Customer Reviews

Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, "Rabbit Remembered"

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Tom Wolfe recently said of John Updike that he knew that there were 275 million people living in the United States, and that he didn't believe there was a one of them who was looking forward to a new John Updike novel. To this I would say he is only about half right. I would agree that news of the first half of this book, the short story collection, left me mostly unmoved. But I can guarantee you that I, along with dozens of other people I'm sure, was delighted to see yet another installment in the Rabbit series, and scooped it up eagerly.

It doesn't disappoint. Of course, everybody familiar with the series knows that Rabbit died a long time ago, but contained in here are all of the other familiar faces: Janice, now married to Ronnie Harrison; Nelson, separated; Pru; Billy Fosnacht; and Annabelle Byer, the mover and shaker of the plot this time around. Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom's presence, though, looms over all, figuratively, and eventually as we shall see, literally.

Yes, as the lion is noted for his ferocity, the elephant for his size, and the giraffe for his height, Rabbit is known for, well, what rabbits are known for. I don't believe I've ever seen this pointed out in any reviews of these books that I have read, and am at a loss to explain why. (I apologize if I have missed something.) Even Mr. Updike seems to be curious about this, throwing us a not so subtle hint in this one.

Think about it: in the first book he cheats on Janice, and indirectly causes the death of his daughter. In the second book, he is separated from Janice, but cheats on his girlfriend, and while gone she is killed in a fire. In the third one, he is prevented from consumating his lust (by Nelson, no less, hilariously), and nobody dies. But in the fourth one, after cheating on Janice yet again, and with Nelson's wife this time, he indirectly causes his own death. Yes, boys and girls, the age old theme: sex equals death. Or in this case, illicit sex equals death, sooner or later. Or maybe, everything eventually equals death.

But I am being simplistic. These books encompass way more than this; in fact, one could argue that these books encompass everything that is human about all of us. Yes, Rabbit's life can be read as a tawdry, melodramatic, almost tragic soap-opera, but to do so would be missing the point. These books are also slyly, wickedly funny. How ridiculous, we think. Look at these bumpkins, struggling to find happiness through self-gratification. But how tragic. And how sad. Because we are contained in here too. It is Updike's magnificent intelligence which allows us to see the pathos and humor in all of it.

Is Rabbit Everyman? No, he is not every man. But he is also not uncommon either. We all know people like him. The stumbling good guy, buffeted around by life, taking what comes his way without much thought or introspection or faith. He doesn't really love anybody and is not really sure how to. In Mr. Updike's hands, though, this thoroughly mundane person is fascinating, and probably the most fully-realized character in American literature. We have been following him, and the America he lives in, for four decades now. There is no doubt in my mind that several hundred years from now people will be studying these novels in order to get a complete and thorough picture of American culture in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Is it a pretty picture? No, not really. Is it accurate? Yes, to the degree that it captures the life of one individual--no more, no less--it is. At the end, Harry is in Florida, lost, feeling like he has been swimming underwater. His life has been a void.

This book, Rabbit Remembered, allows us to see his accomplishments, through those he left behind, and ends with the characteristic brilliance typical of the entire series. It is New Years Eve, the end of the century, the end of the millenium. Four well-dressed, clumsy, drug-addicted, divorced, molested, depressed, middle-aged youths--Nelson, Pru, Annabelle, and Billy--are going out for the evening. Janice looks at them, her children--Harry's children--and tears come to her eyes. She is moved, but incapable of understanding why.

It is Harry. He is the father of illegitimate Annabelle and legitimate Nelson, the one-time lover of Pru, his daughter-in-law, and the one-time lover of Billy's mother. This is his connection to them, and what, inexplicably, has moved Janice. These children are his legacy. The legacy of the Rabbit.

When future historians try to understand the Sexual Revolution of the latter twentieth century, they will probably find no more useful documents than the fiction of John Updike, whose obsession with sex, particularly the adulterous variety, is unparalleled in modern literature. In Updike's world, pick any four couples and you've got yourself seven adulterers and one weirdo - quite a different Pennsylvania from the one this reviewer lives in.

In this mixed volume of fiction, "The Women Who Got Away", "New York Girl", "Natural Color", the Bech story "His Oeuvre" and the surprising "Scene From the Fifties" all revolve around marital infidelity and the burgeoning sexual revolution. Updike's obsession with adultery leads one to suspect that the writer suffered from post-coital remorse, and tried to come to grips with his own indiscretions by implying that they are symptomatic of the culture, and so not really his fault. The stories invariably show how tawdry these encounters are, how irresponsible he recognizes them to be, and how paranoid the perpetrators become, all to convince someone (His family? His mistress? His readers? His Maker?) that it really wasn't all that much fun. "Let me off easy," he seems to be saying, "I've already suffered enough."

"Rabbit Remembered" is the real class of this collection, and a worthy capstone to the Rabbit series, but readers unfamiliar with the four novels preceding shouldn't expect to get much out of it. Recapitulations of the events from the prior novels are often pretty brief, giving the barest review of the facts and skipping all the emotional fallout. The focus is on the late Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom's son Nelson, and the changes that take place in his life when his unbeknownst half-sister Annabelle shows up at his mother's house.

Fans of Updike's work will surely appreciate this one last entry into the Rabbit franchise, even if there isn't much else to recommend this volume. Those new to Updike should start anywhere but here; the adultery-go-round of the first dozen stories is sure to leave a bad taste in the mouths of most readers, and the redeeming qualities of "Remembered" will be wholly opaque to the uninitiated.

Licks of Love is worth buying just for the novella featuring our old favorite hero Rabbit Angstrom...however, in addition to Rabbit, this book contains marvelous short stories by the wonderful John Updike. There is a delcious story about a one night stand and a gorgeous one about cats! If you want to be touched by love and feel its power, buy this book, read this book and cherish this book. God bless John Updike!

At the end of Rabbit at Rest, Harry Angstrom, aka Rabbit, had enough: his declining health, his little mutt of a wife Janice, and his wimpy, cocaine-snorting son Nelson. But life went on for others, and in "Rabbit Remembered," the predominate part of this collection, the author allows a window into their lives ten years after Rabbit's demise.

The influence of Rabbit has hardly disappeared. Rabbit's childhood friend Ronnie Harrison and a meathead in Rabbit's view has married Janice. Rabbit's suspicion that an affair with Ruth years ago produced a child proves correct as Annabelle Byer presents herself at Janice's front door ten years after Harry's death. And Nelson has righted himself by becoming a mental-health counselor, though his marriage to Pru has disintegrated. There are issues to be worked out, but Harry's optimism seems to pervade these characters far more than at the end of Rabbit at Rest. There are several contentious scenes, but there is a refreshing ability and willingness to look issues in the eye that was not necessarily present in Rabbit's day.

"Rabbit Remembered" is the reason to buy this book. But for those unfamiliar with the Rabbit series, it could have little meaning with the countless references and assumptions concerning the previous books, especially the last one. The other stories in the book pale in comparison. The themes that Updike likes to engage - marriage, obsession, infidelity, regret, etc - seem better suited to novels than short stories. Somehow snippets of these themes are not satisfying.

Read the novella ("Rabbit Remembered") first; it's worth the price of the book all by itself. A very interesting fictional experiment -- a piece about the lingering influence of a man ten years dead on his family and acquaintances. I have read all the earlier Rabbit Angstrom novels (several times) and enjoyed this thoroughly; I'm not sure how much you will like it if you are not familiar with the earlier works.

As to the other stories...well, bad Updike is better than most other authors' best efforts. These are not his best and are disappointing after his most recent short story collection (The Afterlife and Other Stories).

If you're new to Updike don't start here -- but if you are already a fan there is much to enjoy. As usual the prose is flawless and delightful even though some of the characters are underdone and some of the stories structurally flawed -- a rarity in Updike's work.

In Licks of Love, Updike fires off one of the ''Rabbit'' stories he dreams up every decade or so. The 182 page ''Rabbit Remembered'' tries to work both sides of the street, to document the dying months of the '90s while conjuring the spirit of a hopeless narcissist.

Forty years ago, ''Rabbit, Run'' introduced Harry ''Rabbit'' Angstrom, the rangy, aimless middle American who'd go on to star in three further novels. Harry died in 1990's ''Rabbit at Rest,'' and ''Rabbit Remembered,'' a tail to the tale, looks at what was left in his wake.

A doorbell hoarsely rings in Brewer, Pa., and Janice Harrison, Harry's remarried widow, is staring across her doorstep at a somewhat sluttish looking nurse named Annabelle Byer, the product of an affair Rabbit had way back when. In his typically crystalline prose, Updike describes how Janice sizes up the girl and her motives and how she mulls over lost time while scooting about town in her black LeBaron convertible.

Janice's ex- cokehead son, Nelson, is now a 42 year old mental health counselor divorced from his wife and living at home. He takes a shine to his half sister that's both fraternal and not a little incestuous. Nothing much happens, but by the holidays, fragments of families are meeting up and falling apart and piecing themselves -- and thus Rabbit -- together again.

Throughout, people take in the noise of the age: impeachment, ''American Beauty,'' the Y2K bug, the new VW bug.... And Updike seems particularly hung up on tongue studs.

There are a dozen short stories in ''Licks of Love'' too; most are not just short but small, and they're all pointed in the same direction as the main event anyway -- toward past books and ancient desires. With his keen looks at (un)settling old scores, Updike has designed the glimmering ''Rabbit Remembered'' as a seductive news brief. It's a ghost story, to be sure, but each character is haunted by the present, and American life is all American gothic. It turns out that poor Harry Angstrom, a monument to the way our little lives are led, was a man in full after all.

This collection is a well-written short story anthology centering on the foibles of loving someone more than one love oneself. In addition to the dozen tales, the legendary John Updike includes a novella about the Rabbit family. That tale, ?Rabbit Remembered? is worth the ?steep? price of admission by itself.

The short stories are enjoyable, but Mr. Updike has plowed no new ground. Perhaps it is this reviewer at fault as a rabid Rabbit fan, but the fantastic novella clearly owns the book. Fans of the previous four books will want to read this posthumous story while new readers will scramble for the four novels that have made Mr. Updike a well deserved award winning author. Without giving away the plot, the deceased Rabbit?s illegitimate daughter meets the rest of the family in a humorous but, often melancholy way. This clearly enables the tying up of the previous stories into a fabulous complete package worth reading.

Harriet Klausner

Let's face it - most folks will come to this book to get their Rabbit fix, so let's deal with that story first. We readers spent a lot of time in the four Rabbit books being exasperated, if not saddened, by Nelson, Rabbit's unfortunate, screwed-up son. Well, here, finally, Nelson comes into his own. He has hit his stride. We readers become - dare I say it? - downright proud of him. And how is Rabbit remembered? You need only observe his children, in whom he lives on. (Check out the last word and re-read the question it answers. Hmmm...) Also, you don't need to read the first four Rabbit books to enjoy or understand this story; it's satisfying on its own - cinema verite in book form.

The other stories are not terribly memorable or compelling. Nevertheless they fit just like a comfortable old pair of shoes. One wonders if they might not be simply necessary, a chance for Updike to work through the late-arriving gremlins of his own memory. If you want to read only one or two of these stories, I'd recommend "Natural Color" very highly for its great insights and the title track, "Licks of Love in the Heart of the Cold War," as a better-than-average plot. Mr. Bech also makes an appearance ("His Oeuvre"), and the excerpts from his (Bech's) writings are as diverting to read as ever, as is the sad conclusion he makes at the end of the story.

This set of short stories is mostly about aging men pining for lost loves. The writing is beautiful, as expected in an Updike book. The recurring theme gets a little tiresome, though, with a few interesting exceptions. "Scenes from the Fifties" has a smile-inducing punch line. "Licks of Love in the Heart of the Cold War's" main character is an American banjo player, acting as "cultural ambassador" in USSR.

The highlight, though, as other reviewers have mentioned, is Rabbit Remembered. Through the Rabbit novels Harry's son, Nelson, held little interest for me, despite the closeness of our ages. But now he's grown up, cleaned up, filling the main-character role quite well. His half-sister arrives on the doorstep of his mother and step-father's house where he lives, sparking his further growth and cleansing. This is a lovely, necessary read for fans of the Rabbit series.

Shortly after I read the four Rabbitt novels - recently; yeah, I'm a bit behind the times - I bought this to read the "sequel". While many of the stories in this book are excellent, the Rabbitt sequel should never have been published. It left a bad taste in the back of my mind, after having devoured all four "real" Rabbitt novels in just a few weeks. This sequel is trite, useless, and does not help the legacy of that poignant character. If you enjoyed the Rabbitt novels, don't feel that you need to read this.