Rabbit Redux by John Updike

Three classes behind his, Peggy Gring had gone to high school with Rabbit and had seen him when he was good, had say in those hot bleachers screaming, when he was a hero, naked and swift and lean. She has seen him come to nothing.

I read, but didn’t review, Rabbit, Run, last year. It follows Rabbit Angstrom, aged 26, as he lives his post-high school life, tries, and fails, to make his marriage to his high school sweetheart work, and suffers some pretty heavy-duty heartbreak. It’s a tragic book, and Rabbit is a tragic character, both unique and universal—he’s his own man, but the narrative of Rabbit, Run is a universal chronicle of one man’s failure to live up to whatever potential he has. It’s also an exercise in both character and reader debasement, disturbing and moving in equal part.

Rabbit Redux takes place 10 years later, with much of the cast returning, picking up where Run left off, with Rabbit, in the aftermath of the tragic event that closes Run, trying—and once again, failing—to shape his life into something that makes him less miserable. After discovering his wife is having an affair with a co-worker, George Stavros, Rabbit’s life again goes off the rails. His wife leaves him, and he takes in a young female runaway, Jill, and her “friend”, a black drug dealer named Skeeter. Things don’t go well.

The title. Rabbit Redux, speaks to a restoration, and, in the end, there is a restoration of sorts. It comes at a cost, of course, and most of Redux doesn’t seem redemptive at all. If anything, Rabbit is a bigger jerk than in Run, more confused, volatile, misogynist, and, adding a new wrinkle, racist. He descends into drug use and, regarding Jill, what could easily be construed as sexual abuse, and, frankly, is pretty reprehensible. It speaks to Updike’s skill that Rabbit still feels human and, in the end, pitiful, if not exactly sympathetic.

Parts of Redux are hard reading—the bleakness rarely lets up, and there’s a dearth of reader surrogates. Updike dares us to sympathize with Rabbit, the cruel screw-up, as he watches those around him collapse. And watch, he does; Rabbit’s defining characteristic is his passivity, his impotence. He is acted upon and around. Even in his seductions, which in Run were at least initiated by Angstrom himself, are thrust upon him by others. He allows terrible things to happen under his roof, allows his wife to leave when she all but tells him she wants him to fight for her, lets his son do as he pleases. In the end, even Rabbit’s redemption, such as it is, is a sad, passive affair, as he is restored, not by his own actions, but by the actions of a woman he has wronged.

In the end, the title ends up being a cruel irony: Rabbit’s restoration at the end of the novel only restores him to less than the state he was in at the beginning. He is renewed only in the sense that his situation has changed, for the worse—the man in the middle is the same as always, growing older as the world revolves around him. Rabbit stifles every attempt at epiphany, never striving to be a better man, drowning in his own confusion and pity, kept from the deepest depths by the outstretched hands of the people he hurts.

One more thing: I don’t know if it comes through in this review, but Rabbit Redux is a very strange, very adult book. It’s disturbing, creepy, and can be kind of disgusting. Let the buyer beware.

Little Scarlet by Walter Mosley

I read Little Scarlet after reading This Year You Write Your Novel. Thought it might give the book some context to see what sort of fiction Mosley turns out. After finishing Little Scarlett, I think he produces work I'd probably enjoy. On the other hand, I had some issues with this book, although they're mostly my fault.

I didn't realize when I bought Little Scarlet that it was book 6 in the Easy Rawlins series, for one thing. With a lot of mystery or crime novels, chronology isn't particularly important, but Little Scarlet picks up immediately following a huge race riot and told me virtually nothing about Rawlins himself. It wasn't until I was nearly 1/3rd of the way through that I realized it was set in the 60's, which made Rawlin's extreme racial sensitivity and (well-rendered) impotent rage more understandable, as well as explaining why most of the white characters in the book exhibit behavior that would be considered inappropriate publicly now, but which, in the 60's, was hardly uncommon.

The story itself is a pretty hard-boiled detective story, as Rawlins investigates the mysterious circumstances surrounding the murder of Little Scarlet, a young girl murdered during the riot. The twists are there, and the character of Rawlins seems like an interesting one. Ultimately though, it was hard for me to get a good read on Mosley from this book. His themes of racial identity are well-integrated into the plot, and the characters are strong. It's just a case of too little information, a situation I'll try to remedy soon.

The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt

“When gods die, they die hard. It's not like they fade away, or grow old, or fall asleep. They die in fire and pain, and when they come out of you, they leave your guts burned. it hurts more than anything you can talk about. And maybe worst of all is you're not sure if there will ever be another god to fill their place. Or if you'd ever want another god to fill their place. You don't want fire to go out inside you twice.”

This was one of my favorite passages from the book. However, it doesn't really fit with the rest of this review. I just thought I would share it.

I thought I knew what I wanted to say about this book. But as I thought more about it, it became less clear. Initially, I felt that the first half of the book was great – funny, witting, creative. As compared to the last half which was a little more somber. But I have come to the conclusion that the two halves worked well in concert.

The books begins, “Of all the kids in seventh grade at Camillo Junior High, there was one kid that Mrs. Baker hated with heat whiter than the sun. Me.” The “me” is Holling Hoodhood (a downright Nabokovian name), who thinks that his homeroom teacher has it in for him because he is a Presbyterian. This means that every Wednesday, when all the other kids in his class go either to temple or mass – depending on which side of town they are from – Holling remains at the school, meaning that the teacher has to figure out what to do with him. After a wide range of chores, she finally settles on making him read Shakespeare.

Each chapter focuses on one month out of the school year, complete with mean teachers, trips to the principal’s office, surly playground bullies, and revenge meted out with snowballs. If Bill Watterson had lacked the ability to draw, he would have written something like The Wednesday Wars.

The last half of the book gives the first half of the book some meaning and importance. The last few chapters also make it evident that Holling has grown up quite a lot in less than a year. Although portions of the book are a little over the top, most of it smacks with the realism of growing up in the 1960s. The day-to-day stories of Holling’s life are framed by the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the threat of nuclear war, and somewhat serious – although not that unusual – family problems.

I wonder how much of this book is autobiographical. Schmidt did grow up on Long Island during the 60s. Regardless, The Wednesday Wars was definitely worth the read.