IT'S A DAD'S LIFE:John Updike's character Rabbit explains why fathers feel slightly bemused, writes ADAM BROPHY.
I CAME late to John Updike. It took his dying to spur me on. His dying also caused a little humiliation. A knowledgeable neighbour, on hearing the news, commented that we’d all have to revisit the Rabbit series. To which I replied that I didn’t know he’d written kids’ books. I have a degree in English from UCD. Maybe you shouldn’t send your kids there.
Then I read Tom Humphries eulogising Updike’s ability to write on sport, off the cuff, on his day off, with a fluent and precise eye that leaves the average (and Tom Humphries is way better than average) sportswriter flapping. He went on to write that if he could emulate a fraction of it, it would cause him to lay down his pen “with contentment”. That was enough. Straight on to Amazon to have the four Rabbit books whisked my way.
Now, months later, with all four masticated and digested, I can’t get Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom out of my skull. It goes without saying that these are brilliant books; the last two both won the Pulitzer. And I’m not going to labour over the genius of the writing, the intricate passages that flaunt beauty in the mundane. Nor am I going to quote my favourite lines to highlight the skill of the creator. All that has been done by far more skilled commentators than me and, even in their hands, the quotes only serve to highlight the limited capabilities of just about anybody in close proximity to the master.
Nah, Updike got me because, and I wonder has this happened for many others, I think I am Rabbit. And worse, I always wanted to write a novel about the disenchanted male, basically me, and when I read Rabbit, RunI went, ah here, he's a little better than I'm ever going to be. And he had me all figured out 50 years ago.
Rabbit, Runwas about me when I was 26, Rabbit Redux is about me now. I know how the next 20 years are going to pan out because I've read Rabbit is Richand Rabbit at Rest. There's nothing to look forward to, and I'll wind up dying ridiculously young.
Of course, I’m not an ex-high school basketball star. I don’t currently work in the printing industry and there is little chance that in the future I’ll inherit a Toyota dealership, as all happened to our friend Harry. But Harry refused to be defined by either the times he lived in, even though outwardly he walked as if he did, nor by those closest to him, his family.
This is the theme that seems to sit on the shoulders of so many men, the grinding notion that we think we are different from everyone else and yet toe the line so as to make our existence somehow bearable. This, it feels, isn’t the exception but the norm. Man as outsider. Father as detached provider. Your sense of detachment and exception climbs into your head and scrapes at your confused mind when all you want is a comfortable feeling of inclusion.
I read Rabbit and found solace in his struggle and that, I think, is the beauty of the series. That it makes me feel normal, as a man and a father.
Michael Lewis's Home Gameis the latest book to do this overtly. Lewis describes his attempts to transition from the non-verbal, barely present fathering model, as practised by his own dad, to the ideal model of some perfect future.
Huxley might have considered this in his writing but fatherhood wasn’t the hot potato back then that it is now. Back then you were expected to be an outsider in your own family; now we’re expected to be right in there, hands on, providing and caring.
And all the while juggling our sense of, “What the hell am I doing here? Why amn’t I living in Vegas with a stripper?”
You’re not supposed to feel alone in your own family but anybody with a shred of honesty will attest to the fact that you often do. As a child you’re confused most of the time, about everything and how it works.
Teens are fuelled on disassociation: disenchantment is your currency. For a few brief years in your 20s you run off and gambol alone in the world, sniffing and touching. Yet most of us are plotting, for some strange, indistinct reason, a way back to the family system we fled. We get there and wonder why we find it hard.
But that’s okay. That’s normal. John Updike told me so. In the most fantastic prose.