Word: skeeter
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...awakened to what Updike calls "new areas of sexual and psychic penetration" by a rich teen-aged "hippie" named Jill. He is then confronted directly with the problems which have caused his confusion--Vietnam, racial strife, local revolutionary struggle--when he takes in a young black war veteran. Skeeter attempts to give a metaphysical basis to explain social conditions--something Rabbit instinctively needs...
...Skeeter's problems are not Rabbit's: Angstrom can accept neither his nihilistic analysis of American history, nor the irrational fire of his revolutionary solutions. Skeeter tells him what was lurking in the plumbing of America; Angstrom does not believe the sewer's backed up all that far. "Confusion is just a local view of things working out in general," says Rabbit. Which does not imply that Rabbit returns to a passive acceptance of what's laid out for him. He comes to grips with his life. He accepts guilt for his own domestic mess, and (with his father) recognizes...
Rabbit's Penn Villas warren becomes a crash pad for Jill, a teen-age runaway from suburban Connecticut, and a skinny black radical named Skeeter, a curious combination of Flip Wilson, Rap Brown and early Malcolm X. As in Couples, it is again a fire that destroys, purges or does whatever fire is supposed to do in such charged circumstances. Rabbit's house is burned down by Penn Villas residents who are less concerned about their property values than about their children watching Jill and Skeeter get high and fornicate...
...Skeeter and I sat in the front seat of his '62 Chevrolet and he pointed out some "real good boys" he had gone to school with. "Good fighters too," he bragged, "throw a real quick punch." Then he stopped smiling and said it. "You know any of them goddamned hippies...
...deeply felt pain of the blues is transposed in country music into feelings of lost prestige, embarrassment, and finally defeat. In the mountain towns of north Georgia, though, it's not obvious at first. Not until you have talked to someone like Skeeter for a while, and he tells you how he doesn't mind working at the textile mill, and how good the women are and how much he loves the South. And he keeps telling you over and over again...