revolution — New England Journal of Public all Policy rhetorical, of course who became — against long-held assumptions and president of the deconstructionist bravura, that "a deconstructionist is beliefs. J. Hillis Miller, MLA in 1986, argued, with characteristic pride and is not a parasite but a patricide. He a bad son demolishing beyond hope of repair the machine of Western metaphysics." 10 And so it has come to pass. The center has not held, said Yeats; deconstructionists applaud the black hole. Such a theory may at first seem patent nonsense, not worth the effort of refuta(When told "Your house is on fire!" should you consider such a "speech act" a nonreferential, paradoxical, and problematizing "text," a verbal artifice, or should you assume that this utterance may be a lucid description of an actual state that requires your action? I would call the Fire Department and worry about metaphysics another time. A popular bumper sticker of the early 1990s takes a clear stand on this issue of philosophical realism when it compellingly states: "Shit Happens!") However, it must be granted, deconstructionists have performed a service by calling new attention to textual tensions, rhetorical rationalizations, and slipshod, self-serving, moralistic readings of literary works. They have as well, for better or worse, empowered a new generation of literary critics, aided by allies in related schools of partisan social critics feminists, blacks, ethnics, gays and lesbians, Marxists, and so on who seek to deconstruct the "hegemony" of the patriarchal literary canon and replace it with a new five-foot shelf of politically correct texts. Marginality is decontion. — — struction's central faith! Lehman, if you will, deconstructs deconstruction by examining the case of Paul de Man, America's leading deconstructionist and the center of a school of literary and linguistic theorists at Yale University, which dominated critical discourse in and beyond the academy during the 1980s. Deconstructionists argue, as de Man makes clear, that the author is irrelevant to his text: "Considerations of the actual and 11 historical existence of writers are a waste of time from a critical point of view." Lehman convincingly shows this to be not only a false assumption, but also an expression of wishful thinking. In the late 1980s, it was revealed that de Man had written ninety-two articles, spanning most of 1941-1942, for the journal Le Soir, which had become a Nazi publication in occupied Belgium. In "The Jews in Contemporary Literature," March Man, then twenty-one, argued Europe would not miss what if they were deported. Europeans should not crossbreed with "them"; rather, "we" should "liberate ourselves spiritually from their demoralizing influence in the realm of thought, literature, and the arts." Furthermore, we learned that de Man had abandoned his common-law wife and children just after World War II when he came to America, where he soon began a new life with a new wife. (In eerie parallel, as Lehman's book appeared in 1991, so too did the accusations that Werner Erhardt, founder of est, had brutalized his wife, beaten his son, and committed incest with his daughter! Those who urged separations between words and deeds had much to answer for in 4, 1941, de that he claimed were Jews' minimal contributions to culture 12 own lives, it seemed.) Reasonably enough, Lehman asks, "Did de Man's insistence on language's 'unre13 liability' conceal the wish to lay the blame for his youthful journalism on language?" Lehman's inescapable conclusion is that de Man's personal motives were suspect and self-serving, from the time he supported Nazism to the time he advocated deconstruction. In Allegories of Reading, de Man wrote, "It is always possible to face up to any their 116 because the experience always exists simultaneously as fictional discourse and as empirical event and it is never possible to decide which one of the two possibilities is the right one. The indecision makes it possible to excuse the bleakest of crimes because, as a fiction, it escapes from the straits of guilt and innocence." 14 Here de Man, aware his own life is a fictional construct, implicitly experience (to excuse any guilt), claims for himself a freedom from judgment David Lehman we usually grant to characters in fiction. reveals de Man's claims to irresponsibility to be a problematizing cover-up for his own moral-political-personal culpability. "patricide" had been revealed to be just that — not an The "bad son" and the allegorical figure, as Miller who had behaved immorally and was belatedly being held to account for his actions, which, in his case, were words that made a difference in Nazi Germany and in contemporary America. Signs of the in people's lives implied, but an actual person — Times reaffirms the intimate relations between art and life, a connection that decon- structionists try to deny. Bret Easton enough) (1) Ellis's American Psycho opens with epigraphs from (presumptuously Dostoyevski — on the fictional nature but the social representativeness of the perverse narrator of Notes from Underground; (2) Miss better writer than Ellis) on society's Manners (who need for manners, for "if we is a far followed every impulse, we'd be killing one another"; and (fittingly) (3) Talking Heads, a trashy rock group: "And as things fell apart / Nobody paid much attention." All of which suggests that the novel's narrator, Patrick tler (he works at Pierce Bateman — a twenty-six-year-old Wall Street hus- & Pierce, an allegorically aptly named brokerage firm), a young man on the make for thrills and chills, cutting and thrusting his way through is a representative man who shows how far his public life and his pubic obsession America has come from a common assumption of civil manners. Bateman's sickening displays of violence (upon women, the homeless, children, and animals), his inability to feel responsibility or regret, and his numbing materialism are offered as evidence that things indeed have fallen apart. At its best, Ellis's shocking novel is his way of making Americans pay attention to a derangement at the heart of our culture. At its worst, Ellis's tedious and lurid novel is yet another example of that derangement. Narrator Patrick Bateman's account of his night journeys through sex and violence in New York City are offered by Ellis as evidence of the "End of the 1980s," as one climactic chapter is titled. However, by the time of its publication, the era of ReaganTrump acquisitiveness and conspicuous consumption seemed long gone. Our only president, George Bush, was set on reversing the lessons of the Vietnam War by winning one for the Gipper's former VP in the Gulf and Oliver Stone's film of wretched excess during the 1960s, The Doors, was opening. Indeed, Stone had already done a film version of Reagan-era greed, Wall Street, years before, as had two writers in fiction: Jay Mclnerney in Bright Lights, Big City and Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities. So Ellis was a redundant latecomer in the genre of cautionary tales about the immoral selfishness and violence of our times a tale set, of course, in New York City, our Gotham as Gomorrah. "If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere," sing the Vegas showstoppers about New York, "a city that doesn't sleep." Patrick Bateman makes it there with a new level of callous violence, stalking his victims through the dark and naked city. As a result, many in the literary community and the other guardians of public taste were — — figuratively assaulted by the book. For example: "Misogynist garbage," said 117 Tammy .- . - : - : Bruce, president of the Los Angeles Chapter of the National Organization for omen, a group that pressed a boycott of the novel." Even Norman Mailer was shocked, which came as a surprise, for the author of A: American Dream may have provided the literary model of American Psycho. In Mailer's novel the seh\iustifying narrator. Stephen Rojack, takes pleasure in the murder of a woman (his wife ). enjoys sex with a maid, then wanders the streets of a pattern followed many times by Bateman. However, after a time Rojack the city "wanted to be free of magic, the tongue of the Devil the Dread of the Lord." while Bateman just keeps on shcing-and-dicing his way around Manhattan. Patrick Bateman is never stricken by conscience and he is never caught two features of the novel that offended most reviewers. In the novel's final scene. Bateman is having drinks at Harry's Bar. trying to figure out where to try to get reservations for dinner. He notices a sign, this is not an exit, and narrator Bateman lets this stand as his final word to the reader, words that close Ellis's novel. Bateman and Ellis at that point seem to merge into one voice. The novel provides no moral center outside the immoral Bateman. That is, there is no exit from his life and character for Bateman and no assurance \> — 1 - of safety for the reader. Perhaps that is why Mailer was American writer which shocked. "I cannot recall a piece of fiction by an depicts so odious a ruling class — worse, a young ruling of Wall Street princelings reach", presumably, by the next century to manage class the mighty if surrealistic levers of our economy. Nowhere in American literature can one point to an inhumanity of the moneyed upon the afflicted equal to" some of the scenes in Ellis's novel " However. Mailer finally came down against American 1 Psycho, for because of its author's talent and all Ellis has made all of the novel's hyperbolic brilliance, a banality of his murderer's evil. many that Simon and Schuster, which had paid the twenty-six-year-old author an advance of S300.000 for his third novel canceled the boot's publication. The novel was resold, for an undisclosed amount, to Vintage, which issued it in a trade paperback in March 1991. Ellis, who had received death threats, defended his work as a social satire, a novel of "surface" that used "corned}'" (undetected by most readers) "to get at the absolute banality of the violence of a perverse decade."- So Ellis was proud of the very quality, banality, for which Mailer faulted the novel. Ellis presents a New York of extremes between rich and poor, sane and insane. The word fear is "sprayed in red graffiti on the side of a McDonald's on Fourth and Seventh," where two handsome and affluent young men, leaving their workday on Wall Street, hail a cab on the opening page of the novel. In the cab one of these depressing men-on-the-make scans the newspaper and reports on the daily record of urban horrors: Long before its publication, the novel infuriated so Strangled models, babies thrown from tenement rooftops, kids killed in the subway, a Communist rally. Mafia boss wiped out, Nazis baseball players with AIDS, more Mafia shit, gridlock, the homeless, various maniacs, faggots drop. ping like flies in . . the streets, surrogate mothers, the cancellation of a soap opera. ho broke into a zoo and tortured and burned various animals alive, more nowhere else, just Nazis and the joke is. the punch line is. it's all in this city here, it sucks, whoa wait more Nazis, gridlock, gridlock, baby-sellers, blackmarket babies. AIDS babies, baby junkies, building collapses on baby, maniac _ ; - . . — . baby, gridlock, bridge collaps; 118 This catalogue of urban diseases and afflictions, which makes no distinctions between the serious and the silly, recounted by a young man who is not the socio- pathic antihero of the novel, serves as Ellis's reference point for the reader. It is as though he is saying to the reader, "You ain*t seen nothin' yet!" before he launches into the loathsome days and ways of Patrick Bateman. before Ellis explores the permutations and combinations of horror he inflicts upon the innocent and vulnerable citizens of the city. American Psycho contains telling catalogues of the conNew York have no souls, only greedy hearts. Bateman's ability to recognize brand names is at first astonishing, then appalling, finally numbing. According to the Boston Phoenix. Ellis mentions some four hundred products in as many pages: Giorgio Armani leads the list (54 citations), followed by Ralph Lauren (49), J & B Scotch (34), and Rolex (26).'- American Psycho seems to seek the combined audience of GO readers and Silence of the Lambs viewers, presenting trendy duds with a maniacal genius. At work, for example, Bateman, brooding upon blood, sits at his Palazzetti glass-top desk, wearing Ray-Bans, chewing Nuperin, hung over from a coke binge begun at the night spot Shout! while he listens to rock music on his Walkman. He pops Valium, washes it down with Perrier, then applies Visine to his eyes. "All it comes down to 21 Ellis composes a fictional world of brittle, is this: I feel like shit but look great." For sumer all its repulsion, culture, for the inhabitants of his pricey "surface." However, unlike his peers, Bateman lives on the edge as well as on the surface. It seems his deepest passion is dedicated to obtaining restaurant reservations and first attending the Giraffe, the in clubs: Tunnel. Chernoble. Canal. Nell's, the Yale Club, the Quilted Newport, Harrv's, End. Bateman Fluties. Indochine. the New York Yacht — catching The Club. World's Show, live or During the course of the novel he watches programs on the following: descendants of members of the Dormer Party". "UFOs That Kill." the mevitability of nuclear war, "Shark Attack Victims." "Aspirin: Can It Save Your Life?." Nazis, women who have had mastectomies. "Girls Who Trade Sex for Crack." an exclusive interview with Donald Trump followed by a report on women who had been tortured. "Concentration Camp Survivors." "Has Patrick Swayze Become Cynical or Not?." the best restaurants in the Middle East. Spuds McKenzie. "Home Abortion Kits." "Beautiful Teenage Lesbians." the punk rock band Guns N* Roses, girls in the fourth grade who trade sex for crack, and much more. From such lists we begin to discern not, as Trollope once put it. the way we live now. but the ways a few affluent, selfdestructive Americans lived in the Reagan years. Morning in America, indeed! Yet Ellis's novel is destroyed less by its indulgence in the horrific Bateman's pathology, violence, and sexism, after all. should not be ascribed to the author than by its implausibilities. most notably: (1) Bateman seems not to have to attend to his work to be able to afford a life of extraordinary luxury" restaurants, clothes, jewels. helicopters, and limos so the economic base of this world is even more fanciful than it is in Wolfe's Bonfire or the stylish film Someone to Watch Cher Me. in which the threatened heroine, rich and beautiful, lives in a Manhattan apartment the size of Grand Central Station. (2) Bateman hacks, dismembers, cooks, and drags bodies around town, to store human remains at a flat in Hell's Kitchen, his clothes soaked in blood, but he is never caught, never even noticed. (3) Ellis's configuration of the yuppie as serial murderer is self-defeating, for by exaggerating the moral corrosions of on is faithful only to one thing Patty Winter tape, each day. — — — 119 — New England Journal of Public Policy Reagan era, by equating greed with violence, he limits the application of his satire and destroys his case, misses the far more subtle derangements of the era. Wall Street hustlers were bad enough in what they did at the greedy work Bateman implausibly the ignores, without trying to how Bret Easton Ellis make them over into comically tried simultaneously to tions — is ing event, a more pathological sociopaths! ripped off two reputable make a buck The New York publishing houses off his book and telling social parable. American Psycho, as a embodies and exemplifies American men story of — which to protect their reputa- novel and as a publish- at their worst. In Paul Theroux's Chicago Loop, Parker Jacoda, an architect, does attend to his work, as a builder-developer, until he quits to become an underground man in He Chicago. leaves murdered girls in their apartments and tries to get caught to stop himself from what he cannot help doing. So, unlike Bateman, Jacoda does have a latent conscience. Jacoda is not forced to stand as a representative of Reagan-era man trapped in the destructive elements of his warped He reduces everything to sexual warfare; misogyny is the dark- greed, but as an example of a gender expectations. "The campaign was happening, and that was the best reason a choice, and you knew they were awful when you saw their wives four bossy bitches propping up their greedy eager-to-please husbands." 22 When Parker looks at the men in Robert Mapplethorpe's exhibition of often shocking photographs some of men who are committing sex and violence upon each other he sees victims of a voyeuristic artist. Theroux's Chicago serves as the apt setting for Jacoda's descent into the, maelstrom. There Parker has no exit. side soul. of all presidential not to buy a paper. — What — — Parker had managed to cut across, to converge: he did not travel in a straight Was it a sign he saw, or the fact that the train was drawing into LaSalle, that made him think of the word Loop? Whatever, it was the right word. His whole line. life was a curve and in the course of his life escaped the tyranny of parallel However, it is He had he would inscribe a loop. 23 not clear that Paul Theroux has entirely escaped the tyranny of par- allel lines in this novel. It ... lines. is, as Anita Brookner notes on the dust jacket, "remarkable a tour-de-force," a sympathetic treatment of a horrific own murderous man who is the victim of and scenic control, unlike the sloppy American Psycho, but Chicago Loop attempts no analysis of this evil man. As Coleridge said of Iago, Parker is an example of motiveless malignancy. No insight emerges from his killings, as it does, say, from Pinky's murderous deeds in Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, for Parker, like Bateman, cannot articulate a moral vision. Parker is first seen assaulting a vulnerable, reckless woman; he is last seen seeking his own punishment. Perhaps Theroux, too, is something of a voyeur, an his exploitative artist, At drives. It is also written with minimalist precision showing us lurid deeds for clever moment literary titillation. in Rabbit at Rest, John Updike, daring to be obvious, portrays American, Harry ("Rabbit") Angstrom, in the role of Uncle Sam, marching in the 1989 Fourth of July parade in Brewer, Pennsylvania, his home town. Though Harry is fifty-six, overweight, and recuperating from a heart attack, he feels happy to be home again amid the cheers of townsfolk, reminded of those cheers he his boldest his representative 120 heard thirty years before, when he had been legend, a walking cloud. Inside him flower petals uncurling in the sun." a high school basketball hero. a droplet of explosive has 24 Young once more, opened "He is a his veins like seized by patriotic fervor, reveling in glory, Rabbit once more, he marches to recorded music. Kate Smith belts out, "God dead as she Bless America" — is, dragged into the grave by sheer gregarious "... to the oceans, white with foam." Harry's up to survey all grows upon him, making his heart thump worse and worse, that human history 25 all in all this is the happiest fucking country the world has ever seen. weight, — eyes burn and the impression giddily — Harry Angstrom Run is as if he had been lifted Updike's alter ego and hero-of-sorts — Rabbit, Rest (1990) — in four novels Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at life: from midcentury glory Rabbit to fin de siecle decline and fall. In portraying his Pennsylvania double remained in the circumscribed world Updike fled, for "Brewer" is Reading, Pennsylvania, and "Mt. Judge" is Shillington, a nearby town, where Updike came of age in triumphal march, Updike affirms his own patriotism before he left for Harvard and turns the knife to his critics, literary and political. Clearly Updike likes, though he does not wholly approve of, Rabbit. For all his faults, we shall not look on his callow, conlikes again, this personification of some American men of the 1950s ventional, both home-centered and promiscuous, patriotic, and assured that the world owed them a living. However, not everyone was won over by Rabbit. Rabbit at Rest so piqued Garry Wills that he denounced the whole tetralogy as implausible and overwrought in the New York Review of Books. "There is a compulsive tidiness about this scheme which tries to make up in comprehensiveness what it has increasingly lost in plau26 sibility." Wills the author of many works on politics and religion, including Nixon Agonistes was particularly offended by Harry's pro-war, pro-Nixon politics during the Vietnam War, the era portrayed in Rabbit Redux. "Under the fiction of Rabbit reaching up from the working class is the reality of Updike reaching down to a solidarity with Nixon's values." 27 For Wills, Rabbit and his author are of one political mind, so when Rabbit preens patriotically in a parade, so too does Updike. Thus, Wills might say, Rabbit at Rest is an act of narcissism, a selfconsuming artifact, Updike's advertisement for himself, his valediction forbidding mourning. "There is an air of forgiveness to the novel, since Harry has lost any sense of what might need forgiving Harry's creator has lost track of what he 28 originally meant him to mean." Garry Wills is an astute political analyst, but he is much too argument directed to (1960), Rabbit which, taken together, constitute an epic of American — — — — — . serve as an adequate literary to critic. . . He has made do so Wills has taken Updike's own political a serious case against Updike, but statements far too Wills has overidentified the author with his novels' hero The proper literally. — "Never That is, trust the artist. function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist," corD. H. Lawrence. 29 And Wills has, I believe, missed the irony and well-wrought ambiguity of Rabbit at Rest, for Updike's art of fiction makes this a well-realized novel and an exemplary American tale. The novel is Updike's goodbye-to-all-that for Harry Angstrom, who moves toward death with characteristic recklessness. Rabbit at Rest is, as well, Updike's separate peace with his alter ego and Trust the tale. rectly affirmed 121 New England Journal of Public Policy the America they both had long celebrated. Updike's self-destructive character values that Garry make him, like Wills's attack "air of forgiveness" for his balanced by a devastating satire of Rabbit's values, his country, bloated, heartweary and near terminal. is on the Rabbit saga is based on the amazing revelations of Updike's 1989 autobiographical memoir. There, in a chapter titled "On Not Being a Dove," Updike recounted his fervid support of the Vietnam War. He recalls how he told British editors, early in the war, "I political values in Self-Consciousness, am for our intervention if it does some good." Blood acceptable, for Updike, in a struggle between American against fumed it writers denounced the war — as celebrated in Norman in sacrifices are apparently good and evil. While most notable Southeast Asia and many demonstrated — Mailer's The Armies of the Night Updike New York Times, he declared he against the demonstrators! In a letter to the who promoted the war did so to prevent other wars. Americans should, as he did, trust Lyndon Johnson. "If he and his advisers (transferred intact, most of them, from Kennedy's Camelot) had somehow got us into this mess, they would somehow get us out, and it was a citizen's plain duty to hold his breath and hope for the best, not parade around spouting pious unction and crocodile tears." (Updike's heavy sarcasm and reliance upon cliches here show his believed that those determination to needle antiwar protesters; blind patriotism results in hyperbole, which overwhelms his usual stylistic delicacy. We are not surprised to learn, from Updike, that his family made him a present of an American flag during the Vietnam War! Curiously, here Updike-as-flag-waver anticipates the scene in which Harry Angstrom parades around, spouting pious and patriotic unction and weeping patriotic "crocodile tears.") John Updike was moved, he reports, when he saw those war proponents, Lyndon Johnson and Dean Rusk, hug at a White House dinner. 30 While Harry Angstrom supported the war from middle America, John Updike toasted it among the power elite. Updike, shaped by memories of the Depression, his childhood faith in the wisdom of FDR, and the righteousness of the American mission during World War II, identified with authority, even during the Vietnam era, when three presidents lied to us and our military commanders continuously reported false sightings of lights at the end of the long tunnel of war. The country had been good to Updike, so why should he like those demonstrators who called their native land Amerika turn against it? "Defending the war (or, rather, disputing the attackers of it) was perhaps my way of serving, of showing loyalty to a country that had kept its hackneyed promises 31 life, liberty, pursuit of happiness to me." That America had not kept its promises — — — — to large sectors of its citizenry, or that the prosecution of a long, Southeast Asia might not be the best thing for our nation bloody war in — such thoughts seemed not to occur to Updike, so insistent was he to defend, rhetorically, his country against the verbal attacks from soft liberals. Even the Cold War made sense to Updike, defining the world in Manichean alternatives. "Athens and Sparta, light and shadow. Ours was the distinctly better mousetrap." 32 Updike's political values, which affirmed John F. Kennedy's Cold War vision of a "long twilight struggle" against forces of darkness, were sustained by a religious vision in which good and evil contend. Though he had married into a New England Unitarian family, which celebrated light, reason, and political liberalism, something in Updike, values and visions derived from his early religious training, rebelled. 122 Updike's Pennsylvania Lutheranism represents "a theological animus; down-dirty all belonged to a sex and the bloody mess of war and the desperate effort of faith dark necessary underside of reality that I felt should not be merely ignored, or risen above, or disdained." Updike subscribes explicitly to "a dark Augustinian idea." affirms the notion of Original Sin. '"In seminal American text, the Adam's Fall New England Primer" / We sinned all,' He began that he notes admiringly. 11 All of this served to solidify John Updike's pro-war patriotism. So it is why not difficult to see Rabbit at Rest as a timentality. Wills fair Wills, a sharp critic of Nixon's war policies, saw occasion to attack Updike for mindless, pro-American sen- would not march behind Harry Angstrom as Uncle Sam while a resurrected Kate Smith blessed America in recorded song. "Updike began with the aim of saying hard true things about Wills. "By succumbing to his own what is wrong with America," argues Updike ends up exemplifying stylistic solipsism, wrong." 34 Updike, of course, has a different memory of how the Rabbit series began. When he was in his mid-twenties, he conceived a work of fiction composed of two novellas that articulated alternative visions and life patterns: "One would be the rabbit approach spontaneous, unreflective, frightened, hence my character's name, Angstrom and the second was to be a horse method of coping with life, to get 35 into harness and pull your load until you drop." Rabbit, Run, then, began as an experiment in point-of-view and present-tense narration, not as a parable of the American character at mid-century; a later novel, The Centaur, showed the "horse method." On Rabbit, Run, Updike reports: "Although the first novel had had a few overheard news items in it, it wasn't really in a conscious way about the 50's. It was 36 just a product of the 50's." For all that, the novel became a telling period parable. The Harry Angstrom of Rabbit, Run is twenty-six, a MagiPeel salesman, unhappily married to pregnant and alcoholic Janice, and the neglectful father of a son, Nelson; Rabbit is also a reveler in his own lost glories of high school basketball. When he stops to play a pickup game with some neighborhood lads, he feels again the impulse what is — — to transcend his own limits — to fly past the nets, as James Joyce's autobiographical For Rabbit, "that old stretched-leather feeling makes his whole body go taut, gives his arms wings. It feels like he's reaching down through years to touch 37 this tautness." His spirits lifted by this transcendent moment, Rabbit attempts escape from the ordinariness of his given life. He gets in his car and heads south, "down, down the map into orange groves and smoking rivers and barefoot women." 3 That is, Rabbit, irresponsible and self-seeking, runs toward a romantic vision, a proalter ego put it. * own needs, a Florida of his imagination, not an actual place. Rabbit moves through 1950s America with the same instinctive spontaneity that jection of his moves on the basketball court. When he stops for gas, a farmer sees he has no route mapped out and warns Rabbit, "The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there." Rabbit, however, trusting in improvisation, is not convinced: "I don't think so." 39 Yet characterized his former Rabbit's instincts are not, as sudden left turn, Updike contrives his plot, trustworthy. Rabbit takes a following his impulses, and fittingly finds himself on a curving dirt Thus Updike, in Rabbit, Run, plotted a him in his tracks. So this tenconformity turns around and goes home again. In Rabbit road, a lover's lane that leads to a dead end. closed world, one which circumscribed Rabbit, stopped tative rebel against fifties 123 New England Journal of Public Policy he thinks about his sister, Mim, who at nineteen broke away from Brewer and ended up in Las Vegas. "Rabbit never could have made it out there. He needed 40 to stay where they remembered him when." But just as Rabbit, Anteus-like, never can wholly detach himself from his home ground, neither can he sink comfortably into it; that's the tension which makes him interesting. Back from his failed flight to Florida, Rabbit refuses to return to Janice and takes up with a former prostitute, Ruth. She likes him because, as she says, "You haven't given up. In your own stupid way, you're still fighting," though neither she nor Rabbit was sure just what it was he fought to find. 41 The Reverend Jack Eccles, Episcopalian, like the farmer at the gas pumps, tries to discover where Rabbit is going. But Rabbit, a bush-league mystic, cannot say; he will learn by going where he has to go. "Somewhere behind all this there's something that wants me to find it." The Reverend Eccles, who counsels parishioners during rounds of golf, treats Rabbit's quest vision ironically: "It's the strange thing about you mystics, how often your little ecstasies wear a skirt." 42 For Eccles, Rabbit is "monstrously selfish," worshiping his "worst instincts." But Updike sets himself on the side of the seeker. Rabbit knows there is something there there, waiting for him, and finds evidence for at Rest . . . his vision in a perfect golf shot. Stricken; sphere, star, speck. It hesitates, fooled, for the ball visible sob takes a makes and Rabbit thinks it will die, but he's ground of a final leap: with a kind of his hesitation the of space before vanishing in falling, "That's last bite he it!" and, turning to Eccles with a smile of aggrandizement, repeats, "That's cries 43 it." moment of overreaching is echoed in Updike's luminous "hub fans bid kid adieu," of the final home run by the legendary Red Rabbit's visionary report, in Sox left fielder Ted Williams in September 1960 against Jack Fisher, pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles. Here the lonely hero/artist figure performs a triumphant act, — — beyond boundaries, which illustrates the presence of grace it in an otherwise compromised world. If Rabbit Angstrom winds up like the legendary Casey, who struck out, Ted Williams did not. driving a sphere Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a 44 towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. climbed on a diagonal line into the vast — As in this prose poem on Ted Williams, Rabbit, Run registers a vision patterns embody aesthetics and values from Updike's "angle." So, in Rabbit, Run, — that Updike was less concerned with typifying a decade or characterizing the nation than he was with establishing a character, Harry Angstrom, who state of the illustrates an impulse toward transcendence, a faith in transformation, even in the midst of his own failed and tawdry life. Updike's Rabbit has intimations of immortality from rec- from replications of epiphanies of excellence (as in the Reverend Eccles wryly notes, from brief ecstasies that lie ollections of early childhood, golf shot), and, as the beneath skirts. Rabbit, Run was composed in the late 1950s, before that decade took on self- conscious associations of smugness and order, which were symbolized by Ike's fondness for golf and hesitancy about foreign entanglements and before John 124 F. Kennedy — into Cuba, outer space, and Vietnam! The 1960s, by contrast, was a desperately self-conscious decade, an era of preening extravagance. It was also a particularly disorienting decade for members of Updike's generthose relatively few who were born in the midst of the Great Depression, ation got the nation "moving again" — who remembered World War II with patriotic pride, who came of age in the age of postwar American affluence and assurance, who married young, reared children, and went about their careers, whistling while they worked, as though they were play- Then came an unscripted age, Age of Aquarius, sexual revolution, political assassinations, Vietnam, dancing and demonstrating in the streets. As a result, Rabbit Redux was a much more deliberate act of representation of the national "distress," as Updike calls it. "Suddenly it seemed to might be the vehicle in which to packme that Rabbit Angstrom of Pennsylvania 45 age some of the American unease that was raging all around us." Rabbit, then, who began as a flawed visionary in Rabbit, Run, becomes a mere ing their prescribed roles in an American libretto. scored to rock-and-roll rhythms: the black and women's movements, the . . . "vehicle" in Rabbit Redux; the solipsistic inwardness, which had constituted both his beauty and his monstrousness, was now overwhelmed by lurid occurrences of national import. older, heavy and broken, Harry, as he was by then called, lived in a housing development (Penn Villas) with his sour teenage son, Nelson, and a slimmed-down Janice, who was having an affair with Charlie Stavros, a slick car Ten years sterile salesman. When Janice moved house two tenants: Jill, in with Charlie, Rabbit implausibly invited into his a rich, doped-up runaway teenager, and Skeeter, a black rev- who was hiding from the police. This combustible combination of characand values exploded Harry Angstrom's previously safe life: while he was making love to a neighbor, his house burned; Jill was killed in the fire; Skeeter ran; after witnessing these events, Nelson was marked for life; finally Janice returned, reestablisholutionary ters ing a fragile stasis. In Rabbit Redux, the weakest work of the tetralogy, Updike implausibly fused Updike midlife Rabbit with the sexual-racial politics and violence of the sixties. determined to "throw in," as he tellingly puts an inventory of the era's prob- it, lems: "all the oppressive, distressing, overstimulating developments of the most American decade dissentious and since the Civil War — anti-war rhetoric, teach-ins, middle-class runaways, drugs, brilliant technological abroad) the moon protest, black and (proceeding rendezvous through a turmoil of violence shot." 46 In short, Updike overloaded the at power eerily to its home and circuits of the novel with topical allusions; so the novel, like Rabbit, was overwhelmed, overturned like a skiff in a storm. Updike left the focused realism of Rabbit, romanticism of Rabbit Redux. Run for the blurred — Harry Angstrom a political reactionary, a timid would be to envision Archie Bunker at Woodstock! Still, Harry's increasingly rich inner life he is an American Leopold Bloom is convincingly portrayed. While it strains credibility to see him reading Frederick Douglass and denouncing America's racism, it is entirely convincing to see Rabbit begin to identify his personal condition and fortunes with his beloved country. "I learned," Harry told his sister, "the country isn't perfect." But, Updike adds, "even as he says this he realizes he doesn't believe it, any more than he believes at heart that he will It is as impossible to accept solipsist — in this milieu as it — 125 — .Yen England Journal of Public Policy die.""" (In Rabbit at Rest Harry will accept the related notion of his own death and America's imperfections.) With Rabbit Redux, Updike's Rabbit books became para- bles for the state of the nation tive man. His private and Harry Angstrom became an American representaAmerican successes story counterpoints the public narrative of most of the second half of the twentieth century. Updike identifies the fortunes of the nation with his hero: as Rabbit goes, so goes America. 'America and Harry suffered, marvelled, listened, endured. 4 Not without cost of course." In Rabbit Is Rich, set in 1979, Updike juxtaposes Harry's fortunes against the nation's fate and counts the costs. While America is ••running out of gas" (the opening words of the novel), figuratively and literally, during the Carter years. Harry (a "vehicle" indeed!) becomes a Toyota salesman on the Brewer lot owned by Janice and her mother. Mrs. Springer; he grows rich, full of himself, and takes his destined place, socially and economically, in American society, becoming a smiling public man. 49 Harry* is at the top of his game. "A ball at the top of its arc, a leaf on the skin of a pond." 50 In an extravagant symbolic moment, Harry and Janice make love on a bed strewn with Krugerrands earned from stock investments! However, Harry, finally at ease in Zion carrying out his appointed golf rounds, still seeking God under skirts knows it can't last. He, as Jimmy Carter would soon be, is held hostage to fortune. What goes up must come down; what floats must sink. Though Harry celebrates becoming a grandfather, he knows it is the be ginn ing of the end for him. and distresses during Increasingly. - — — Through the murk he to glimpses the truth that to be rich is to be robbed, to be rich is be poor." 51 In Rabbit at Rest, the final Reagan administration, it is work of the Rabbit who tetralogy, a novel set in the last year of the is running out of gas in a nation of diminish- on "Why Rabbit Had Go." Updike says, "It's a depressed book about a depressed man, written by a depressed man." 5: For all that the identification between the novelist and his hero, which Wills and others have noted the novel in no way constitutes Updike's unqualified defense of Harry Angstrom and his values, as Wills and others charge. Rather. Updike beautifully balances sympathy with satire, suggesting, as he does in the Uncle Sam scene, that Rabbit is America, in all its flawed flamboyance. It is, as Henry James said, ""a complex fate" to be an American: Rabbit is buoyant with ing richness. Harry has the sympathy of his author. Reflecting to — optimism, selfish, fated. Everything — potent improvisatory, dangerous, irrepressible, overreaching, he does, he now believes, is informed by "his faint pronged sense of doom." 55 Furthermore, Rabbit no longer the swift runner and artful dodger he was as a young man, looks at himself more honestly and critically than he ever had before. "Fifty-five and fading." He sees his own swollen reflection in the Toyota showroom glass ("a giant ballroom") and wonders what has become of him. 5" He is even able to admit to a selfishness that has allowed him to use others and be callous to bis family. "His own son 55 can't stand to be in the same room with him. Ruth once called him Mr. Death." The novel opens with Harry Angstrom in the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, — a woman who — two children and Roy (age Judy (age awaiting the arrival of Nelson and Pru, his daughter-in-law lust in the aging Rabbit — and their excites eight) But Rabbit senses he may be awaiting "'something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane."" 6 Rabbit had always sought, through flight, some undefined sense of wholeness, harmony, and radiance, four). 126 which he called it. Now of his ever-selfish being — death, a personification of the hollowness — seeks him. it at the center is neither bitter about his state nor apologetic about his life. Indeed, with wonder at all that is passing and he is rich with realizations. teeming he is Rabbit explains the credo that guided his action when he tells his granddaughter why he did not park his car where an attendant directed him. "Whenever somebody tells me to do something my instinct's always to do the opposite. It's got me into a lot of trouble, but I've had a lot of fun. This bossy old guy was pointing one direction so I went the other and found a space." just as he used to find quick openings on the 5 basketball court. " But he now moves warily and tries to protect his granddaughter in ways he failed to protect Becky, his daughter, who had drowned in Rabbit. Run. or Jill, his young lover, who was burned to death in Rabbit Redux. Updike informs Rabbit's every step with a sense of fragility, caution, wariness. Taking Judy for candy, he warns her to be careful on the escalator. '"Easy does it, pick a step and stay on it. Don't get on a crack." At the bottom he says. '"O.K.. step off. but not too soon, don't 58 panic, it'll happen, O.K., good." Rabbit's best times are behind him and his days are nearly done. Weighted by a lifetime of self-indulgence, stuffed with junk foods he cannot deny himself. Rabbit, at 230 pounds, has trouble turning his head, "his neck stiff with fat." He is seized by chest pains and his vision is foggy. He is. as they say. a heart attack waiting to happen. Much like his beloved, decaying nation. "Everything falling apart, airplanes, bridges, eight years under Reagan of nobody minding the store, making money out 747 is blown out of the sky over of nothing, running up debt, trusting in God." Yet Rabbit 5' 61 - A Lockerbie, Scotland, and Rabbit identifies with "those bodies fallen smack upon the boggy Scottish earth like garbage bags full of water." 61 Harry and Janice, having turned over management of the Toyota dealership in Brewer to Nelson, live in Florida half the year now. in Deleon (Deelyun. or "deal you in," as the locals pronounce it), a town named in cynical allusion to the sixteenth-century Spanish explorer, Ponce de Leon, a forerunner of Rabbit, who sought eternal youth in the same place. But Rabbit's Florida is strewn with junky businesses serving the elderly, a landscape laden in death imagery. "On the telephone wires, instead of the sparrows and starlings you see in Pennsylvania, lone hawks and buzzards sit." 6- two-bedroom condominium on the fourth floor of them and other migratory "snow birds." Ham-, now given to Proustian reveries, remembers things past and contemplates the end. He is taking his last look around and Updike is there to show him the way. Finally Rabbit learns the route on his life map. When Harrytakes his grandchildren on a tour, "he unfolds a map he carries in the glove compartment. Figure out where you 're going before you go there: he was told that a long In their in Valhalla Village, a housing unit overlooking a golf course, a dwelling for time ago." 6? Part of the charm and the horror of Harry Angstrom and his exemplary life is that he has not. as Ruth long ago noted, given up. He still thinks that "there's something that wants me to find it." The indescribable it. he hopes, is nothing less than a vision of divinity and purpose, a fusion of the lonely /with life's mysteries. Rabbit thinks he still might discover God it — at least a clarification within the arbitrary rules of games or by transgressing social and sexual norms in pursuit of his little ecstasies. Rabbit's vision clears on the golf course near his Deleon condo. where he plays 127 of New England Journal of Public Policy with three wise men, as he believes them to be — three Jewish retirees, men who accept their lives as Rabbit, that funky searcher, never can. Always, golf holds out the hope of perfection, of a perfect weightlessness and consummate ease, for sions, shot after shot . now and . . again it does happen, happen All you have to do is in three dimen- take a simple pure swing and punc- ture the picture in the middle with a ball that shrinks in a second to the size of a needle-prick, a tiny tunnel into the absolute. That But Rabbit searches for meaning in would be 6* it. ways other than replaying the games of his youth. Throughout Rabbit at Rest, Harry reads, a few pages each night, Barbara Tuchman's The First Salute, a book about the Dutch role in the American Revolution. Tuchman's comments obviously also apply to America under Reagan; they allow Updike to filter a larger vision of national decline through Rabbit's semiconscious haze: "Fantasies about America produced two strongly contradictory conclusions that in the end came to the same point of injecting some caution into the golden dreams." 65 Could America become one nation? Were its people too self-indulgent? Such speculations help Harry get to sleep, but they also point us to Updike's larger thematic purposes. Then Harry has his inevitable heart attack. While he is sailing with Judy, their boat overturns and Harry, in a truly heroic moment, drawing upon and improvisatory all his instinctive rescues his granddaughter from drowning and gets her back gifts, he collapses. (In Rabbit, Run, Rabbit abandoned Janice, who accitheir baby, Becky, an event that haunts Harry and Janice for the rest of their lives.) "Whatever it is, it has found him, and is working him over," Rabbit decides, after his heart attack. 66 Life is a game of elimination, he concludes, to shore before dentally drowned wondering who next is it. 67 Recuperating in Penn Park, in Brewer, Pennsylvania, Rabbit revisits scenes of his youth, taking his long goodbye and confronting new troubles. Nelson has, in their absence, ruined the family business, run up a massive debt to drug dealers, and nearly destroyed himself with a cocaine addiction. Cocaine is Nelson's it, his quick trip out of a miserable world, as he suggests when he admits his addiction to his mother. "I love coke, Mom. And it loves me. I can't explain it. It's right for me. It makes me feel right, in a way nothing Nelson, his father's son, is else does." 68 another representative man, a personification of the thirty-something, self-indulgent, financially and personally overextended hustling men of the Reagan era. Nelson had plunged his family into the crimes of the 1980s — company books cooked by a bookdying of AIDS. Yet Nelson has his own faith in America as a res- fraud and debt from overextended credit, his keeper who cuing God. is "It's self-destructive what this country is all redeeming charm, reveals a future in which meet their dour fate and foreshadow greater easy to be rich," he tells his father, "that's about." 69 Nelson, who lacks Rabbit's American men national miseries. Nelson takes on unmanageable burdens, but for Harry this is a time of letting go. Harrison, with whom he has been having an affair for a decade, since they first made love in a Caribbean wife swap in Rabbit Is Rich; now she is dying of lupus. She gives him a Diet Coke and Harry reflects on a larger design of diminishment. "First they take the cocaine out, then the caffeine, and now the 70 sugar." Harry, who has turned fifty-six by this time, is more cautious, feeling more He visits Thelma 128 Though Thelma wants to, he does not want to make love with her. He worabout AIDS. (Ronnie, her husband, Rabbit's former high school teammate, has 71 slept around.) "Love and death, they can't be pried apart any more." mortal. ries Rabbit undergoes angioplasty, making his temporary stay against death. In the may be his he wants to see her mother, but hospital he continues to settle his affairs. His nurse, Annabelle Byer, daughter by Ruth. She is kind to him, asks him if Rabbit passes up the chance to see his former lover, the woman he has sought for and Ron Harrison visit him in years. A time to love and a time is time for everything and this is the time for her to give the hospital, she says there a her husband, she kisses Harry goodbye. up. Despite the presence of to die. When Thelma Lost opportunity is not only a personal but also a national condition, as Updike makes clear when Rabbit reflects on George Bush, president-elect. "Harry misses Reagan a bit, at least he was dignified, and had that dream distance; the powerful thing about him as President was that you never knew how much he knew, nothing or everything, he was like God that way, you had to do a lot of it yourself. With this new one you know he knows something, but it is a small thing." 72 Rabbit at Rest is a parable about the diminishing promise of American life, perhaps about the betrayed promise of all life. (Did Updike find renewed national purpose in Bush's quick devastation of Iraq in 1991?) Yet in the midst of death, Updike implies, there each come is feels is life. together in sex. While Nelson is in a — Out of mutual need abandoned by a spouse — Pru and Harry, staying in the Springer house, drug rehabilitation center and Janice taking real estate classes, Harry and his daughter-in-law form a brief union, transgress acceptable pleasure. "Her tall norms and decencies to give each other solace and passing dimmed room is lovely much Brewer last month were lovely, all pale wide-hipped nakedness in the blossom along that block in had seemed, a piece of paradise blundered upon, incredible." 73 Blessed by the incredible once again, for a while Rabbit seems his old as those pear trees in his it self, reborn. management of the car lot again. As the Toyota ad put it, "Who could ask for anything more?" 74 Harry plays the role of Uncle Sam in Brewer's Fourth of July parade. But he cannot long escape death images. Thelma dies. Then Mr. Natsume Shimada of Toyota arrives, like a grim reaper. Shimada speaks in a comic He takes over accent, but he bears a serious message, not only for Harry, but for America. "We produce better product for rittle man's money, yes? You ask for it, we got it, yes?" But "America make nothing, just do mergers, do acquisitions, rower taxes, raise national debt. Nothing comes out, all goes in foreign goods, foreign capital. America take everything, give nothing. Rike big black hole." Shimada sees Americans as jolly, undisciplined people, living in a country full of dog shit, the nation Rabbit had adored and exploited. Shimada blames Janice and Harry for being in Florida instead of watching over Nelson's management of the firm. 75 When Shimada takes the Toyota dealership away from the Angstroms, he removes the economic bubble that has lifted them to giddy heights. They are on their own, in free-fall. Nelson returns, filled with the higher power rhetoric of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. With Nelson back, Janice wants Harry to stay away from the lot. "We'll be fine," she says, but, Updike adds, "she lies." 76 Things continue to come apart. Nelson, who at first wanted to start a treatment center at the lot, wants to sell motorcycles. Harry warns there is another economic depression coming. — 129 New England Journal of Public Policy Janice wants to sell the Penn Park house to pay their debts and for them all to live together in the Springer house. head when Janice phones him from the Springer live, saying that Pru has told them that she and Harry slept together. Janice will never forgive him for what he did; she calls it "mon77 strous." She insists that he drive over to "process" all this, but Harry packs and heads South, replicating his failed journey of escape in Rabbit, Run. Now as then he listens to the radio oldies songs like "Vaya con Dios" and "It's Magic." He looks for the garage where the farmer had told him he should know where he was going. "Well, now he did. He had learned the road and figured out the destination." 78 This time Rabbit knows where he is going, and Updike allows Rabbit finally to transcend the limits of his commonplace life, though it is the only life he will ever have. Only Harry's troubles come to a house, where Nelson and his family — death is waiting for him to find it. Unrepentant Rabbit runs, completing a journey to Florida he began thirty years before, but this time there is no turning back. On the long drive, then alone in his Deleon condo, Rabbit has time to think and comes to some conclusions that seem to have Updike's endorsement. Updike's stay-at-home hero has finally surpassed his limitations, come to understand it, which he finds to be "incredible" or, as Shimada put it, "Rike big black hole." That is, Updike holds Harry Angstrom up to criticism for his selfishness as a husband and father, as a poor caretaker of his talents and a violator of his body, but Updike allows him the dignity of a tragic realization. Rabbit had been "reared in a world where war was not strange, but change was: the world stood still so you could grow up in it. He knows when the bottom fell out." When Kroil's, a huge, hometown department store, closed, while Rabbit was a boy, "Rabbit realized the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of money. You just passed through, and they milked you for what you were worth, mostly when you were young and gullible. If Kroil's could go, the courthouse could go, the banks could go. When the money stopped, they could close down God Himself." Now Springer Motors will 79 go. And soon, so will he. All things pass. "Nothing is sacred." Not only does Thelma die, but Barbara Tuchman, chronicler of the American mission, dies as well. Then Baseball Commissioner Bartlett Giamatti dies of a heart attack. Mike Schmidt of the Phillies decides to retire. "I like the way he went out," Rabbit says, "quick, and on his own nickel." 80 Even the demise of the Cold War makes Rabbit plaintive: "It's like nobody's in charge on the other side any more. I miss it, the cold war. It gave you a reason to get up in the morning." 81 In Rabbit at Rest, John Updike posits a parable of national decline and fall. Rabbit, a petty Gatsby, has not fulfilled his early promise, and the nation he loves has turned sour. At least Rabbit decides to go out on his own nickel he has his final heart attack while playing basketball with a black young man on the outskirts of Deleon. Thirty years before, early in Rabbit, Run, he had played in another pickup game, mourning the loss of great days gone. Now he reaches out for it one last time. "Up he goes, way up toward the torn clouds. His torso is ripped by a terrific pain, elbow to elbow. He bursts from within; he feels something immense persistently fumble at him, and falls unconscious to the dirt." 82 He is not dead at novel's end, but he is close enough to count out of the game. Harry Angstrom embodies Updike's portrait of a failed and fallen America. Rabbit fulfilled the promise of American life athletic prowess, marriage and a — — 130 — and it now promises to kill him. "Enough" is the final and money word of the novel. Harry ("Rabbit") Angstrom, representative American man. is done in by his own fulfilled dream of success, his wretched excess. family, sex, Brian Moore's Lies of Silence, a novel in the genre of the political thriller, portrays Michael Dillon, a thirty-one-year-old resident of contemporary Belfast, in a "moment of crisis," arrested, between worlds, unable to mature or regress, a dangling man. first, private and predictable. In a fictional version of Belfast, husband and a hotel manager of the Clarence, on the Malone Road (in actual Belfast, the Wellington Park is located on the Malone Road), but this is not the s? Unsurprisingly, though he life he wanted. "He was a failed poet in a business suit." is married to Moira, age thirty-three, Dillon is in love with Andrea, age nineteen. Moira, who grew up on the Falls Road, hates living away from Belfast, but Andrea, who is from Canada and a former Queen's University Belfast student, is ready to flee Belfast whenever Dillon can break himself of the city's hold. Dillon's middle-class and midlife crisis turns suddenly and dramatically public. With melodramatic bravura, Moore has Dillon decide to tell Moira he is leaving her, only to be prevented by the appearance in his life of political terrorists, the IRA. The Dillons live in North Belfast, far from "the image of the city [familiar] to the outside world: graffiti-fouled barricaded slums where the city's Protestant and Catholic poor confronted each other, year in and year out, in a stasis of hatred, fear and mistrust." 84 In his neighborhood, Catholics and Protestants live at peace, side by side. But Dillon cannot so easily escape murderous Belfast. IRA men, figures masked in woolen balaclava helmets, materialize like a bad dream and take the Dil- Dillon's crisis seems, at Dillon is a lons hostage. a bomb They explain designed to kill that Michael, in his car, the Reverend Akin is to deliver a Pottinger, bomb to the hotel, Orange Order propagandist, Moore's fictionalized portrayal of the Northern Ireland Protestant majority's propaReverend Ian Paisley. Pottinger will be speaking before the Canadian Orange Order at the Clarence. Moira will be held hostage while Michael delivers the bomb. "She needn't think that bein' a Catholic from the Falls is goin' to save her neck," says an IRA man of Moira. "So, mind what you say, the pair of you." 85 That is, as the saying goes in tense Northern Ireland, Whatever you say, say nothingl Lies of Silence is a novel in which an Irish representative man cannot break out of gandist, the the debilitating heritage of his divided nation. 86 Dillon hotel clients and the hotel's American owners is — and a a servant to his betters feckless dreamer. He — main- by betraying his wife, but then conforms to the national lust for martyrdom by threatening to identify a kidnapper and, by so doing, exposes himself to IRA assassins. Finally he is a martyr, killed by the IRA, though he had by tains his "lies of silence" then decided not to inform. Dillon's conditions of arrested adolescence bilities — his desire to of married love through romance with a younger escape the responsi- woman, his poetry rather than practicality, his wish to run away from his given ined as felicity elsewhere — are all traits hankering for life to an imag- enforced by the special conditions of Belfast, Moore imagines it. As Michael Dillon drove the bomb from North Belfast, through center city, to the was intensely aware of "this ugly, troubled place which held for him implacable memories of his past life." He drove past the Catholic boarding hotel near Queen's, he 131 New England Journal of Public Policy school where he had been caned, past the university where he had his failed dream of escape through poetry, past "those Protestant and Catholic ghettos which were on inequity and sectarian But he was still trapped, just as he had been as a boy, when he stared out the window "and imagined himself in some aeroplane being lifted over that grey pig's back of a mountain to places far from here." 87 At the Clarence Hotel, Michael parked the car beneath the window of the room in which Pottinger was scheduled to speak, but then rebelled against his captivity and ran across the street to a shop and phoned the police, who cleared the hotel before the bomb exploded. Though Michael had no way of knowing it at the time, Moira was safe, for the IRA lads had left her shortly after Michael drove off with the bomb. But it seems that Michael had, by not carrying through with the proxy bombing, broken his ties with Belfast at last, particularly when the suspicious, enraged Moira refuses to go to London with him, where he will bring Andrea and take on a the true and lasting legacy of this British Province founded hate." new job at another hotel. At a farewell party reflect at the Clarence, Dillon's Moore's own ambivalence toward This city, with its ugly streets, its sense of the pull of place might Belfast. endless rain, its monotonous violence, its Prot- and Catholic cant and, above all, its copycat English ways, incongruous as a top hat on a Tonga king all of these things he had wanted to flee now lost their power to anger him. Instead in this crowded room filled with Ulster men and women he felt, as people must have felt in wartime, the fellowestant prejudice ship of the besieged. — 88 Michael need not have worried, for Belfast would not so easily be abandoned. Michael and Andrea, seemingly safe in England, share idyllic days in a Hampstead flat, he is lulled into the illusion that he might be able to start a new life. "Was it over? Was it possible, here in London, to slip back into the safe anonymous 89 river of ordinary life?" The Belfast police want him to return, to identify one of the kidnappers. Michael vacillates, first telling Andrea that he must "do the right thing," then telling a newly concerned Moira that he will not testify. Dillon dangles between worlds and convictions. Then the IRA relieves him of the need to choose by gunning him down. Michael Dillon, a man who would have been another Stephen Dedalus, full of silence, exile, and cunning, becomes another Gypo Nolan, the pathetic betrayer in Liam O'Flaherty's The Informer. In Lies of Silence, Brian Moore's myth of Belfast is featured as a destructive place, particularly for its murderous and murdered young men. Briefly, as Amongst Women, John McGahern's beautiful novel, centers upon the final years of Michael Moran, a cantankerous, occasionally charming, old Irish Republican a man — who fought against British rule before the 1921 treaty divided Ireland, then fought again in the post-treaty Irish Civil War, a the world around him, particularly the despite himself. man who, members "No matter how favourably the in turn, has of his never ceased fighting those who love him him he would always own family, tides turned for permanent opposition." 90 Like Paddy McGuire, the bitter farmer in Patrick Kavanagh's poem The Great Hunger, McGahern's Moran was one with his miseries, except for those rare moments of rapture when he was alone with his fields. But contrive to be in 132 end of the day, he was more the victim than the lord of all he surveyed. "Instead 91 fields, he sometimes felt as if the fields had used him." In the late 1950s, Moran is an aged man, living on a farm in the west of Ireland with another son having fled the sting of his second wife, three daughters, and one son his father's hard hand and sharp tongue. After his failed struggle for a united Ireland, Moran was disillusioned by the "crowd of small-minded gangsters" who ran the Republic. 92 All he came to care for was his family, but he fouled his own nest with his bitterness. Moran distrusted, as much as he relied upon, the hope embedded in the bones of the women he dominated. In time, each of his children fought his and her way out of their father's dour world, finding new lives in Dublin and London, though all but one of them returns home for renewal of their defining ties to family and place Moran's farm, Great Meadow, outside Carrick, in the west of Ireland. McGahern shows how Moran's strengths were gradually passed on to his long-suffering wife and daughters and became their heritage, while Moran's sons turned away from their imposing father as a model. Amongst Women is a tribute to the women of Ireland who come into their own in our time, replacing the driven men who founded a nation. Just below the surface of this realistic novel, we can detect the faint outline of a symbolic pattern. Moran represents the hard life and harder heart of an Ireland that was quickly fading, Yeats's "great hatred, little room." His women both embody the mythic Irish role of sacrifice, particularly for Rose, his noble wife, and represent, for his daughter, the new sense of identity for women in Ireland, the emergence into a new world of self-reliance and authority. Though McGahern does not flinch at portraying the self-consuming passions of Moran, the novel shows proper respect for a man who, however misguided, fought for his nation and believed in his church and his family. Indeed, the novel is a literary act of mercy in its compassion for characters caught in the nets and nettles of the hard life that Ireland offers its citizens. When Moran rails at his firstborn, Luke, who left his home and never returned, Rose urges Moran to "do the generous thing," but that is beyond him. 93 Some critics said much the same, and not without just cause, after reading McGahern's early fiction, which was unrelenting in its flaying of Ireland, but Amongst Women is an eloquent statement of reconciliation. McGahern, Ireland's finest living writer of fiction, has long imagined Ireland as a prison in which his characters are confined with lifetime sentences, though in The Pornographer he redefined Ireland as a haven in a lawless world. 94 In. Amongst at the of using the — — Women McGahern goes to the heart of the country to look at the destructive ele- ments and hidden strengths in traditional Irish life. The novel shows the redemptive element in traditional Irish family life, rooted in a dear, perpetual place, surrounded by fields; the Morans are sustained by unquestioning faith, illustrated by their nightly recitation of the Rosary, each saying a decade. In Irish country as when they all all members life, cohesion is beautifully member embodied in field of the family join in gathering the hay into sheaves. go together, squeezed into a car, to work, Or when midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. "Once they crossed the bridge the church appeared like an enormous lighted ship in the night. There was something wonderful and moving about leaving the car by the roadside and walking together in the cold and darkness towards the great lighted church" 95 However confining it might have been, a sense of coherence resided in the community. In the town, Moran's visiting daughters were greeted warmly on Saint 133 New England Journal of Public Policy Stephen's Day. "'You're home! You're home for Christmas!' and hands were gripped and held instead of shaken to show the strength of feeling." 96 Though McGahern welcomes the new age of wider individual opportunities, a sense of regret for lost clarity in the hard pastoral novel. Just before his death, reluctant to let go, meadow life of western Ireland suffuses the Moran rises, walks the fields, takes was no longer empty but filling with a fresh growth, a faint blue tinge in the rich green of the young grass. To die was never to look on all this again. It would live in others' eyes but not in his." 97 McGahern shows will live in the eyes of that these fields and Himself, man of the house, in them the women who, quite literally, survived him. And in the eyes of the readers of Amongst Women, a novel of a troubled and troubling man of Ireland. his last look around. "The . . . — — Robert Bly's Iron John: A Book About Men is a book about male initiation, although, no way denigrates women or resists the insights of the women's movement. The "Wild Man" Bly admires is no macho rapist. Rather, he is one "who has examined his wound, resembles a Zen priest, a shaman, or a woods- according to Bly, man more in it than a savage." 98 To make his point, Bly retells, interprets, and amplifies, with examples drawn from mythology and other folk tales, "Iron John," a tale first set down by the Grimm brothers around 1820, but the story could be thousands of years old. In the tale a boy loses a golden ball, which rolls into Wild Man's cage. Wild Man promises to return the ball only if the boy steals the key to the cage from beneath his mother's pillow and frees Wild Man. This the boy does, setting in motion a series of adventures (an initiation rite), which eventually brings him to manhood. "The Wild Man here amounts to an invisible presence, the companionship of the ancestors and the among great artists For all that, the dead." Bly's Wild 99 Man is no wimp. Indeed, Bly sets himself against the "soft modern male who has been both chastened and enlightened into tenderness and passivity by women. So for all its antimacho consciousness, Bly's male," that is, the thesis retains trace elements of anger against what he presumes women (Mom men. Bly would preserve the male "instinct for fierceness," but not "the instinct for aggression." For Bly, "in recent decades, the separatist wing of the feminist movement, in a justified fear of brutality, has labored to breed fierceness out of men." 100 However, Bly does not always make clear the line between positive fierceness and negative aggression. He urges men to heed the call of the Wild Man and leave "the busy life" (that is, the life of dutiful work and home commitment) behind. Bly praises but does not adequately illustrate "the positive side of male sexuality." Though the Iron John story ends in a marriage ceremony between the boy-becomeman and a princess, Bly says little about the way manhood is affirmed through fulfilling the roles of worthy husband and father by living in the midst of the life we all know. For Bly, "every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with the Wild Man is the step the eighties male or the nineties male has yet to make Contact with Iron John requires a willingness to descend into the male psyche and accept again!) have done to . . . what's dark down make more sense around a campfire, or between the pages of a book, than they do in the there, including the nourishing dark." midst of a busy life lived within a complex 134 101 Sadly, such assertions society. Bly provides a map of psy- and spiritual escape, but he says little about how a man should get through the day in his given life. Iron John, then, is still another American wish-fulfillment book in which the adolescent hero lights out for the territories. chic discussed in this article portray men who journey away from their ordiguided by various versions of the Wild Man, into initiation rites, searching for some undefinable it. Some of them find plausible new lives based upon old The works nary lives, deceits. Paul de Man was a fraud all his life and, consequently, promoted a theory of interpretation that justifies deceit. Harry Angstrom, a failure as a husband, lover, and father, became a bloated, foolish, self-consuming solipsist in Rabbit at Rest. But, through Updike's marvelous, inside, present-tense narrative, Rabbit retains the redeeming courage of his own convictions, the candor to see who he was, and the rashness to pursue what he wanted, even when that was meretricious. Patrick Bateman, Bret Easton Ellis's monstrous creation, Bly's thesis that modern capitalism encourages ersatz initiation through various and rock-and-roll are who turns to sadistic fiction, the Sooner or later all, young thrill killings. Though he said of Parker — only abandon at the very Jacoda end is a perfect illustration of to perpetuate the occasion of seeking. In American Psycho, sex, drugs, insufficient distractions for the same can be adolescents means of thrill its jaded psyche of young Bateman, inhabits a in more subtly executed house of Paul Theroux's Chicago Loop. for Rabbit — these American men, arrested their responsibilities as husbands, as fathers, as responsible new lives, new selves. Taken together, they certainly up to their responsibilities as protectors of the earth, which is what Bly says the Wild Man should be. Rather, these men, real and imaginary, embody the wilfullness, insensitivity, angry and powerful sides of men. What is admirable, to varying degrees, is the candor and artfulness of these male authors who successfully expose the dark half of the male psyche. What is wondrous, too, is the redemptive grace occasionally found in these figures who refuse to settle for things-as-they-are. Perhaps McGahern and Moore, Irish writers, present their compromised fiction heroes with more sympathy because these novelists more persuasively illustrate the shaping hand of cultural-historical influence on their fictional characters and therefore blame them less than American novelists, who present fictional heroes who like to think that each man is the author of his own destiny. Moore's Michael Dillon tries to fly past the nets of responsibility, planning to leave his wife, family, and country for a new love from the New World, but IRA men intrude to remind him of his local commitments. Even then Dillon leaves Belfast, seeking a renewed self in England, but the ties that bind him to home Belfast as the quotidian! are far-reaching. Moore presents a world in which men are trapped between a stone and a hard place; interestingly, the women around Dillon survive and grow, while he is killed. John McGahern's Irish world is even more enclosing, for his representative man, Michael Moran, an embittered former rebel, a petty tyrant who rules his farm and family with an iron hand, will not let go of destructive old ways, though it drives his sons away. His women, wife and daughters, suffer even more; however, at the end of their father's days, they grow strong through their resistance. As in Moore's Lies of Silence, McGahern's Amongst Women does not conclude with the death of the male citizens, in failed quests to create do not live — — protagonist; rather, both novels turn their attentions to the surviving fictional heroes of these novels by Moore and McGahern are women. The men who are defined by their reactions to social contexts and redeemed by the devotion of their women. 135 New England Journal of Public Policy They have a far narrower range of choice to impose shape and meaning than do their American counterparts. Thus their manhood, more circumscribed, is more plausibly portrayed. More than Love and Death in the American American life, is "charmingly and infuriatingly 'boyish.' " As a result, our literature insufficiently deals with mature social arrangements; instead, child- and adolescent-centered, "the American novel is preeminently a novel of terror." As we see from the American novels here examined the two Irish novels tell a different story little has changed since Fiedler wrote: thirty years ago, Leslie Fiedler, in Novel, suggested that American fiction, like — — Our great terror, we novelists, though experts on indignity and assault, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a on loneliness and man and woman, which expect at the center of a novel. Indeed, they rather shy away from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature women, giving us instead monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality. 102 The representative men portrayed in these books have much to answer for, but most of the writers who portrayed these men deserve praise for their candor about the male animal. £*> Notes 1. Jerry Alder, Karen Spingen, Daniel Glick, Jeanne Gordon, "Drums, Newsweek, June 2. Sweat and Tears," 24, 1991, 47. Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1991); Keen, Fire in the Belly (New York: Bantam Books, 1991). 3. Richard Stengel, "Bang the 4. Cited in Drum Mark Feeney, "Motown, Sam Quickly," Time, July 8, 1991, 58. Mailer, My Country Left or Wrong," Boston Globe, July 10, 1991,53. 5. Bly, Iron John, 25. 6. Gloria 7. 8. Emerson, Some American Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 13. David Lehman, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Cited in (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991), 154. Cited in Ross C. Murfin, "What Is Deconstruction?" in Case Studies The Scarlet Letter (Boston: Bedford Books, 1991), 311. in Man Contemporary Criticism: 9. Lehman, Signs of the Times, 53. 40-41. 10. Cited in ibid., 11. Ibid., 137. 12. Ibid., 180. 13. Lehman, Signs of the Times, 158. 14. Cited in ibid., 207. 15. Cited in Roger Cohen, "Bret Easton Times, March 6, Ellis Answers Critics of An American Dream (New 16. Norman Mailer, 17. Norman Mailer, "Children of the Pied Piper: Mailer March 1991, 'American Psycho,'" New York 1991, C-14. York: Henry Holt, 1965), 255. 154, 156. 136 on 'American Psycho,'" Esquire, . Cohen, 18. Cited in 19. Bret Easton 20. "Sex, 21. Ellis, 22. Paul "Ellis Ellis, Answers," C-13. American Psycho (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), Murder and Armani," Boston Phoenix Literary Section, American Psycho, 4. April 1991, 1 1. 106. Theroux, Chicago Loop (New York: Random House, 1990), 66. 23. Ibid., 69. 24. John Updike, Rabbit at Rest (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 370. 25. Ibid., 371. 26. Garry Wills, "Long-Distance Runner," New York Review of Books, October 25, 1990, 11. 27. Ibid., 12. 28. Ibid., 14. 29. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, in Edmund Wilson, ed., The Shock of Recognition: The Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Made It (New 30. York: Random House, Men Who 1955), 909. John Updike, Self-Consciousness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 1 13-120. 31. Ibid., 137. 32. Ibid., 139. 33. Ibid., 136-137. 34. Willis, "Long-Distance Runner," 14. 35. John Updike, "Why Rabbit Had to Go," New York Times Book Review, August 5, 1990, 1 36. Ibid., 2. 37. John Updike, Rabbit, Run, in The Poorhouse Fair and Rabbit, Run (New York: Modern Library, 1965), 152. 38. Ibid., 171. 39. Ibid., 175. 40. Ibid., 287. 41. Ibid., 233. 42. Ibid., 266-267. 43. Ibid., 271. (Summer 44. See Shaun O'Connell "Rabbits Remembered," Massach usetts Review 15, no. 3 1974): 511-520. John Updike, "hub fans bid kid adieu," in Assorted Prose (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 146. 45. Updike, 46. "Why Rabbit Had to Go," 24. John Updike, "Special Message," in Hugging the Shore: Essays and Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 858. 47. John Updike, Rabbit Redux (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 48. Updike, "SpeciaJ 49. 1971), 358. Message," 858. John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 50. Ibid., 237. 51. Ibid., 375. 137 1981), 3. Criticism (New York: . New England Journal of Public Policy 52. Updike, "Why Rabbit Had 53. Updike, Rabbit at Rest, to Go," 24. 1 1 54. Ibid., 381. 55. Ibid., 60. 56. Ibid., 3. 57. Ibid., 22. 58. Ibid., 18-19. 59. Ibid., 42. 60. Ibid., 9. 61. Ibid., 176. 62. Ibid., 29. 63. Ibid., 100. 64. Ibid., 56. 65. Barbara Tuchman, The First Salute, cited in Updike, Rabbit at Rest, 86. 66. Updike, Rabbit at Rest, 136. 67. Ibid., 331. 68. Ibid., 154. 69. Ibid., 40. 70. Ibid., 197. 71. Ibid., 203. 72. Ibid., 295. 73. Ibid., 346. 74. Ibid., 351. 75. Ibid., 389-390. 76. Ibid., 409. 77. Ibid., 434. 78. Ibid., 438. 79. Ibid., 461-464. 80. 352. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 353. 82. Ibid., 506. 83. Brian Moore, Lies of Silence (London: Bloomsbury, 1990), 8. 84. Ibid., 11. 85. Ibid., 55. 86. A pattern well-established in his previous fiction. Shaun O'Connell, "Brian A World Well Lost," Massachusetts Review 29, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 539-555. 87. Moore, Lies, 84. 88. Ibid., 152-153. 89. Ibid., 168. 138 Moore's Ireland: 90. John McGahern, Amongst Women (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 163. 91. Ibid., 130. 92. Ibid., 18. 93. Ibid., 51. 94. Shaun O'Connell, "Door no. 2 95. (Summer into the Light: John McGahern's Ireland," Massachusetts Review 25, 1984): 255-268. McGahern, Amongst Women, 97. 96. Ibid., 99. 97. Ibid., 179. 98. Bly, Iron John, x. 99. Ibid., 41. 100. Ibid., 46. 101. Ibid., 6. 102. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New 139 York: Criterion Books, 1960), xix-xxi.