Updike has written 50 books. This collection contains a new Bech
story, a number of reflective, longish stories and a novella about
Harry 'Rabbit' Anstrom's family, ten years after his death. As in
his whole career, Updike's honesty and frankness comes wonderfully
well written. His eye for the detail of American life, from the
streets of his native Pennsylvania to the art galleries of New
York, is as sharp as ever. Perhaps sharper. For this collection has
a very distinct theme: looking back on an America which is passing,
from the innocent habits of childhood to the more complex memories
of past love affairs. Updike is, in a quiet way, in a frenzy of
remembrance, and the result is very moving, as if a master wants to
capture and define his sense of America, to leave a literary
memorial. For my money, the Rabbit books are his great masterpiece.
Where Bellow writes about himself, thinly disguised and Roth is
best on his own family, Updike, the third of the trilogy of great
American male writers, has invested to soul of Harry Angstrom with
all the conceits, trickery, indulgence and lovable failings of a
generation. But it is also a vivid literary creation which will
live forever. The great success of the books is that Updike has
created a character who, although familiar with the part of the
world where Updike grew up, is unlike his creator. Angstrom is
uneducated, crass, a schoolboy hero gone to seed, a poor father,
and fatally self-indulgent. Yet he is so vividly alive on the page
that I, for one, have missed him since Updike killed him off in
1989. Now, through the memories of his wife and children and the
appearance of a daughter born as the result of an affair, he comes
back to trouble his family. In the end, they side with him against
his detractors, perhaps Updike's generous valediction. The other
stories, including Bech, are mostly about forgotten lovers, from
high school to early adulteries. Some of these come from the other
great swathe of Updike's output, the Tarbox novels; others from his
memories of his family. All are new stories; all are full of
intelligence and frankness. A wonderful book. Review by JUSTIN
CARTWRIGHT (Kirkus UK)
What has become of the Angstroms?
'Rabbit Remembered' is a glorious, novella-length sequel to John Updike's quartet of novels about Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom. Several old strands come together at last, and the dead man’s survivors fitfully entertain his memory while pursuing their own happiness over the edge of the millennium. The place is, as before, the area of Brewer, Pennsylvania; the time, the last months of 1999. The dozen short stories that precede 'Rabbit Remembered' revisit many of the locales of John Updike's fiction: the small Pennsylvania town of Olinger; the lonely farm to which the hero moves as an adolescent; the exurban New England of adult camaraderie and sexual mischief; the New York City of artistic ambition and taunting glamour. Love, including an old woman’s for her cats and a boy’s for his embattled father, exerts its spell in all twelve; the title derives from a story in which an American banjo virtuoso demonstrates his licks to an enthralled Soviet audience in the heart of the Cold War, while being hounded by the epistolary aftermath of a one-night stand in Washington, DC.
Licks Of Love is John Updike at his very finest.
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