Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, "Rabbit Remembered"
John Updike
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 0345442016
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this brilliant late-career collection, John Updike revisits many of the locales of his early fiction: the small-town Pennsylvania of Olinger Stories, the sandstone farmhouse of Of the Farm, the exurban New England of Couples and Marry Me, and Henry Bech’s Manhattan of artistic ambition and taunting glamour. To a dozen short stories spanning the American Century, the author has added a novella-length coda to his quartet of novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Several strands of the Rabbit saga come together here as, during the fall and winter holidays of 1999, Harry’s survivors fitfully entertain his memory while pursuing their own happiness up to the edge of a new millennium. Love makes Updike’s fictional world go round—married love, filial love, feathery licks of erotic love, and love for the domestic particulars of Middle American life.
the fearless flat accent of the great American inland. “I am Alice Oglethorpe. You may not remember, but we once traveled from New York to Los Angeles on the same train.” Her handshake was like her voice, firm, and neither cold nor warm, but he detected a slight tremble. Then, her identity dawning, Bech’s heart surged forward in his chest and he, the professional spielmeister, felt his mouth open and nothing come out. Her blue eyes, with their uncanny silvery backing, clung to his attentively
two singles, in the crowded dining car. The shiver of their cutlery on the vibrating tablecloth. The reassuring, fairy-tale solidity of the heavy-bottomed cups and coffeepots, bearing the New York Central’s logo. The theatrically deferential black waiters in a world where happy black servitude was also on the way out. Bech sensed as soon as she was ushered to his tingling table that she would sleep with him. There was that pale light in her eyes, a slightly loud shimmer in her teal-blue
“I’ll risk it,” Anderson responded. “I hate my face the way it is.” He had come to hate, though he did not want to scar their pure relation with such a confession, the daily facts of life: shaving his face, combing his hair and enduring a haircut, putting himself into pajamas and bed at night and getting himself out of them, rumpled and sweated, in the morning. He was weary of the way whiffs of staleness arose to him from his lower regions, and of the way his crowned and much-patched teeth
guess—I guess you were married to my father.” A mail truck coasts by, one of those noseless vans they have now, white with a red and blue stripe. They used to be solid green, like military vehicles. Mailmen used to be men; now theirs is a mail-lady, a young woman with long sun-bleached hair and stocky tan legs in shorts who pushes her pouch on a three-wheeled cart ahead of her along the sidewalk. It is not time for her to go by yet, but across Joseph Street, another young woman comes out on the
accusatory note. She doesn’t seem to mind. Her mild eyes, their blue deepened by the blue of the umbrella, take him in as she defends herself: “But it’s so exciting out. Feel the electricity in the air? I heard on the radio driving here the eye is over Wilmington.” “I bet it’s soon downgraded to just a tropical storm. North Carolina is where it really hit. Pennsylvania never gets the real disasters.” “Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” Annabelle asks. Their heads are at the same level. He is short