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Nelson's mother and stepfather remain suspicious
of Annabelle's motives, but Nelson himself is delighted to discover
he has a sister. And this is where the novella gains strength.
Nelson--a former drug addict and now a counselor in a local treatment
center--secretly meets Annabelle, and they find themselves getting
along strikingly well. They order the same food, they finish
each other's sentences, and perhaps most tellingly, their caregiving
jobs (Annabelle is a nurse) suggest their personalities are hard-wired
to mirror each other.
But there's a more complicated reason Nelson
insists on bringing Annabelle into his family: Nelson has more
than a little in common with Hamlet. Both characters are literally
father-haunted (like Hamlet's ghost father, Nelson's dead father
appears to him, faceless, in a dream), and they both live rather
awkwardly at home and harbor quiet jealousies against the stepfathers
who have moved into their fathers' houses and taken possession
of their mothers. (The Shakespeare references shouldn't surprise
us; Updike's most recent novel, Gertrude and Claudius,
was a reworking of Hamlet. Click here
for WAG's review.) By bringing Annabelle into the family, Nelson
subtly jabs at his stepfather, who himself had a fling with Annabelle's
mother. She is, in a sense, a living ghost, a surrogate soldier
in Nelson's quiet war against his stepfather's aggressions. But
quiet wars have a way of getting louder, as Nelson discovers
when he invites Annabelle to the family's Thanksgiving dinner.
Ostensibly, he wants to give her a sense of connectedness, but
Annabelle is smart enough to see through his motives ("'Nelson,
are you sure it's my spell you're trying to break?'").
She does go to the family dinner, but as even
casual readers might guess, it quickly becomes the sort of gathering
in which dysfunctional families can hit peak performance. The
question, of course, is whether Nelson can turn the experience
into a catalyst for positive change--and whether Annabelle will
want to stay with her new family after all. Readers may not care
about--or even like--Nelson's extended family all that much,
but Updike makes us care deeply about Nelson and Annabelle, and
his managing to take the Angstrom family in a new, interesting
direction is a considerable achievement.
While
"Rabbit Remembered" is arguably long enough to have
been published on its own, Updike seems determined to collect
and bind everything but his grocery lists (witness last year's
More Matter: Essays and Criticism--click here
for WAG's review), and he throws in twelve short stories to accompany
"Rabbit Remembered."
Frankly, he shouldn't have, if only because
some readers will be so unmoved by them they may not read their
way through to "Rabbit Remembered."
The short stories' themes--sex and adultery,
love and guilt, nostalgia and rumination over past conquests--are
standard-issue Updike, and they are at "Rabbit Remembered"'s
center as well. But the twelve stories are largely devoid of
the qualities--complex character development, nicely chosen details,
etc.--that make "Rabbit Remembered" so strong by comparison.
Instead, many of the stories feel like loose personal essays
and casual autobiographical sketches (particularly "The
Women Who Got Away"), and even the stories that are better
developed (particularly "My Father on the Verge of Disgrace")
lack the compressed dramatic tension that drives Updike's stronger
story collections (like 1987's Trust Me).
The key to why these stories fail, over all,
lies in their structure, I think. The focus throughout most of
the stories is on the protagonist (often the story's narrator)
as an individual through extended time, rather than on a time-compressed
conflict shared among complicated characters. (Feminist readers,
beware: the collection's secondary characters tend to fall into
three predictable categories: potential sex partners, actual
sex partners and angry husbands.) Unfortunately, stories about
a character remembering the past tend to be structurally static
in the present, no matter how powerful their narrated memories
are. "His Oeuvre," for instance, rests on nothing more
than Henry Bech (another one of Updike's recurring characters)
spotting past lovers at his public lectures and using their appearances
as an excuse to narrate their trysts (for our benefit, not the
public audience). The actual meetings at the lectures aren't
particularly dramatic, and the consequent lack of narrative momentum
is a glaring weakness. And Updike's penchant for a neat, tacked-on
ending intended to wrap up his thematic efforts in a single,
profound sentence is troubling, particularly in the context of
the collection's most sketch-like, open-ended pieces.
While
the short stories in this collection might appeal primarily to
Updike fanatics (indeed, one wonders whether some of the slighter
sketches would have ever have appeared in such august magazines
as The New Yorker, without Updike's byline), "Rabbit
Remembered" has enough scenes of genuine emotion and drama
to justify the rest of us buying the collection, I think. Besides,
Annabelle is a compelling, complicated character in her own right,
and given that Updike has written about the Angstroms in ten-year
intervals for the last four decades, we may see her again a decade
from now, so maybe we should familiarize ourselves with her issues.
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