leaving, conceivably, the south and midwest?

"It seems simple enough, drive all night through the dawn through the morning through the noon park on the beach take off your shoes and fall asleep by the Gulf of Mexico. Wake up with the stars above perfectly spaced in perfect health. But he is going east, the worst direction, into unhealth, soot, and stink, a smothering hole where you can't move without killing somebody. "
- John Updike, Rabbit, Run p.23-24

And to the west, amoral depravity, unlimited riches, and chlorinated swimming pools. At least it's sunnier there.

As you can probably surmise, I've started reading Updike after completing Didion. Again, this wasn't due to some connection I was aware of, although Rabbit and Maria share a love of driving, apparently to escape the lives they feel trapped by. But Rabbit has already fled his hole, for parts still uncertain. Maria's truest escape, after the freeway lost it's power over her, was into a laconic nihilism that allows her acquaintance (friend would be get their relationship all wrong, though near the end they are something like compatriots) BZ to kill himself with pills while holding her hand on a bed in the middle of the desert.

I'm not sure if Updike was an athlete in his younger days, but when Rabbit starts describing how it feels to "be in the zone" (quotes mine; Updike doesn't use sports page cliches like this, but then again, the book was written in 1960, before that sort of locker room parlance grew popular, I'd imagine), he is perfectly on target. And since he's talking basketball, I'm all over it. But Rabbit's fallen on hard times and, like many former jocks, he seems to be more than a little bit stuck in his glory days of 23 points in his first varsity game and how it felt to "smother" Oriole High.


now playing - The Fall, "This Nation's Saving Grace"