Updike (73 page)

398 “Why doesn’t Dad just die?”:
RRich
, 323.

398 “The kid was no threat to him for now”: Ibid., 456.

399 “She breathed that air he’d forgotten”: Ibid., 189.

400 Updike thought
Rabbit Is Rich
the “happiest” novel:
HG
, 455.

400 “an invigorating change of mates”: Ibid., 457.

400 the inspiration for “Janice’s lusty rejuvenation”: Ibid., 456.

400 “unquestionably” Updike’s finest novel: Mark Feeney, “Rabbit Running Down: Intimations of Immortality in Updike’s Finest,”
The Boston Globe
, September 27, 1981, 1.

400 “the best book I’ve ever read about an ordinary man”: Anatole Broyard, “Ordinary People,”
The New York Times Book Review
, December 13, 1981, 43.

400 “
Rabbit Is Rich
is the first book”: Roger Sale, “Rabbit Returns,”
The New York Times Book Review
, September 27, 1981, 32.

400 “What comes through most vividly,” Yardley wrote: Jonathan Yardley, “Rabbit Isn’t Rich,”
The Washington Post
, April 26, 1982.

400 declared Updike “both a poet and a historian”: V. S. Pritchett, “Updike,”
The New Yorker
, November 9, 1981, 206.

401 “a swindler named Rosenthal”: JU, “Suzie Creamcheese Speaks,”
The New Yorker
, February 23, 1967, 110.

402 a letter from Updike apologizing for his absence:
HS
, 875–76.

402 “a largish white edifice with a distant look at the sea”: LP, May 25, 1981, Houghton.

X. Haven Hill

403 “An adult human consists of sedimentary layers”:
HG
, 460.

403 “I had left a big white house with a view of saltwater”:
HS
, xx.

403 He also thought of the Shillington house, where as a child he “soaked up love and strength,” as a “big white house”:
SC
, 25, 27.

404 “a pale white castle in a fairy tale”: LP, September 10, 1981, Houghton.

404 “As we drove up the lane,” Oates wrote: JCO to JU, October 9, 1982, Syracuse.

404 “Now that I think of it[,] wasn’t 675 Hale the house”: MA to JU, August 10, 1982, Houghton.

404 “We ate at a table that was much too large”: E-mail, Austin Briggs to author, March 6, 2011.

405 “My own house, up a wooded hill”:
OJ
, 61.

405 “middling, hidden, troubled America”:
SC
, 103.

405 the Gold Coast, “a bucolic enclave”:
HG
, 457.

405 summer places built by “quiet Boston money”:
OJ
, 50.

406 “I envy John the metaphorical resources of Infinity at his left hand”: JCO to JU, October 9, 1982, Syracuse.

407 Rabbit’s life was less “defended” than his own:
HG
, 448.

408 “What is clearest in the documentary”: John Corry, “A Documentary of John Updike,”
The New York Times
, July 13, 1983.

408 “I feel in most respects that I am a pretty average person”:
WMRR
.

409 “That was when you really got the impression”: Author interview, Michael Updike, August 18, 2012.

409 “It felt like we’re his mistress”: Ibid.

410 “His life seemed destined never to be wholly his own”:
A
, 64.

410 a “chasteningly grand” silhouette:
WE
, 10.

411 “engagingly half-mad with a storyteller’s exuberance”: Bloom,
John Updike
, 2.

411 “semi-depressed and semi-fashionable”:
WE
, 2.

411 “I once moved to a venerable secluded town”:
OJ
, 855.

411 “Bald November reigned outside”:
WE
, 156.

412 “[T]he world poured through her”: Ibid., 78.

412 “[S]unlight pressed on Alexandra’s face”: Ibid., 291.

412 Updike “had a very good spy in the female camp”: Diane Johnson, “Warlock,”
The New York Review of Books
, June 14, 1984, 3.

412 “loves Alexandra better even than Rabbit”: Bloom,
John
Updike
, 2.

412 “I’ve been criticized for making the women”: Quoted in Margaret Atwood, “Wondering What It’s Like to Be a Woman,”
The New York Times Book Review
, May 13, 1984, 1.

412 “gorgeous and doing evil”:
WE
, 343.

412 conflating “sinister old myths” with the “modern female experiences”:
OJ
, 855.

413 “a male author notoriously unsympathetic to women”: Nina Byam, “Review of
The Witches of Eastwick
and
Sex and Destiny
, by Germaine Greer,”
The Iowa Review
(Fall 1984): 165.

413 “The decade past has taught her more than it has taught him”:
RRich
, 138.

414 “the sexual
seethe
that underlies many a small town”:
CJU
, 267.

417 “ruminative ekphrasis”—poetic description of an artwork: Arthur Danto, “What MOMA Done Tole Him,”
The New York Times Book Review
, October 15, 1989, 12.

418 “I feel confident in saying that the disadvantages of New York life”:
OJ
, 53.

418 a depressive divinity school professor with a “sullen temper”:
RV
, 9.

418 To achieve the “informational abundance”:
OJ
, 869.

419 Having decided after
Witches
to “attempt a city novel”: Ibid., 856.

419 a “crassly swank” rotating restaurant atop a skyscraper:
RV
, 309.

420 “urine and damp cement and rubber-based paint”: Ibid., 59.

420 “beyond the project, deeper into that section of the city”: Ibid., 221.

420 “an African mask, her lips and jaw majestically protruding”: Ibid., 223.

420 “princess of a race that travels from cradle to grave”: Ibid., 226.

420 “killing an unborn child to try to save a born one”: Ibid., 221.

420 “an essay about kinds of belief,” Updike labeled it:
CJU
, 254.

420 staying overnight in the hospital “under observation”:
RV
, 269.

420 “When I was spent and my niece released”: Ibid., 280–81.

421 Crews accused Roger (and Updike) of “class-based misanthropy”: Frederick Crews, “Mr. Updike’s Planet,”
The New York Review of Books
, December 4, 1986, 12.

422 Crews locates “a certain bleakness at the center” of Updike’s mind: Ibid., 14.

422 his “sense of futility and of doom and of darkness”: Mervyn Rothstein, “The Origin of the Universe, Time and John Updike,”
The New York Times
, November 21, 1985.

422 “the natural state of the sentient adult”: F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Crack-Up
(New York: New Directions, 1993), 84.

423 his good temper balanced against a recurring sense of being “smothered and confined, misunderstood and put-upon”:
SC
, 256.

423 “Happiness,” he writes in
Self-Consciousness
, “is best seen out of the corner of the eye”: Ibid., 254.

423 “Can happiness,” he asks, “be simply a matter of orange juice?”: Ibid., 255.

423 his sense of well-being is complicated by his “inner remove”: Ibid., 256.

423 “is a vast conspiracy to make you happy”:
ES
, 413.

424 “He that gains his life shall lose it”:
SC
, 257.

424 the tone was sometimes “kind of acid”:
CJU
, 188.

424 God was the “guarantor” of his existence, “a protector and a reference point”:
WMRR
.

424 he woke up in the night feeling “fearful and adrift”:
MM
, 40–41.

424 he was wearing, he tells us, his “churchgoing clothes”:
SC
, 254.

425 “I have stayed out,” as he put it, “of the business end of St. John’s”:
CJU
, 255.

425 “I saw this as being a woman’s novel by a man”: Mervyn Rothstein, “In ‘S.,’ Updike Tries the Woman’s Viewpoint,”
The New York Times
, March 2, 1988.

426 “A sort of blessing seemed to arise from the anonymous public”:
OJ
, 761.

426 “this massive datum that happens to be mine”:
SC
, xi.

427 he conceded that he was peddling a kind of “cagey candor”:
HG
, 472.

427 “These memoirs feel shabby,” he wrote:
SC
, 231.

427 “A writer’s self-consciousness,” he tells us, “is really a mode of interestedness”: Ibid., 24.

427 “leaning doggedly away from the pull of his leather pouch”: Ibid., 37.

427 “here we see Updike nude, without a stitch of irony or art”: Martin Amis,
The War Against Cliché
(New York: Talk Miramax Book, 2001), 376.

428 “a parading,” as he put it, “of my wounds”:
DC
, 11.

428 he adopts a self-mocking tone: “I have preened, I have lived”:
SC
, 78.

428 “a basically glancing, flirtatious acquaintanceship”: Ibid., 154.

428 “I had propelled my body through the tenderest parts”: Ibid., 40.

428 musing on his “troubled epidermis”: Ibid., 72.

428 “What was my creativity, my relentless need to produce”: Ibid., 75.

428 he describes the “obdurate barrier” in his throat: Ibid., 79.

428 the “paralysis of stuttering stems from the dead center”: Ibid., 87.

428 the “ingenious psychosomatic mechanism”: Ibid., 99.

428 “I tried to break out of my marriage”: Ibid., 98.

429 “I gave my teeth to the war effort”: Ibid., 163.

429 “holes where once there was electricity and matter”: Ibid., 248.

429 “Between now and the grave lies a long slide”: Ibid., 78.

429 “
You carry your own hide to market
”: Ibid., 211.

429 “Truth,” he writes, “is anecdotes, narrative”: Ibid., 234.

430 she wanted to go home and “take what comes”: JU to WM, November 8, 1989, Illinois.

432 “I was an orphan, full of the triumphant, arid bliss of being on my own”:
OJ
, 869.

433 Updike, in a “frenzy of efficiency,” did the same in the late fall of 1989: Ibid., 867.

433 she made “gallant stabs in both directions”: JU to WM, November 8, 1989, Illinois.

434 Her “unignorable” decline during the year he spent writing it:
OJ
, 872.

434 medical details he “shamelessly” fed into his terrifyingly vivid descriptions:
HG
, 458.

434 “that singeing sensation he gets”:
RRest
, 91.

434 “Deciding to wind up the series”: JU, “Why Rabbit Had to Go.”

434 “You might say it’s a depressed book”: Ibid.

435 “working at the full height of his powers”: Michiko Kakutani, “Just 30 Years Later, Updike Has a Quartet,”
The New York Times
, September 25, 1990, C13.

435 “one of the very few modern novels in English”: Jonathan Raban, “Rabbit’s Last Run,”
The Washington Post
, September 30, 1990.

435 a friendly, unbuttoned congregation, a “human melt”:
RRest
, 371.

435 “to the mild, middling truth of average American life”:
OJ
, 183.

435 “always . . . trying to fashion a piece of literature”: Ibid., 189.

436 “It is, after all, the triumph of American life”: Ibid.

436 “Harry’s eyes burn”:
RRest
, 371.

436 “tired and stiff and full of crud”: Ibid., 166.

436 As he would say, “Enough”: Ibid., 512.

436 the neatness of “a squared-off tetralogy, a boxed life”:
HG
, 457.

436 “So many themes convene in
Rabbit at Rest
”: Ibid., 459.

437 Brewer kids playing basketball: “Legs, shouts”:
RRun
, 3.

437 These black kids have “that unhurried look”:
RRest
, 487.

437 “as alone on the court as the sun in the sky”: Ibid., 506–7.

437 At forty-five he was “over the hill”:
CP
, 147.

438 “I wanted to cap my series and make it a tetralogy”:
OJ
, 872.

438 “a specimen American male’s evolution into grandpaternity”: Ibid.

438 “Harry tries to imagine the world seen through her clear green eyes”:
RRest
, 55.

438 Nelson cries in anguish, “Don’t
die
, Dad,
don’t
!”: Ibid., 512.

438 “Whatever it is,
it
has found
him
, and is working him over”: Ibid., 136.

439 “I think he was emotionally shy with us”: Author interview, David Updike, January 18, 2013.

439 his father “just didn’t have room for grandchildren”: Author interview, Michael Updike, August 18, 2012.

440 “With his wonderful new tool of ease how can a writer say No?”:
OJ
, xviii.

442 the many months of “sexual disarray”:
MM
, 822.

442 “I’ve been carrying Buchanan around with me for years”:
CJU
, 230.

442 “There is a civilized heroism to indecision”:
MFA
, 13.

442 for the next fifteen years and counting, “fairly content”: Ibid., 365.

442 Alf tells us, “Real life is in essence anti-climactic”: Ibid., 357.

442 “the Queen of Disorder”: artistic, vague, maternal: Ibid., 10.

443 “the Perfect Wife”: peremptory, efficient, snobbish: Ibid., 24.

443 “my
Tempest
, my valedictory visit to all my themes”:
MM
, 822.

443 “like many a mother in the biography of a successful man”:
MFA
, 26.

443 “Is it not the biological cruelty of mothers”: Ibid., 29.

444 “What would have happened to me if William Shawn”:
HG
, 466.

445 “shamanistic mystique” associated with the cult of Mr. Shawn:
MM
, ix.

445 The sober, dignified pages he was used to were suddenly “sharply angled”: Ibid., xxi.