Word: angstrom
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...although there has been no slaughter so far. Several enthusiasts have compared the show with Ingmar Bergman's film, Scenes from a Marriage-to Bergman's disparagement. Perhaps because he wears a warm-up jacket, Tom has been likened to John Updike's puzzled hero, Rabbit Angstrom. Commentators have noted, almost with reverence, that the characters are "human" and that Mary is "vulnerable," as if these qualities were very rare. With tough, raucous programs like All in the Family dominating prime time, perhaps they...
Updike speaks of 'Rabbit' Angstrom in a detached way: Rabbit was "happy working in Mrs. Smith's garden." He "pined after an animal existence." Updike wouldn't be, and doesn't. The dust jacket photo for A Month of Sundays shows him in a pin-stripe suit and shiny black shoes, flashing a tolerant half-smile at his walking companion, who has been cut from the picture. He holds two crisp autographed copies of his latest book under his left elbow, while his left hand absently attends to an itch on his right pinky...
...picture of Rabbit Angstrom, and it is not really a picture of the Reverend Thomas Marshfield, the hero of this new book. But Marshfield has more of John Updike in him--the Updike who doesn't long for an animal existence and doesn't mind living in New York City--than the mute heroes of half a dozen of his previous novels...
...Intellectually, I'm not essentially advanced over Harry Angstrom. I went to Harvard, it's true, and wasn't much good at basketball...other than that we're rather similar. I quite understand both his anger and passivity, and feeling of the whole Vietnam involvement as a puzzle, that something strange has gone wrong...but it's no great leap of the imagination to do that...
That little bothers me in a sense--all writers do that to some extent. Harry Angstrom is supposed to be some kind of an American. But at least there's tact when you do it as a novel, whereas Mailer's is the sublime conviction that whatever happens to him happens to Them--it's like what's good for General Motors is good for the nation. Still, Armies of the Night was made wonderful by the richness, the ironic complexity of Mailer's view. He does have a very complicated mind at times. I quite like Prisoner...