Showing posts with label Rereading. Show all posts

Friday, September 30, 2022

The 100 best books of the 21st century / No 4 / ‘Never Let Me Go’ by Kazuo Ishiguro

The 100 best books of the 21st century

No 4

‘Never Let Me Go’

by Kazuo Ishiguro

As Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro's unsettling story of a community of clones, comes to cinema screens, Rachel Cusk finds herself both intrigued and repelled by the novel

Never Let Me Goby Kazuo Ishiguro

263pp, Faber, £16.99

Rachel Cusk
Saturday 29 June 2011

n Kazuo Ishiguro's 1995 novel The Unconsoled, Ryder, a pianist, is due to give an important concert in a foreign city. The novel is written in the form of an extended anxiety dream: manifold impediments spring up to delay his arrival at the concert hall; at one point he realises he hasn't practised the pieces he intends to play. In a field outside the city where, through labyrinthine causes, he finds himself, he comes across the dilapidated wreck of his old childhood family car. "I stared through the spiderweb cracks [in the window] into the rear seat where I had once spent so many contented hours. Much of it, I could see, was covered with fungus." The elasticity of the subconscious is also the novel's elasticity – it is more than 500 pages long – and likewise the novel's procedures are those of its adopted system of Freudian values.

Rereading Stephen King: week 18 – The Talisman

For this novel, King joined another master of the horror genre, Peter Straub, to create - a fantasy novel

BIOGRAPHY OF PETER STRAUB

James Smythe

Tuesday 23 March 2013

I couldn't remember a word of this. It was bound to happen sooner or later: a book I'd read which had slipped entirely through my memory. Sometimes I find a book is loose and hazy in my memory – I have a bad memory, and while overarching plots usually stick for everything I've read, details are often significantly more vague – but for The Talisman, I couldn't remember anything. I have the original copy; I know it had a sequel, in 2001's Black House; and I know that, since it was written, it's become more and more entwined within the Dark Tower mythos that runs through so many of King's novels. But everything else? Gone.

Alan Hollinghurst on Edmund White's gay classic A Boy’s Own Story

REREADING

Alan Hollinghurst on Edmund White's gay classic A Boy’s Own Story

A Boy’s Own Story chronicles a teenager’s journey to adulthood in the 1950s midwest

Rowan Somerville's top 10 of good sex in fiction

Alan Hollinghurst
Friday 10 June 2016

ABoy’s Own Story is both a masterpiece in the literature of adolescence and a pivotal book in the history of gay writing, opening up the landscape of teenage homosexuality with revelatory frankness. “What if,” its narrator wonders, “I could write about my life exactly as it was? What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion, never divined or expressed?” The “realism” of the 19th-century fiction he devours seems to him a kind of fantasy, creating a “parallel life”, “tinglingly far-fetched”. Could there be a new realism that faithfully depicted the inner and outer worlds he actually lived in? In the midwest of the 1950s the growing-up of a young gay man is a vulnerable, marginal, barely visible thing, riven by confusion, self-hatred and doubt. Edmund White’s novel, doing justice to all this confusion, tingles none the less with its own excitement: the value, and novelty, the sheer teeming interest, of telling the truth. More than 30 years on, in a culture in which sexual truth-telling is ubiquitous, it retains its power to startle: in the tense insouciance with which it describes a 14-year-old’s lust for his father, or his earning money to pay for a hustler; or in the hair-raising betrayal that brings the novel to its close, a wilful act towards which we see the whole narrative has been moving with an awful logic.

John Banville / Franz Kafka's other trial

Franz Kafka

REREDING

Franz Kafka's other trial

An allegory of the fallen man's predicament, or an expression of guilt at a tormented love affair? John Banville explores the story behind Kafka's great novel of judgment and retribution

Also in tomorrow's Guardian Review: Laura Miller on how novelists are finally coming to terms with the internet; an interview with Linda Grant; Janet Todd on Sebastian Faulks's mistakes; David Bromwich on how Howard Hawks got the best out of Grant, Bogart and Bacall; and Hermione Lee on Michael Cunningham's new novel

John Banville

Friday 14 January 2011

The artist, says Kafka, is the one who has nothing to say. By which he means that art, true art, carries no message, has no opinion, does not attempt to coerce or persuade, but simply – simply! – bears witness. Ironically, we find this dictum particularly hard to accept in the case of his own work, which comes to us with all the numinous weight and opacity of a secret testament, the codes of which we seem required to decrypt. The Trial, we feel, cannot be merely the simple story of a man, Josef K, who gets caught up in a judicial process – the book's German title is Der Prozeß – that will lead with nightmarish inevitability to his execution. Surely it is at least an allegory of fallen man's predicament, of his state of enduring and irredeemable guilt in a world from which all hope has been expunged. Yet the book has its direct sources in the mundane though extreme circumstances of Kafka's own life, and specifically in what Elias Canetti calls Kafka's "other trial".

Rereading / In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje

In the Skin of a Lion

by Michael Ondaatje

The fallen nun

Anne Enright first read Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion as a creative writing student. Beautiful and highly contagious, it seems to do impossible things - a dangerous influence on an aspiring novelist

Anne Enrigh
Sat 15 Sep 2007

here are certain books that should be taken away from young writers; that should be prised out of their clutching fingers and locked away until they are all grown up and ready to read them without being smitten. At the very least, they should have "Don't try this on your own typewriter" printed in bold across the front. In the Skin of a Lion is full of things that Michael Ondaatje can do, but that you probably can't do, or can't do yet. It is a highly contagious book. It seems to do impossible things.

Persuasion by Jane Austen

Seeing the light at last

At school Emma Tennant was bored by Jane Austen, but returning to Persuasion changed her mind

Emma Tennant
Saturdady 23 November 2002

I had no liking for Jane Austen at all when I was young, and Persuasion seemed the most pointless of her works. St Paul's Girls' School, where I enjoyed the lessons of the English teacher Miss Jenkinson but little else, was a grim institution in the early 1950s - more Brontë than Austen - and the little piece of ivory on which the celebrated spinster wrote her tales of love and disappointment and sudden, unconvincing happiness, didn't mean anything to me.

Rereading / Henry Green’s Party Going / An eccentric portrait of the idle rich

REREADING

Henry Green’s Party Going: an eccentric portrait of the idle rich

Amit Chaudhuri revisits a masterful tale of revellers stranded at a hotel, which recalls Joyce and Woolf but resembles neither

The 100 best novels / No 63 / Party Going by Henry Green (1939)

Amith Chaudhuri

Saturdady 18 March 2017

I

n the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student in Oxford, I bought a volume of three novels by an author I hadn’t heard of, Henry Green. The Green people were talking about then had an e at the end of his surname, and his first name was Graham. He was almost an exact contemporary of Henry’s: born in 1904, a year before Green, he lived much longer. Both belonged to well-to-do families, but Green was particularly affluent. His father was an industrialist. I’d tried reading Graham Greene, but had never made much headway. Then Henry Green came along, and Graham swiftly became, for me, the “other Greene”, and then not even that. About Henry Green, however, there’s an irreducible, longstanding excitement among the few who have read him.

I must have bought the three-novel volume of Loving, Living, Party Going because John Updike had, in his introduction to the volume, not only given Green centrality as a precursor, but called him a “saint of the mundane”. The religious analogy was excessive, but what had made me admire Updike in the first place was the way in which he’d deliberately made room for the mundane, for the banality that fills our lives and makes them truly interesting. And yet I found Green to be a different kind of writer, with almost none of the chronicler’s impulse that from time to time directed Updike’s decade-long projects, and with no abiding interest in realism, despite his extraordinary eye and ear and his gift for capturing character. Replying to a question put to him by Terry Southern for the Paris Review in 1958 – “You’ve described your novels as ‘nonrepresentational’. I wonder if you’d mind defining that term?” – Green said:

From high society to surrealism / In praise of Leonora Carrington – 100 years on

Carrington’s painting Chiki Ton Pays.

REREADING

From high society to surrealism: in praise of Leonora Carrington – 100 years on

With her paintings and tales based on dreams, animals and the occult, Carrington was an uncanny original. Marina Warner salutes the artist on her centenerary

Marina Warner
Thu 6 Apr 2017

I

n the mid-1980s, Leonora Carrington was living for a while in New York, in a small single room in a basement in the Gramercy Park area; she worked at a table between her bed and the kitchenette, clearing away the crucibles of tempera, brushes and palette to cook for herself and, sometimes, for guests who had tracked her down as I had. She had chosen to live below street level because that is where she felt safe, and she was very content with her modest setting. Among the many animals in her paintings and writings are badgers and raccoons and other builders of lairs and burrows; like them, she preferred to keep her feet firmly on solid ground, as if needing an anchorage while her mind spun off on its wild flights.

The surrealist artist of words and images was then in her 70s, small and thin, with very dark round eyes that still radiated the feral beauty of her youth, and a smoky voice filled with energy and humour. Here was a celebrated, indeed notorious figure; she could have been a monstre sacré. Yet she was exceptionally free from vanity and envy, from craving wealth or flattery or any other signs of worldly status (it’s significant, I think, that in one of those surrealist questionnaires that André Breton loved devising, Narcissus came last among her favourite myths).

Leonora Carrington at home in Mexico City in 2000

Every week or so she would go to her gallery and deliver one of her dream paintings in return for the small stipend they gave her, and then she would drop in on one of the Korean delis that had sprung up around that time and buy her dinner from the salad bar. We spent many days together wandering around the city: we once crossed Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum, where she wanted to look at the Egyptian collections; she was strongly attracted to wrapped and swaddled and swathed bodies, because they too made her feel held fast by reality. She was always tapping her powers of fantasy, by numerous techniques – including, especially, daydreaming on that threshold between sleep and waking where “hypnagogic visions” appear.

Carrington never bothered about her archive or her intellectual property, and her writings are more like a jazz musician’s basement tapes than a major creative writer’s archives. The Debutante and Other Stories, the first book from Silver Press, a new feminist publisher, is a major step in gathering her tales together for the first time – including the earliest ones from the 1930s and the material published in New York during the war, while many surrealists were in exile there, as well as later entertainments and fantasies she created, sometimes for performance, after she settled in Mexico.

At first she wrote in French – the language she shared with Max Ernst and with many of their friends when she was living in Paris and then in St-Martin-d’Ardèche in Provence before the war broke out in 1939. A few tales – among them the magnificent, terse detonations of “The House of Fear” and “The Debutante” – were published in tiny editions, but many more were scattered when the fall of France drove Carrington and Ernst, as well as many French nationals among the surrealists – Breton, Benjamin Péret, Marcel Duchamp – to flee. Some typescripts of stories she had forgotten about only surfaced among the papers of Jimmy Ernst, Max’s son, after his death in New York in 1984.

Asked about the relation between her writing and painting, Carrington offered an oblique clue: “I haven’t been able to reconcile image world and word world in my own mind. I know the Bible says sound came first – I’m not sure. Perhaps [they happened] simultaneously, but how did it all get solid?” In her tales, the image world and the word world do take on solid form. The story “As They Rode along the Edge” finds Carrington at her most witchy and comic: the heroine, Virginia Fur, lives in a forest and travels at the head of a procession of a hundred cats, “riding a wheel”. She has a huge mane and “long and enormous hands with dirty nails”, and “one couldn’t really be altogether sure that she was a human being. Her smell alone threw doubt on it – a mixture of spices and game, the stables, fur and grasses.”

Carrington realigns, or turns upside down, the usual hierarchy of beings: humans emerge as only a single, lesser aspect of a polymorphously organic universe, and people in Carrington’s paintings gain in stature and, by implication, in wisdom the closer they come to the creaturely. While Circe cast Odysseus’s men under an evil spell when she turned them into beasts, Carrington, on the whole, considers animal transformation a blessing, a deliverance, a site of transcendence. In everybody, she said, there is “an inner bestiary”. She was “born loving animals”, and was taken out by her mother (a rare treat) to the local zoo in Blackpool to celebrate her first communion. In her own case, when she was young and a shape-shifter, her chosen avatar was the horse.

Born on 6 April 1917, Leonora had a childhood where the paddock on the one hand and the nursery on the other featured vividly as zones of thrill and transgression. The rituals and privileges of her background provided her with a heaped storehouse to raid. Her paintings, first shown by Breton in Paris in 1937, have titles that disclose how she was plundering what was marvellous from the banalities of a propertied family’s daily round: The Meal of Lord Candlestick and What Shall We Do Tomorrow, Aunt Amelia? reveal the interweaving of autobiography, invention, playfulness and mystery, the comic and the gruesome, also present in the stories she was beginning to write at the time, winning the admiration of Ernst and his circle.

She liked puncturing pomp and pretension of all sorts. A squib such as “The Three Hunters” satirises the pursuits of her class, most particularly her father and brothers, who were keen sportsmen; a story like “The Neutral Man” the stifling social round. But irony also streaks through her uses of Celtic enchantments, passed on by her Irish mother and nanny, which meshed with the surrealist web of erotic games, occult divination and perverse dream scenarios. Yet, throughout the fanciful, delinquent and transgressive scenes she imagines, Carrington sustains a dry inconsequent tone and well-bred, often naive English manners with a dash of faerie whimsy. Her magical egalitarianism means a cooking pot can do very well for an alchemist’s alembic, and the knitting of a jumper stand in for the weaving of the soul from “cosmic wool”.

A bronze sculpture by Carrington is unveiled in Mexico City in 2008. Photograph: Alamy

Because she left England – for good, as it turned out – and has been published in French far more consistently than in English, Carrington has been identified with the surrealist movement abroad. So it’s easy to overlook her closeness to a thoroughly Anglo-Saxon tradition on the one hand and to Irish legends and lore on the other. The stance she adopts often reminds the reader of one of Hilaire Belloc’s wicked children, although she takes the delinquents’ side, not the admonishing grownups’. The stories of this early period also reflect the pleasure – even the intense pleasure – Carrington found in her changed surroundings. Her stories vibrate with warmth and colour, abundant and delicious herbs and foods, spectacular and unbridled self-expression; they show her revelling in wildness, in scents and textures – cinnamon and musk, in the release of passion and imagination, and the discovery of physical sensation. She also fantasticates about food, and her Catholicism surfaces in her lingering on the cannibalism at the heart of the eucharist. The necessary killing and trimming and dressing of animals for the table fascinate her: the passage from the kitchen to the table, from the pot to the dish, recurs as an obsessive motif. She denounces, with all a young woman’s vehemence, the waste and greed she perceives in her paternal home: The Meal of Lord Candlestick shows grotesque female orgiasts, in maiden-aunt society hats, impaling a baby and gorging on a fowl-cum-dragon flambé.

Food is powerful magic – it poisons, as in her comic masterpiece, the novel The Hearing Trumpet, written in the early 60s and published in the 70s, but it also represents a female sphere, and its dangers can be redeemed by wise husbandry and care. Carrington always perceived a connection between traditional women’s work and art, and disliked grandiose male assertions of heroic status. “Painting is like making strawberry jam, really carefully and well,” she once told me. She valued what she called “dailiness”: the common cabbage is her rosa mystica. It appears in the 1975 portrait of her friend, the historian and religious thinker Anne Fremantle, as well as proudly on its own.

The era of new age spirituality makes it hard to find the right language to describe the journeys of the mind Carrington undertook, and her odd mingling of tone: she was serious about the inner dream worlds she explored but punctured them with black comedy. The commercialised hokum of US west coast mysticism since the 1960s – the crystals and amulets and synthetic quoting from the world’s adepts – and the widespread decadence of mythological borrowing (mostly from Jung and Joseph Campbell) make it difficult to find a vocabulary for Carrington’s questing that does not sound like a circular from the Personal Growth Movement. Jane Miller commented on this difficulty in a review of Carrington’s first novel, The Stone Door. “In spite of all its waywardness and intimations of profundity,” she wrote, “the novel is finally a good deal more like a prettily embroidered sampler than some gravely worked cabbalistic banner, for its eclectic, not to say magpie, snatching at bright detail and unexplained incident is controlled by a tastefulness and sense of design which are old-fashioned and charming rather than portentous.”

A sculpture by Carrington on a street in Campeche, Mexico. Photograph: Alamy

Edward James, the surrealist patron who collected her work during the many lean years, wrote of Leonora’s images that they were “not merely painted, they are brewed”. It is an apt choice of word, and describes her writings too: these small and concentrated potions in which the oddest elements from metaphysics and fantasy, daily routine and material life are simmered together and mischievously served up. Her witchcraft, which had so enchanted the surrealists, entered another phase in the surroundings of lo real maravilloso americano, in the phrase of the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier: the marvellous (Latin) American reality.

Alongside her friends, the painters Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo, Carrington came to seem the voice of that Latin imagination, in many media: in Mexico City, she wrote plays and designed masks and costumes; and she was commissioned to celebrate the people of Chiapas, descendants of the Aztecs, in a vast mural for the Regional Museum of Anthropology and History of Chiapas. She continued to defy convention, too, opening her house to meetings during the student action of the 1960s and participating in the beginnings of the women’s movement.

In many changes of shape, Carrington fulfilled, over nearly a century of work, the task of art as defined by Paul Klee: to make visible the invisible. She conveyed her consciousness, its complex of memory, fantasy, desire and fear, reaching for the apt metaphors to hand from a rich deposit of learning. “The matter of our bodies,” she said, “like everything we call matter, should be thought of as thinking substance.” As Doris Lessing, one of Carrington’s favourite authors, wrote: “The longest journey is in.”

• The Debutante and Other Stories is published by Silver Press

THE GUARDIAN

Monday, November 5, 2018

John Updike / Running away by Julian Barnes

Rereading

Running away

When Julian Barnes first read the Rabbit quartet on a book tour of the States he was overwhelmed by Updike's joy of description. Twenty years later, he still thinks it is the greatest postwar American fiction

Julian Barnes
17 October 2009

hen a writer you admire dies, rereading seems a normal courtesy and tribute. Occasionally, it may be prudent to resist going back: when Lawrence Durrell died, I preferred to remain with 40-year-old memories of The Alexandria Quartet rather than risk such lushness again. And sometimes the nature of the writer's oeuvre creates a problem of choice. This was the case with John Updike. I have only ever met one person – a distinguished arts journalist – who has read all Updike's 60-plus books; most of us, even long-term fans, probably score between 30 and 40. Should you choose one of those previously unopened? Or go for one you suspect you misread, or undervalued, at the time? Or one, like Couples, which you might have read for somewhat non-literary reasons?

The decision eventually made itself. I had first read the Rabbit quartet in the autumn of 1991, in what felt near-perfect circumstances. I was on a book tour of the States, and bought the first volume, Rabbit, Run, in a Penguin edition at Heathrow airport. I picked up the others in different American cities, in chunky Fawcett Crest paperbacks, and read them as I criss-crossed the country; my bookmarks were the stubs of boarding passes. When released from publicity duties, I would either retreat inwards to Updike's prose, or outwards to walk ordinary American streets. This gave my reading, it felt, a deepening stereoscopy. And even when, too exhausted to do anything, I fell back on the hotel minibar and the television, I found I was only replicating Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom's preferred way of ingesting politics and current events. After three weeks, both Harry and I found ourselves in Florida, "death's favourite state", as he puts it in the final volume, Rabbit at Rest. Harry died; the book ended; my tour was over.

I came home convinced that the quartet was the best American novel of the postwar period. Nearly 20 years on, with Updike newly dead, and another American journey coming up, it was time to check on that judgment. By now those four volumes had been fused into a 1,516-page hardback under the overall title Rabbit Angstrom. If the protagonist's nickname denotes a zigzagging creature of impulse and appetite, the angst of his Scandinavian surname indicates that Harry is also the bearer of a more metaphysical burden. Not that he is more than fleetingly aware of it; and the fact that he isn't makes him all the more emblematically American. John Cheever once said that Updike's characters performed their lives amid a landscape – a moral and spiritual one – of whose grandeur they were unaware.

John Updike in 1950s. Photograph: Elemore Morgan Jr

Harry is a specific American, a high-school basketball star, department-store underling, linotype operator and, finally, Toyota car salesman in the decaying industrial town of Brewer, Pennsylvania (Updike based it on Reading, Pa, which he knew as a boy). Until Rabbit starts wintering in Florida in the final volume, he scarcely leaves Brewer – a location chosen to represent middle America by a New York film company in Rabbit Redux. Harry is site-specific, slobbish, lust-driven, passive, patriotic, hard-hearted, prejudiced, puzzled, anxious. Yet familiarity renders him likeable – for his humour, his doggedness, his candour, his curiosity and his wrong-headed judgments – for example, preferring Perry Como to Frank Sinatra. But Updike was disappointed when readers went further and claimed they found Rabbit lovable: "My intention was never to make him – or any character – lovable." Instead, Harry is typical, and it takes an outsider to tell him so. An Australian doctor, asked by his wife Janice what is wrong with Rabbit's dicky heart, replies: "The usual thing, ma'am. It's tired and stiff and full of crud. It's a typical American heart, for his age and economic status etcetera." Harry's quiet role as an American everyman is publicly confirmed in Rabbit at Rest when he is chosen for his second, brief moment of public fame: dressing up as Uncle Sam for a town parade.

Rereading the quartet, I was struck by how much of the book is about running away: Harry, Janice and Nelson all take off at different points, and all return defeatedly. (Updike explained that Rabbit, Run was partly a riposte to Kerouac's On the Road, and intended as a "realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road" – ie, the family gets hurt, and the deserter slinks home.) I had forgotten how harshly transactional much of the sex was; how increasingly droll Rabbit becomes as he ages (Reagan reminds him of God, in that "you never knew how much he knew, nothing or everything", while Judaism "must be a great religion, once you get past the circumcision"); how masterfully Updike deploys free indirect style, switching us in and out of the main characters' consciousness; and how, instead of making each sequel merely sequential, he is constantly back-filling previous books with new information (the most extreme example being that we only get Janice's pre-Rabbit sexual history in the 2000 follow-up novella Rabbit Remembered – 40 years after we might have learned it).

What I remembered well was the audacity of Updike's starting-point. Harry is only 26, but past it: his brief years of sporting fame lie behind him, and he is already bored with Janice. On the second page, he refers to himself as "getting old" – and there are still several hundred thousand words to go. Even when he attains bovine contentment and material success in Rabbit is Rich, it is against a general background of things being over before they had really begun. Each book is purposefully set at the dying of a decade – from the 1950s to the 1980s – so there is little wider sense of fresh beginnings: the 1960s America of Rabbit Redux isn't filled with love and peace and hopefulness, but with hatred, violence and craziness as the decade sours and dies. Perhaps America is itself dying, or at least being outpaced by the world: this is what Harry, and the novel, both wonder. What is American power if it can be defeated by the Vietcong; what is American inventiveness if it can be out-invented by the Japanese; what is American wealth when national debt piles up? In Rabbit Redux Harry feels he has "come in on the end" of the American dream, "as the world shrank like an apple going bad"; by the start of Rabbit is Rich he feels "the great American ride is ending"; by the end of Rabbit at Rest "the whole free world is wearing out".

Whereas in my first reading I was overwhelmed by Updike's joy of description, his passionate attentiveness to such things as "the clunky suck of the refrigerator door opening and shutting" – by what he called, in the preface to his The Early Stories, "giving the mundane its beautiful due" – in my second I was increasingly aware of this underlying sense of things being already over, of the tug of dying and death. Thus the whole trajectory of Janice's life is an attempt to expiate the sin of having accidentally, drunkenly, drowned her baby. And while Harry imagines himself a genial and harmless life-enhancer, others see him quite differently. "Boy, you really have the touch of death, don't you?" his sort-of-whore girlfriend Ruth says at the end of Rabbit, Run. "Hold still. Just sit there. I see you very clear all of a sudden. You're Mr Death himself." Harry's son Nelson agrees with this analysis. In Rabbit Redux, Harry is away on another sexual escapade when his house burns down, killing the runaway hippie Jill; teenage Nelson, equally smitten by the girl, thereafter treats his father as a simple murderer. And in Rabbit at Rest Harry fears his female-killing curse is striking a third time when his rented Sunfish capsizes and his granddaughter Judy is nowhere to be seen. This time, as it happens, the hex is reversed: Judy is only hiding beneath the sail, and the scare triggers Rabbit's first heart attack, a dry run for his death.

And after death? Harry's intimations, not of immortality, but of the numinous, show up more clearly on rereading. Updike said that he couldn't quite give up on religion, because without the possibility or dream of something beyond and above, our terrestrial life became unendurable. Rabbit shares this vestigial need. "I don't not believe," he assures his dying lover Thelma, who replies, "That's not quite enough, I fear. Harry, darling." But it's all he can manage: "Hell, what I think about religion is ... is without a little of it, you'll sink." But this "little" doesn't find or express itself, as did Updike's, in churchgoing. God-believers in the quartet tend to be either crazies like Skeeter, fanatics, or pious post-Narcotics Anonymous droners like Nelson. Harry is not exactly a joined-up thinker, but he has an occasionally questing mind, a sense of what it might be if there were something beyond our heavy-footed sublunary existence. It's perhaps significant that the sport at which he excelled, which he plays in both the opening and closing pages of the tetralogy, involves a leaving of the ground and a reaching-up to something higher, if only to a skirted hoop. A greater reaching-up is offered by the US space programme, whose achievements (and failures) run through the book; Harry has a couch potato's fascination for it – as he does for the fate of the Dalai Lama, with whom he bizarrely, mock-heroically identifies. But there are also moments when Harry is able to recognise his longings more precisely. Beside the big stucco house belonging to Janice's parents there grew a large copper beech, which for many years shaded Harry and Janice's bedroom. When Nelson comes into occupation of the family house, in Rabbit at Rest, he has the tree cut down. Harry doesn't argue; nor can he "tell the boy that the sound of the rain in that great beech had been the most religious experience of his life. That, and hitting a pure golf shot." In such moments Rabbit exemplifies a kind of suburban pantheism, giving the mundane its spiritual due.

Rabbit Angstrom has its imperfections. The second volume is usually considered the weakest of the four; and it's true that Skeeter's mau-mauing of whitey Rabbit goes on too long, and to decreasing effect. And there is a change in register after the first volume, where the hushed Joyceanism of his early mode – when he thought of himself as a short-story writer and poet, but not yet fully as a novelist – is to the fore. (Updike didn't realise that he was heading towards a tetralogy until after the second volume.) On the other hand, it's rare for a work of this length to get even better as it goes on, with Rabbit at Rest the strongest and richest of the four books. In the last hundred pages or so, I found myself slowing deliberately, not so much because I didn't want the book to end, as because I didn't want Rabbit to die. (And when he does, his last words, to his shrieking son, are, maybe, also addressed consolingly to the reader: "All I can tell you is, it isn't so bad.") Any future historian wanting to understand the texture, smell, feel and meaning of bluey-white-collar life in ordinary America between the 1950s and the 1990s will need little more than the Rabbit quartet. But that implies only sociological rather than artistic virtue. So let's just repeat: still the greatest postwar American novel.

THE GUARDIAN