Authors: Adam Begley
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.