14. In "Rabbit Redux" white middle american Everyman meets hippy feminist and black power radical.
-
-
Replying to @HeerJeet
15. Begley has a high opinion of "Rabbit Redux"; I think it's a disaster but a fruitful one.
1 reply 2 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @HeerJeet
16. In "Rabbit Redux" Updike showed that he had (at least at that time) no ear for black vernacular speech. Black section badly misfires.
2 replies 1 retweet 0 likes -
Replying to @HeerJeet
17. Yet Updike in "Redux" was for the first time confronting the non-white world that his earlier fiction had drawn a curtain against.
1 reply 1 retweet 0 likes -
Replying to @HeerJeet
18. Out of "Redux" failure, the Rabbit books expand their social field outside Angstrom's personal life and try to encompass America.
1 reply 1 retweet 0 likes -
Replying to @HeerJeet
19. In her personal life in 1970s/80s, Updike had to deal with race more directly because a son & daughter both married African immigrants.
2 replies 2 retweets 2 likes -
Replying to @HeerJeet
20. So by 1980s Updike literally had an African-American family (in several senses) & had also traveled to Africa, Asia, South America.
1 reply 2 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @HeerJeet
21. Updike's wider engagement with world and changes in family surely fed into The Coup: attempt to see USA through African eyes.
2 replies 1 retweet 0 likes -
Replying to @HeerJeet
22. I'd be the last person to describe Updike as racially enlightened.
1 reply 3 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @HeerJeet
23. As
@jonathanshainin usefully reminded me, in both "R. Redux" & "Coup" Updike refers to black man's penis as "whip-like."3 replies 1 retweet 0 likes
24. Still, in Updike we see something interesting: a very white man trying to come to grips with the non-white world.
-
-
Replying to @HeerJeet
25. Won't explicate all of Updike's work but race theme is strong in "Roger's Version," "Brazil" and "Terrorist."
1 reply 2 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @HeerJeet
26. The narrator of "Roger's Version" is pretty racist and very uncomfortable by his mixed-race relative: deliberate on Updike's part.
1 reply 1 retweet 0 likes - Show replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.