What two of America’s most distinguished living novelists reveal about the role of literature in American life
, Updike’s rough contemporaries, also wrote first-person narratives in which men stumble, think and find their ways through the world, trying to square noble intentions with primal impulses. But they and their protagonists were Jewish, and therefore not everyman material in quite the same way as Rabbit is.
And if Frank is just Frank, and not a stand-in for something larger, what is left? He is ironic and detached to the point of inhumanity. Paul, his son, dies in hospital while Frank is in the car listening to a baseball game. It leaves him unruffled, a reaction wholly unbelievable to any parent. Paul, meanwhile, is immature and demanding. Novelists are under no obligation to make their protagonists likeable, but they should at least be interesting, which neither Paul nor Frank are.
Mr Whitehead, meanwhile, represents a livelier and more expansive faction within American fiction. He uses some of the same tools as Mr Ford: like Frank Bascombe, the main character in “Crook Manifesto” is a serial protagonist. This book is a sequel, and structural copy, of “Harlem Shuffle” —both comprise three linked crime novellas set in Harlem, “Shuffle” in the 1960s and “Manifesto” in the 70s. Mr Whitehead is planning another Carney book, set in the 80s.
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