For Rabbit, with Love and Squalor: An American Read - Softcover

Roiphe, Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501170848 ISBN 13: 9781501170843

Publisher: Free Press, 2016

Synopsis

What does it mean to love a character in a book? Many of us do. Many of us always have. These loves are not the subject of late-night phone conversations with friends or entries in our secret diaries. Yet, as Anne Roiphe reveals in her stunning new book, the characters we know only in fiction live forever in our hearts and our minds. We are what we read.

In For Rabbit, with Love and Squalor, Roiphe takes us on a glorious tour of the relationships she has had with the great male characters of American fiction: Holden Caulfield, Robert Jordan, Dick Diver, Rabbit, Nathan Zuckerman, Frank Bascombe, and Max and Mickey. In her literary love life Roiphe is a serial monogamist. When she is involved with one character, she is exclusively his until another comes along. She is an audience, an imaginary lover, and a critic, too -- but a critic only in the way a relative carps or chides at the escapades of a dear one. Though a woman, she identifies with her male heroes; as a woman, she feels love, awe, worry, and tenderness toward them at the same time. Never have the great male creations of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Salinger, Roth and Updike, Ford and Sendak come alive so vibrantly through the critical imagination of a fellow novelist.

What we discover on the printed page often carries over to our real-life encounters with the opposite sex, and so Roiphe weaves fragments of her own life story throughout the book. At different times in her life, men like Holden, Rabbit, Nathan, and Frank taught her much of what she knows about how men feel, how they experience love and loss, how they are like and yet unlike her. Piece by piece, Roiphe uncovers a portrait of the male soul, in all its rage and glory.

A personal odyssey as well as a celebration of the joys of reading, For Rabbit, with Love and Squalor is a winning blend of self-discovery, criticism, and autobiography that will inspire everyone in love with the written word.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Roiphe, a New York memoirist and novelist with a special interest in women's experiences (1185 Park Avenue; Fruitful: Living Contradictions: A Memoir of Modern Motherhood, etc.) has hit upon a clever organizing principle for these seven essays: recollections of literary love affairs with famous male protagonists from recent American literature. Roiphe writes of how these seemingly real characters have permanently affected her understanding of men, relationships and love, from her adolescence to her middle age. As she makes her way through her favorite novels, offering insights from the literary to the confessional, we see how her reading experiences parallel her personal life. In a particularly emotional chapter on John Updike's Rabbit, Roiphe, against her better judgment, confesses her love for such a flawed, immature, yet winning man: "I understand perfectly well that Rabbit is a stand-in for America's failure of moral courage... I know that he and his friends are vulgar, uneducated bigoted provincials... Still. Who could resist loving Rabbit? Not me." Roiphe makes a significant contribution to the growing field of "subjective literary criticism." She also opens up a subject that has been underexamined: the sexual/relationship fantasies of heterosexual women about male characters (traditionally, scholarly focus has been on male obsession with imagined females). The author also touches on how her Jewish identity factors into her fantasies about (and anticipated rejection by) certain male characters, such as Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman. Roiphe writes that "the book was enormous fun to write"; any woman reader who has ever fallen in love with a fictional male (that is, just about every female reader of fiction) will find it enormous fun to read. Author tour. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

Roiphe, a precise and forceful writer, has established her Jewish, feminist, and intellectual bona fides in her earlier works, and now presents an electrifying paean to twentieth-century American literary heroes. Combining personal anecdotes with incisive cultural and literary analysis, she remembers 1951, when she turned 16 and read the newly published The Catcher in the Rye. She explains why Holden Caulfield became her first literary love and blames him for her doomed first marriage. Robert Jordan, Hemingway's hero in For Whom the Bell Tolls, elicits an exhilarating tribute to the strong, silent type, which segues into praise for her second husband. Fitzgerald's Dick Diver provokes a shrewd consideration of the ethos of failure. Then Roiphe really lets loose in her canny appreciation of two heroes who exemplify the conflicts inherent in postwar American maleness: John Updike's Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom and Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman. Each hero serves as a catalyst for musings on society's changing attitudes toward sex, marriage, misogyny, and anti-Semitism over the past five decades as Roiphe celebrates the glorious complexity of human sexuality, and the ever-evolving role literature plays in our conceptions of romance, morality, and love. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1501170848
• ISBN 13: 9781501170843
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240