Media and Mayhem

I saw the strangest thing Friday.

While visiting an assisted-living facility for the first time  (I,  happily,  am not – at least for now  – the potential resident!),  I was taken to a model room designed to show off the place to its best advantage. One touch in the model room that immediately caught my eye was a pile of books, obviously placed to stress the amount of time that would be available for quiet reading.

This would have been no big deal were it not for the fact that the “prop” book on the top of the pile was John Updike’s shattering Rabbit at Rest, the last of the four Rabbit Angstrom novels that tells of Rabbit’s  turbulent and emotionally charged Florida retirement. Without spoiling any of the plot,  his is a retirement in which any looking back is at a trail of unrealized dreams, infidelities, and opportunities missed.  Rabbit in Florida has not completely run out of the steam of life,  and he is not without desire or anger,  but his voracious sexuality and mischievousness of his rootless youth is a distant memory.

Not exactly an apt choice for the library of  an assisted living facility.

But this did remind me of John Updike, who died in January, 2009  after a distinguished and prolific career as a critic, novelist, and poet.

I grew up in an upper middle-class  Southern California suburb in the 60s,  and  for most of my late adolescence had no idea that any serious writers either had, or ever would , place  their characters and their conflicts in suburbia.  The fiction we read  conjured a distant, turbulent, urban world where people were emotional and expansive and outraged, a place where hyperventilating people gesticulated  and exaggerated.

We of the “ticky-tacky boxes” were condemned to talk of lawn furniture,  and “journeys” that ended at strip malls.

Everyone else, I remember thinking, got to live in places with grit and pain and authenticity. We, though, could never be worthy of a novelist’s attention.

The result was that many of us high-tailed it out of the burbs in search of that authenticity. We were escaping a place that only seemed real in biting social satire like Malvina Reynolds’s Little Boxes.

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes,
Little boxes, all the same

Then I found Updike. Shortly after I moved to New York, I discovered the suburban world of John Updike’s fiction.  And I learned for the first time what writers like John Cheever had been saying all along, and what filmmakers like Sam Mendes, David Lynch, and Tim Burton have been saying  all through the intervening years in their highly stylized,  yet riveting, suburban-themed work:  It’s not that nothing was going on in West Covina, California or other ostensibly sterile suburbs.

It’s that we weren’t paying attention.

We shopped in strip malls and lived in matching  houses that were nowhere to be seen in either the “ruralists” (Faulkner, Steinbeck,  and Morrison)   or the “urbanists” (Dickens, Dreiser, Mailer, Ellison, Roth, Bellow).   We were the conformists, we were the strivers, and – most shameful of all — we were the  boring.

I devoured Updike. I remember one marathon weekend reading what was then still the Rabbit trilogy, and flashing back on every nameless gray-flannel guy I knew as a kid in 1950s suburbia. Of course, I realized, some of those suits had to have been the veneer for turbulent and desperate  inner lives.  Some had to have felt pain I can only imagine in the days before they told their kids of disintegrating families and failed businesses and cocktail hours that had become cocktail lives.

There were only a few seedy and secluded bars down near the railroad tracks, but some of those men had to have been stopping there to anesthetize something inside.  One attractive  young mother,  a dead giveaway for June Cleaver with a permanently plastered smile, could not have watched her son’s legs atrophy from polio without wrenching  agony. And one day the happy family three doors down  woke up to find an  empty closet, a missing car, and a few remnants of a father who never, ever came back.

No Tom. No note. No Dad. Ever.

The point is that our little boxes held as much potential for emotional turbulence and longing as Steinbeck’s central valley or Dreiser’s Chicago.  Updike knew that and produced a body of work that mined middle class life for all the adultery, anger, and angst he could find. And all I can say is that — when I read Rabbit, Run, Couples, or Rabbit Redux, when I read the Maple stories – I knew that he knew.

One of the great ironies that I discovered only years later was that at the same time , one town over in the ever so slightly hardscrabble town of Duarte, California, a kid eight years older than me was watching the same scene,  seeing all the rage to which I was oblivious, and perhaps even imagining stories he might someday write that would tear away the veneer. His name was Sam Shepard.

I still remember Rabbit Angstrom’s last words to his son in Rabbit at Rest.

“Well, Nelson,” he says, “all I can tell you is, it isn’t so bad.” Rabbit thinks he should maybe say more, the kids looks wildly expectant, but enough. Maybe.  Enough.