In the opening scene of Rabbit, Run (1960), John Updike's second published novel, the twenty-six-year-old Harry Angstrom – aka Rabbit – joins some children playing basketball around a telephone pole. One of the boys is very good.
He's a natural. The way he moves sideways without taking any steps, gliding on a blessing: you can tell. The way he waits before he moves. With luck he'll become in time a crack athlete in the high school; Rabbit knows the way. You climb up through the little grades and then get to the top and everybody cheers; with the sweat in your eyebrows you can't see very well and the noise swirls around you and lifts you up, and then you're out, not forgotten at first, just out, and it feels good and cool and free. You're out, and sort of melt, and keep lifting, until you become like to these kids just one more piece of the sky of adults that hangs over them in the town, a piece that for some queer reason has clouded and visited them. They've not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him. Yet in his time Rabbit was famous through the county; in basketball in his junior year he set a B-league scoring record that in his senior year he broke with a record that was not broken until four years later.
Are the kids reading John Updike now? Or is he, like his most famous creation, “just one more piece of the sky of adults”? For “adults”, in 2019, read Dead White Males – or, as David Foster Wallace put it in one of the most (mis)quoted reviews of Updike ever, Great Male Narcissists. Wallace was writing in 1997, when Mailer, Roth and Updike, his central trio of GMNs, were “in their senescence”. Surprisingly, Saul Bellowdidn't make the cut. Bellow's heavily autobiographical fiction surely meets Wallace's criteria for the GMNs: “radical self-absorption, and … uncritical celebration of this self-absorption both in themselves and in their characters”.
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