Even if you hate how badly and cynically Rabbit treats his alcoholic wife, his parochial in-laws and (minor spoilers) the sex worker he shacks up with, read Rabbit, Run for Updike’s prose. Updike’s protagonist and inarguable personal surrogate, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, tries to flee this grind, not without some reason, but with disastrous results. But there are certain elements to Updike’s second major novel ( The Poorhouse Fair came out the year before) that will be recognisable to anyone working a nine-to-five in their early to mid-twenties, as the excitement and variety of youth morphs into the routine grind of adulthood. Don’t get me wrong – every single character in Rabbit, Run, is pathetically self-absorbed, even the children.
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You should really read John Updike’s Rabbit series just to better understand one of the greatest bits of criticism to have been published in recent years: the poet Patricia Lockwood’s London Review Of Books takedown of an author once described (without irony…) by David Foster Wallace as “a penis with a thesaurus”. If you want a book equal parts empathy and self-doubt, read this. All of our problems are relatively minor, Tolentino admits, but to us, they’re huge there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s this fact that makes Trick Mirror truly relatable: Tolentino focuses on things such as whether she should get married even though she doesn’t want to, how the internet is warping her friendships and whether she still believes in God after being raised a Christian (she doesn’t). Tolentino’s writing is almost painfully self-aware (she goes to almost comical lengths to apologise to her readers for not providing concrete answers to the many apt questions she asks) and grapples with the daily minor existential questions that life without massive hardship poses to a college-educated New Yorker. And in Trick Mirror: Reflections On Self-Delusion, her first collection of essays, she sticks to what she knows best.
Jia Tolentino, now a staff writer at the New Yorker, is something of a specialist in sharp writing about millennial self-identity in the age of the internet, having begun her career at snark-blogs The Hairpin and Jezebel.
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