Licks of Love
John Updike Hamish Hamilton, 368pp, £16.99
ISBN 024114129X
This is a collection that every admirer of John Updike will want to read. It contains an unexpected treat: a novella-length coda to the author's masterworks, the four Rabbit novels, which had apparently drawn to a conclusion ten years ago.
Starting with Rabbit, Run (1960), and returning to the character at the turn of each decade since, Updike has chronicled the fortunes of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a high school basketball hero, first chafing against the demands of adulthood and then coming to an accommodation with them, albeit with his youthful irresponsibility unsuppressed. Harry, his wife, Janice, and son, Nelson, live in Brewer, Pennsylvania, a city loosely modelled on Reading, near Updike's birthplace of Shillington. Updike narrates the novels in the present tense, catching with a rapt and generous attentiveness the consciousnesses of his characters as they negotiate their lives, influenced both by humdrum, daily concerns and by larger events. Harry is a compromised American hero: venal, selfish and unfulfilled, but with an undimmed openness of spirit. He dies, aged 56, at the end of Rabbit at Rest (1990), his heart bursting on a basketball court.
The new story is called "Rabbit Remembered". It opens as Janice, now married to Harry's old enemy, Ronnie Harrison, opens the door of their home to discover a woman of nearly 40 who claims to be Harry's daughter. We have met this woman, Annabelle, before: in the opening chapter of Rabbit Is Rich (1981) she and her boyfriend stop by his Toyota dealership to test-drive a car. Harry soon suspects that she is the product of his affair with Ruth, a woman with whom he lived during one of his periods of escape from the family home. Harry had always seemed to be looking for a lost daughter, without success. At the end of Rabbit, Run Rebecca, the daughter of Harry's marriage to Janice, had drowned as her mother, drunk, bathed her.
There is in much of Updike's fiction, beyond his celebration of daily minutiae, a background hum of myth. Here it is suggested by a picture that Nelson notices on a restaurant wall: "a boy and a girl wearing old-fashioned German outfits, pigtails and lederhosen, holding hands, lost". Ten years after Harry's death, the children of another generation continue to be bound to the previous one by a spell that prevents them from living their own lives: Annabelle, unmarried and devoting herself to Alzheimer's patients; Nelson, a counsellor, still living at home, and with a broken marriage. The story of "Rabbit Remembered" moves towards a release, on New Year's Eve 1999.
Also making a reappearance in Licks of Love is Henry Bech, the Jewish author who has starred in three collections and who was last seen in Bech at Bay (1998), surprisingly winning the Nobel Prize. In "His Oeuvre", Bech has brief encounters with three former lovers; the glowing memories of them eclipse his satisfaction in his work.
Nostalgia permeates other stories in the collection. Many of Updike's central characters are looking back: to the Pennsylvania childhood of his "Olinger Stories" and of his novel The Centaur (1963); to adulterous young married life in New England as featured in the stories of Joan and Richard Maple and in novels such as Couples (1968). These characters, now increasingly preoccupied with their own and their friends' health, remember youth and early adulthood as times in which pain and loss and anxiety could not cloud an essentially sunny optimism.
Like his near-contemporary Philip Roth, Updike is showing no loss of energy or grasp as he approaches his seventies. Nothing, it seems, is unworthy of his tender notice. His eye and ear operate with undiminished acuity, and his curiosity about the world - from political events to movies, to the procedures of dentistry or dry-cleaning - remains fresh. His penetrating but warm gaze redeems all his characters.
Nicholas Clee is the editor of the Bookseller
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