Another year has turned. At some stage most of us, when asked our age, have to recall the year we were born and do the math. Saying that resulting number out loud makes us look over our meagre achievements and measure ourselves against other writers. I am usually happier if those others are older. Alice Walker is older than I am, I point out, and she always will be. So I have a little more time to do what I want to do.
But there is a thick parade of writers who published at a tender age. Not just the bright young things who have recently produced sparkling novels and essays, but the older young of another time, who were seldom hurried, or even helped, into print. We have had time to judge those works, and we know which ones are a lifetime achievement. We don't wish we'd written them. We simply look forward to reading them again.
Mary Wollstonecraft was 33 when she published “A Vindication of the Rights of Women”, one of the most famous feminist texts in English. She died at the age of 38. Emily Bronte published her weird and artful “Wuthering Heights” when she was 29, a year before she died. Sylvia Plath, author of “The Bell Jar” and numerous volumes of poetry, also died at 30.
John Updike, who died in 2009, lived to a good age, but I happened to be reading his “Rabbit, Run” just as the year turned. Rabbit is the nickname of Harry Angstrom, who was once a high school basketball star and now sells vegetable peelers. Coming home from work one day, he joins a street game of basketball and is treated as an eccentric oldie by the children on the court. That sets off a crisis in his head. He runs out on his boozy, pregnant wife and their two-year-old son and the next day he moves in with a prostitute. Two months later, when his daughter is born, he comes home. He starts, stops, and startles as a rabbit would, alternately driven by sex and fear. All the hallmarks of a mid-life crisis, except that Harry Angstrom is just 26, as Updike was when he began writing the novel.
His impulse to flee has tragic consequences. And yet, at the end, Rabbit takes off again. Where can he run? Will he ever run far enough to escape “I used to be” and “I could have been”?
There are three sequels, but this first Rabbit novel, and the essay by Updike included in the Penguin Modern Classics edition, puts a fresh light on age and measuring up. The quarter-century mark seems as full of doubtful self-assessment as the half-century mark. When I'm 75 maybe I will rail or laugh at my naive middle-aged self. Meanwhile, I will often take stock of my life – when a new year is born, when I cross another birthday, and when another writer passes on. And maybe I will also take up running.
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