R.I.P John Updike

Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though he's twenty-six and six three. So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irisies, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname, which was given to him when he too was a boy. He stands there thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up.

Book Review: All Aunt Hagar's Children

All Aunt Hagar's Childen by Edward P. Jones

This short story collection may have been the only thing I’ve read by Jones, but from this alone I am tempted to rank him among my favorite writers. In a way, his writing reminds me of Alice Munro. He weaves a character’s rich history with a voice that expresses a character’s isolation even among many others. He writes in a language that is comfortable to read, from sentence structure to tone. The characters themselves are rich and varied, even though they often suffer a plight that I could never understand.

I’ve often been intimidated by African-American writing, believing the experiences being described would be entirely alien to me. I’ve come to realize there’s something in the alienation of the African-American experience with which I associate. There is something in it that is similar to Céline. There something existential in all of it.

I’d read “A Rich Man” in, I think, the Best American series, and though the story didn’t necessarily linger and leave me haunted the way some stories have, I knew then that I wanted to read more. Seeing this collection along with Jones’s novel The Known World receive accolades only reinforced that I would need to read Jones. I was not disappointed. It took me a long time to get through because of other obligations, but flipping back through the stories, I’m reminded of their qualities. They are specific and gritty, fantastical and surreal, and all the time heartfelt.

One of the things linking most of the stories is Washington, DC. The city is nearly a character in the stories. It is a place where some long to go, and a place where others have come. Jones describes the city’s streets and neighborhoods, from the time where there was nothing across the Potomac in Virginia but pastures, to the near present. After reading these stories I feel like I know the city better than some of the people I know.

These are good stories. This is a good collection. I’m tempted to rank it right up there with Rock Springs.

Schumpeter and reading fiction

I took time this weekend to actually read some fiction. Sure, I had other things I should have been doing. It’s just been itching in me. I see it in the way I think. I need to move beyond the tangible randomness of numbers, symbols, equations. School is taxing, zaps my mental energy, but it leaves full parts of my brain unexercised. The closest thing to what I was used to through the rest of my schooling was reading Schumpeter. When the professor passed around copied pages of an old text, I felt a warm familiarity. So many previous assignments came in this exact form. And even then the text called for re-reading, pondering, questioning. Things notable absent from my recent studies.

The question in Schumpeter is the notion of creative destruction, the idea that capitalism is a constantly changing form, ever evolving as even great companies need to be destroyed and rebuilt. He argues, like Marx, that capitalism has an inevitable end. He explained, in ways I had not yet seen, that socialism is seen as a replacement for capitalism, its natural successor. And while I see some parts of socialism as a natural evolution from strict capitalism, I now understand why capitalists fight so hard against socialism. It is the antithesis to the form they believe is best. Any move to socialism means a further erosion of capitalism and a step closer to its demise.

Schumpeter doesn’t see capitalism as inherently flawed in the same way as Marx. It just is not static. It changes, requiring the biggest and most formidable capitalist institutions to collapse in order to be rebuilt. Maybe that explains some of what is going on these days. At least reading this reminds me that I’m much more comfortable with theory than I am with calculating aggregate demand curves or with linear regression.

Hot Wheels, fate, and family

One of the best things about being a parent is seeing my own children playing with the same toys I played with as a child. The day I pulled out of the closet the box of Hot Wheels cars I played with as a boy, my children sat with me as we looked at every car. There were ooohs and aaahs, and woo-woo-woo for every one that resembled an ambulance, fire truck or police car.

Looking at each car I remember the sort of characters each had, which ones my brother and I would choose as a representative of ourselves. It was while playing with these cars as a child that I thought about the person I might become. Sometimes I chose the muscle car or race car, sometimes it was the Mercedes or the tractor-trailer. Doing this I thought about whom I might become, what fate might determine for me, what choices I might make that would lead to such a fate.

To now see my children playing with the same cars, the pick-up truck that I still remember taking out of its packaging, the hot rod painted with Testors model paint, the Cadillac ambulance, it really does something to my heart. I wonder what fate they’ll imagine for themselves, and what their future will deliver.