i'm a very very complex person

I have finally finished Trust Me. All in all, I found it less compelling than the novels of Updike's that I've read. Still, there was a power in the way the stories piled up, one after another after another. A big snowdrift of stories, of characters, of lives. In a way, reading Updike is almost an absolving experience. Whatever mistakes you have made in your life and your relationships--whether you've ended up with the wrong person or can't be satisfied with the right person, whether you regret your infidelities or regret missed opportunities for infidelity, whether you've fallen in love with someone off limits or fallen out of love with your spouse, whether you ended it too early or let it drag on far too long--you can find yourself reflected in Updike. The stories read like a parade of human fallibility, and the cumulative effect is one of great tenderness toward all these poor, fucked up people who keep on making the same mistakes you do.

I just finished The Centaur. I feel that there was a lot that I missed in the book, a lot that went over my head, but I found it very beautiful nonetheless. I have a pretty good general familiarity with Greek and Roman mythology (I ought to, after Ulysses and six years of Latin and all the time I spent reading D'aulaire's Greek Myths as a kid), but I wish I were more familiar with the myth of Chiron. I did not realize as I was reading how thoroughly the mythical correspondences are woven into the book; it was only when I finished and saw the index at the end that I realized that every single character in the book has a mythical referent. I already knew that Caldwell, Peter's father, represents the centaur Chiron, and I have now learned that Chiron gave his life to atone for the sin of the theft of fire by Prometheus, represented by Peter. But there is a whole host of other characters, all of whom play a part in Updike's distorted, modernized retelling of the myth, and although I can get a few of the obvious ones (Zimmerman is Zeus, for instance), I don't know enough to place them all and I wish I did. Just knowing the bit about Prometheus and the theft of fire makes the end of the book much more moving...

It's interesting that both Joyce and Updike wrote books that are essentially about father-son relationships, but that both clouded and complicated their stories with the same sort of heavy referentiality to the same source material. It is perhaps possible to grasp the messages of these books without considering the myths through which the stories are filtered, but your understanding of the relationships described will be much richer if you can make the mythological connections. I don't really know where this I am going with this comparison, but I do think it's interesting.

Mythology aside, The Centaur was sometimes baffling and not particularly gripping (I was capable of putting it down for long stretches at a time without feeling compelled to pick it back up), but it had a strange kind of loveliness to it. The prose was dense and rich, and sometimes it was enough to let the flood of words pour over me, and at other times the simplest words and phrases combined to have a remarkably gorgeous effect. This paragraph near the end, as Peter watches his father leave their snowbound house, is particularly lovely:

I turned my face away and looked through the window. In time my father appeared in this window, an erect figure dark against the snow. His posture made no concession to the pull underfoot; upright he waded out through our yard and past the mailbox and up the hill until he was lost to my sight behind the trees of our orchard. The trees took white on their sun side. The two telephone wires diagonally cut the blank blue of the sky. The stone wall was a scumble of umber; my father's footsteps thumbs of white in white. I knew what this scene was--a patch of Pennsylvania in 1947--and yet I did not know, was in my softly fevered state mindlessly soaked in a rectangle of colored light. I burned to paint it, just like that, in its puzzle of glory; it came upon me that I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.

Perhaps you have to have read the whole book leading up to that paragraph in order to get something out of it. I don't know. You could perhaps pinpoint the moment at which Peter/Prometheus steals the life-giving fire to that paragraph, and to me it is moving and luminous.

I am still reading The Centaur. It's an interesting book, and I'm not entirely sure what to make of it yet. There does not appear to be any sort conflict in the book at this point. Well, that's not entirely accurate; there's plenty of conflict, but it's all just the momentary frictions and chronic annoyances of everyday family and working life, not the sort of thing that really drives a plot. In a way it's reminiscent of Ulysses, if Ulysses were set in a small town in central Pennsylvania. Lots of wandering around, lots of attention to the inner life of the characters... Stylistically, though, it's actually very different from Ulysses. Anyhow, despite it's lack of any driving conflict, I'm finding myself really wrapped up in it. Updike has done such a wonderful job of creating the character of Peter: prickly, proud, sensitive, aloof, and very very real. He's part of the reason I'm drawn to the book, but I'm also interested because there's a lot that I haven't figured out yet. The chapters told from Peter's point of view are basically realistic, but the chapters told from his father's perspective are more problematic. The events described stretch the limits of belief (a group of high school students shoot an arrow through their teacher's ankle; the teacher leaves the school and goes to the garage next door where he has a mechanic cut out the arrow; he then returns to the school and continues teaching his class--am I supposed to believe that really happened? To take it seriously? And if not, how am I supposed to take it?), and the narrative switches back and forth between the at-least-semi-realistic high school setting and basically the same story being told through Greek mythology, with Chiron the centaur representing Peter's father. When I was reading the first chapter, I was absolutely mystified. I thought the father actually was a centaur who had somehow wound up teaching science in a high school in PA, or perhaps that the book was set in some crazy world where the Greek myths and ordinary life somehow exist simultaneously and overlap... So, yeah, it's kind of crazy, and I definitely don't have a handle on all of it yet, so I keep reading in an attempt to figure it out.

In other news, today there was a "suspicious package" at the mall where I work. It was big excitement, cops and bomb squad guys all over the place. And the package was right outside my office, too! I could see it from my desk! Of course I didn't notice until all the action started... (good thing I'm not on the bomb squad, I guess). The end result of all this was that I got to close up and go home early. Very nice. A few phone calls to the students who were going to be coming in, and next thing I knew, I had myself a free evening. So I went to see the Cole Porter movie, De-Lovely. It was good, and Kevin Kline did a great job, but it was not nearly as homoerotic as I had been led to believe. Scads of gorgeous gay guys of the sort of intensely closeted, WASP-y, tuxedo-wearing, late-40's/early-50's, gay underworld type, though.

And now, I must go work on the novel. The deadline for completing the revision of the next chapter (it's one of the many 2003 chapters, so let's call it the Friday Night chapter. Or, since I just read the first draft of it, I suppose we could call it the Poorly Structured, Incredibly Stilted Dialogue, Half This Stuff Doesn't Even Make Sense chapter, although I'd rather not.) is Monday, July 26. That gives me two full weekend, plus all of next week.

I'm almost done with -Rabbit is Rich-. And I really don't know what to read next.

And I don't have a whole lot to say. I'm ready for this week to be over. I've been sluggish and lazy. I love my job, which makes me not love myself when I'm not doing my job. So bring on next week, a fresh start! And it's a short week, so it should be easy to keep any productivity related resolutions.

I haven't been able to update lately because I only have internet access at work, and I've been taking on more responsibility recently so my days have been very full. I love it, however, so I may have to be content with updating with less frequency.

Anyhow, I finished Graham Swift's -Ever After-, which I enjoyed very much. I didn't knock my socks off with it's brilliance the way -Waterland- did, but I think that's because it was more understated, not less brilliant. Swift really does an amazing job of capturing his narrators. Also of bringing about a thousand different topics into his novels. There's no possible way I could give a coherent summary of -Ever After-; it deals with marriage, technology, suicide, Darwinism, adultery, the spiritual crisis of the Victorians, geology, family, revenge, academia, religion, surveying, ambition, fame, Hamlet... It's good.

And now I've started -Rabbit is Rich-, the third book in John Updike's Rabbit series. Anyone who has been reading at all faithfully knows that I have had fairly ambivalent feelings about the first two books in the series, so we'll see how I feel about this one. One interesting thing about embarking on the third book, however, is that I am beginning to have an appreciation for the impressive nature of the series as a whole. Updike has really done a good job of portraying the ways in which Rabbit is changed by the times he lives in. It provides a series of very interesting and detailed snapshots of certain American cultural moments...

In other reading news, E. gave me a copy of Ursula K. LeGuin's most recent book, which is an extension of her Earthsea series. I'm just not sure if I want to read it. In my opinion, that series is so perfect the way it is, and I'm afraid that there's no possible way she could continue it without somehow marring the perfection that already exists... If anyone has read it, please let me know.

After writing what I wrote yesterday, I read several hundred pages of -Rabbit Redux- and encountered some very unpleasant images of drug use. Timely, hunh?

My feelings are mixed about -Rabbit Redux-. I continue to read it mainly out of a horrified fascination, just to find out exactly how far Rabbit will allow his life to spin out of control. I'm not really enjoying the experience, however.

Phew. And I don't enjoy my Fridays either. Ten hours without a break. The things you'll do when you love your job....

So is it safe to go back to simply reading and writing about what I read again? It seems hard to know how and when to resume real life...

But, putting that aside and stoically resolving to resume real life, I will continue. I finished -Rabbit, Run- which I believe was the last book I mentioned in this journal. It was a very well-crafted book. The protagonist (I was going to call him the hero, but anyone who has read the book will realize that he's much more of an anti-hero than he is a hero) spends most of the book feeling unnerved and at loose ends, and Updike was able to create a situation in which I wound up feeling ill at ease myself while reading the book. I'd be sitting on the train reading on my way home, and only be able to read a few pages at a time because I felt so unsettled. I'm very anxious to go on to the rest of the series.

Not having any of the other Rabbit books to hand, however, I'm currently reading Ken Kesey's -Sometimes a Great Notion-. I'm only about 100 pages in, but I have most definitely been grabbed. So far I have found that Kesey's style is far more sophisticated and interesting in this book than in -One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest-. He has written quite a tangled family story, and narrates the story in an equally tangled style, with plot lines constantly crossing and interweaving, the past and future endlessly overlapping... In some sort of strange way it reminds me a little of -The Sound and the Fury-.