lOOKS
121
Barbara Solomon's truth, if a reader were persuaded of Updike's
truth he would go out and make himself an eunuch for the kingdom
of heaven's sake.
Rabbit was once a high-school basketball star; now he is
twenty-six, with a pregnant wife, a child, a grubby flat, a job in the
dime store; suddenly he runs away. "I once played a game real
well," he
says.
"I really did. And after you're first-rate at something,
no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.
And that little thing Janice and I had going, boy, it was really
second-rate." Now only in sex does he feel first-rate. He moves in
with a girl who has been a whore, "in a way," and who falls in love
with him; goes back to his wife when she gives birth to their second
child; runs away again, leaving the wife to get so drunk she drowns
the child in its bath; comes back, and runs away again at the child's
funeral; learns the other girl is pregnant and runs from her; just
runs, this time, up the mountain.
It is a parable intended to surprise and shock. Rabbit seems at
first destined for our sympathy; perhaps, it seems, he is going to be
another modern picaresque hero, casting off his bonds of respect–
ability to knock around from one roguish seduction to another, with
his principle the modern motto, "All I know is what's inside
me.
That's all I have." The very mannered writing, all in the present
tense, seems to encourage that expectation; it lights up especially in
sexual passages.
He kisses her lips; her lips expect more than they get.
Into their wet flower he drops a brief bee's probe.... Light
lies along her right side where it can catch her body as it
turns in stillness; this pose, embarrassed and graceful, she
holds; rigidity is her one defense against his eyes and her
figure does come to seem to him inviolable; absolute; her
nakedness swings in tides of stone.
This is not simply Rabbit's own illiterate imagery brought to
fine words; the language for the other characters is much the same,
and the same, too, when nobody knows but us and the author. These
"well-written" phrases become, finally, revolting:
His big suede
shoes skim in thumps above the skittering litter of alley gravel.
...
their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark .
..
a solitary
plum tree ball[s] with bloom, a whiteness the black limbs seem to
