Modern Mind

nature.
    Mamet’s significance, as a figure who emerged in the 1970s, was his response to the arrival of the postmodern world, the collapse of the old certainties. Whereas Peter Brook was part of the new temper, a man who enjoyed multiculturalism, and Tom Stoppard, the British playwright, set his face against it, asserting that there
was
objective truth, objective good and evil, that relativism was itself in its way evil, Mamet exercised an old-fashioned, Eliot-type scepticism to the world around him. 62 He embraced and updated the tradition articulated by O’Neill, that America was ‘a colossal failure.’ 63 His plays
were
plays because he was suspicious of the mass media. ‘The mass media,’ he wrote in a memoir, ‘… corrupt the human need for culture (an admixture of art, religion, pageant, drama – a celebration of the lives we lead together) and churn it into entertainment, marginalizing that which lacks immediate appeal to the mass as “stinking of culture” or “of limited appeal”…. The information superhighway seems to promise diversity, but its effect will be to eliminate, marginalize, or trivialize anything not instantly appealing to the mass. The visions of Modigliani, Samuel Beckett, Charles Ives, Wallace Stevens, survive for the moment as
culture
in a society that never would have accepted them as art…. The mass media – and I include the computer industry – conspire to pervert our need of community…. We are learning to believe that we do not require wisdom, community, provocation, suggestion, chastening, enlightenment – that we require only information, for all the world as if life were a packaged kit and we consumers lacking only the assembly instructions.’ 64
    John Updike has published more than thirty books since
Poorhouse Fair
in 1959, during which time he has attempted to follow both the small and the grand themes in American, white, middle-class life. In
Couples
(1968),
Marry Me
(1976), and
Roger’s Version
(1986) he examined sex, adultery, ‘the twilight of the old morality.’ In
Bech: A Book
(1970) he looked at Communist East Europe through the eyes of a Jewish-American traveller, which enabled him to compare the rival empires of the Cold War. And in
The Witches of Eastwick
(1984) he took a swipe at feminism and American puritanism all at the same time. But it is for his ‘Rabbit’ series that he most deserves consideration. There are four books in the sequence:
Rabbit, Run
(1960),
Rabbit Redux
(1971),
Rabbit Is Rich
(1981) and
Rabbit at Rest
(1990). 65 Harold ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom used to play basketball as a professional, used to be young and romantic, and is now caught up in the domestic dreariness of married life. Rabbit is a deliberate echo of ‘Babbitt’ because Updike sees his hero as the natural epigone of Sinclair’s man from Zenith. But the world has moved on, and Rabbit lives on the East Coast, rather than in the Midwest, more at home in New York and Connecticut. His world is that of gadget-packed apartments, of commodities, including art,of material abundance but also of a spiritual malaise. Rabbit and his circle, with all their everyday needs well provided for, seek to recover the excitement of their youth in affairs, art courses, ever more pompous wines, travel. Despite this, they never escape the feeling that they are living in an age of decline, that theirs is an unheroic, shabby era; and as the books progress, the characters, showing what Updike himself called ‘instinctive realism,’ grow still more desperate in a search for epiphanies that will provide meaning. It is the fate of Updike’s characters, in the Rabbit books, to be entering the postmodern bleakness without knowing it. Updike invites us to think that this is how social evolution takes place. 66
    Saul Bellow has achieved the enviable distinction, better even than the award of the Nobel Prize in 1976, of writing at least one masterpiece in each of
five
decades:
Dangling Man
(1944);
Henderson the Rain King
(1959);
Herzog
(1964);
Humboldt’s Gift
(1975);
The Dean’s December
(1982), and
More Die of Heartbreak
(1987). 67 Born in Canada in 1915, the child of immigrant Jews, Bellow was raised in Chicago, and most of his books are set there or in New York – at any rate, in cities. This is not Updike’s world, however. Most of Bellow’s characters are Jewish, writers or academics rather than business types, more reflective, more apt to be overwhelmed by mass culture, the mass