Updike: The King of Descriptive Writing

I rabbit-earred (that's funny, because the main character is named Rabbit) some of my favourite passages in Rabbit at Rest. He is truly the King of Descriptive Writing. Going for pages without dialogue, he puts the reader smack in the middle of the scene he's depicting, revealing colours, smells, feelings and atmospheres as if his reader were blind.

Published in 1990 (taking place in 1989), he saw glimpses of the modern world:
"The number of trim youngist professionals in lightweight suits and tight linen skirts has ballooned. They bask, these young paperpushers, beside the abstract cement fountains, reading The Wall Street Journal with their coats off and neatly folded...the women of this generation especially fascinate Harry; they wear running shoes instead of high hells but their legs are encased in sheer pantyhose...their hips have been pared and hardened by exercise bicycles and those ass-hugging pants that mold around every muscle like electric-colored paint. These women seem visitors from a slimmed-down future where sex is just another exercise and we all live in sealed cubicles and communicate through computers." pp. 228-229

Updike wasn't too far off from today's world, where girls in tight black pants reveal all and social networking and the Internet--communication through computers--is commonplace.

"We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies." p. 261

"This row used to end Wilbur Street; development had stopped at a gravel turnaround, and an abandoned gravel quarry made the transition to the mountain's shaggy back side. Now a double row, now quite new, of shingled condominiums, with strangely exaggerated chimneys and gables like houses in a child's storybook, occupies still higher ground. The windows and doors and trim boards of these condos are tinted in pale and playful colors. The plantings and little lawns are still tenuous; last night's downpour washed from the defrosted acres of the mountain reddish mud that has drifted, hardening, all along the fresh curbs and overflowed onto the street's blue-black asphalt. We're using it all up, Harry thinks. The world." p. 323

At a funeral, listening to the minister talk about his mistress, who had died of cancer:
"Harry sits there beside snuffly Janice, thinking of the wanton Thelma he knew, how little she had to do with the woman the minister described; but maybe the minister's Thelma was as real as Harry's. Women are actresses, tuning their part to each little audience." p. 368

Guilty as charged, at times. :)

"Rabbit switches the radio off, hating the sound of the human voice. Vermin. We are noisy vermin, crowding even the air. Better the murmur of the tires, the green road signs looming in the lights and parabolically enlarging and then whisked out of sight like magicians' handkerchieves." p. 434

I closed the book quite satisfied, but still curious about one thing: according to the contents, the book is divided into three sections:

I. FL
II. PA
III. MI

This makes sense, as the novel begins in Florida, where Rabbit and his wife have a condo for the winter, and progresses back to PA, where they live most of the year. But not once in the entirety of its 505 pages did Updike mention the state of Michigan. The characters never went there, never talked about or referred to it. What gives, John?

All in all, however, a great read.