{"product_id":"licks-of-love-isbn-9780345442017","title":"Licks of Love","description":"In this brilliant late-career collection, John Updike revisits many of the locales of his early fiction: the small-town Pennsylvania of \u003ci\u003eOlinger Stories\u003c\/i\u003e, the sandstone farmhouse of \u003ci\u003eOf the Farm\u003c\/i\u003e, the exurban New England of \u003ci\u003eCouples\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eMarry Me\u003c\/i\u003e, and Henry Bech’s Manhattan of artistic ambition and taunting glamour. To a dozen short stories spanning the American Century, the author has added a novella-length coda to his quartet of novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Several strands of the Rabbit saga come together here as, during the fall and winter holidays of 1999, Harry’s survivors fitfully entertain his memory while pursuing their own happiness up to the edge of a new millennium. Love makes Updike’s fictional world go round—married love, filial love, feathery licks of erotic love, and love for the domestic particulars of Middle American life.“A touching, elegiac collection of stories about infidelity, about the weight of family, about the dwindling of years . . . [Updike] works so slowly and carefully that you rarely see the emotional punches coming.”—\u003ci\u003eNewsweek\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “With compassion and bemused affection, [Updike] traces the many large and small ways in which Harry’s actions continue to reverberate through the lives of his widow, Janice, and their son, Nelson. . . . [‘Rabbit Remembered’] not only reconnoiters old ground but in doing so also manages to transform it into something stirring and new.”—Michiko Kakutani, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “ ‘Rabbit Remembered’ is a thing of rich satisfaction. . . . Throughout the collection are passages of stylistic certainty and bittersweet intimacy.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Sunday Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eJohn Updike\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.The Women Who Got Away\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePierce Junction was an isolated New Hampshire town somewhat dignified by\u003cbr\u003ethe presence of a small liberal-arts college; we survived by clustering\u003cbr\u003etogether like a ball of snakes in a desert cave. The Sixties had taught us\u003cbr\u003ethe high moral value of copulation, and we were slow to give up on an\u003cbr\u003eactivity so simultaneously pleasurable and healthy. Still, you couldn’t\u003cbr\u003esleep with everybody: we were bourgeoisie, responsible, with jobs and\u003cbr\u003echildren, and affairs demanded energy and extracted wear and tear. We\u003cbr\u003ehadn’t learned yet to take the emotion out of sex. Looking back, the\u003cbr\u003enumbers don’t add up to what an average college student now manages \u003cbr\u003ein four years. There were women you failed ever to sleep with; these, in\u003cbr\u003eretrospect, have a perverse vividness, perhaps because the contacts, in\u003cbr\u003ethe slithering ball of snakes, were so few that they have stayed distinct.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Well, Martin,” Audrey Lancaster murmured to me toward the end of a summer\u003cbr\u003ecruise on a boat hired out of Portsmouth in celebration of somebody or\u003cbr\u003eother’s fortieth birthday, “I see what they say about you, at last.” The \u003cbr\u003e“at last” was a dig of sorts, and the “they” was presumably female in\u003cbr\u003egender. I wondered how much conversation went on, and along lines how\u003cbr\u003especific, among the wives and divorcées of our set. I had been standing\u003cbr\u003ethere by the rail, momentarily alone, mellow on my portion of California\u003cbr\u003eChablis, watching the Piscataqua River shakily reflect the harbor lights\u003cbr\u003eas the boat swung to dock and the loudspeaker system piped Simon and\u003cbr\u003eGarfunkel into the warm, watery night.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy wife was slow-dancing on the forward deck with her lover, Frank Greer.\u003cbr\u003eAudrey had materialized beside me and my hand went around her waist as if\u003cbr\u003ewe might dance, too. There my hand stayed, and, like the gentle buzz you\u003cbr\u003eget from a frayed appliance cord, the reality of her haunch burned through\u003cbr\u003eto my fingers and palm. She was a solid, smooth-faced woman, so\u003cbr\u003enearsighted that she moved with a splay-footed pugnacity, as if something\u003cbr\u003eshe didn’t quite see might knock her over. Her contact lenses were always\u003cbr\u003egetting lost, in somebody’s lawn or at the back of her eyeballs. She had\u003cbr\u003emarried young and was a bit younger than the rest of us. You had to love\u003cbr\u003eAudrey, seeing her out on the tennis court in frayed denim cut-offs, with\u003cbr\u003eher sturdy brown legs and big, squinty smile, taking a swing and missing\u003cbr\u003ethe ball completely. Her waist was smooth and flexible in summer cotton,\u003cbr\u003eand, yes, she was right, for the first time in all our years of\u003cbr\u003eacquaintance I sensed her as a potential mate, as a piece of the cosmic\u003cbr\u003epuzzle that might fit my piece.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut I also felt that, basically, she didn’t care for me, not enough to\u003cbr\u003ecome walking through all of adultery’s risks and spasms of guilt, all\u003cbr\u003ethose hoops of flame. She distrusted me, the way you distrust a\u003cbr\u003ecompetitor. We were both clowns, bucking to be elected Funniest in the\u003cbr\u003eClass. Further, she was taken, doubly: not only married, to a man called\u003cbr\u003eSpike, with the four children customary for our generation, but involved\u003cbr\u003ein a number of murky flirtations or infatuations, including one with my\u003cbr\u003ebest friend, Rodney Miller–if a person could be said to have same-sex\u003cbr\u003efriends in our rather doctrinairely heterosexual enclave. She had a nice\u003cbr\u003eway of drawling out poisonous remarks, and said now, to me, “Shouldn’t you\u003cbr\u003ego tell Jeanne and Frank the boat is about to dock? They might get\u003cbr\u003earrested by the Portsmouth fuzz for public indecency.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI said, “Why me? I’m not the cruise director.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeanne was my wife. Her love for Frank, in the twisted way of things back\u003cbr\u003ethen, helped bind me to her: I felt so sorry for her, having to spend most\u003cbr\u003eof her hours with me and the children when her heart was elsewhere. She\u003cbr\u003ehad been raised a French Catholic, and there was something noble for her\u003cbr\u003eabout suffering and self-denial; her invisible hairshirt kept her torso\u003cbr\u003eerect as a dancer’s and added to her beauty in my eyes. I didn’t like\u003cbr\u003eAudrey mocking her. Or did I? Perhaps my feelings were more primitive,\u003cbr\u003emore stupidly possessive, than I knew at the time. I tightened my grip on\u003cbr\u003eAudrey’s waist, approaching a painful pinch, then let go, and went forward\u003cbr\u003eto where Jeanne and Frank, the music stopped, looked as if they had just\u003cbr\u003ewoken up, with bloated, startled faces. Frank Greer had been married, to a\u003cbr\u003ewoman named Winifred, until rather recently in our little local history.\u003cbr\u003eDivorce, which had been flickering at our edges for a decade while our \u003cbr\u003evast pool of children slowly bubbled up through the school grades toward,\u003cbr\u003ewe hoped, psychological health, was still rare, and sat raw on Frank, like\u003cbr\u003ethe red cheek he had been pressing against my wife’s.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMaureen Miller, in one of those intervals in bed when passion had been\u003cbr\u003eslaked but an awkward half-hour of usable time remained before I could in\u003cbr\u003edecency sneak away, once told me that Winifred resented the fact that, in\u003cbr\u003ethe years when the affair between Frank and Jeanne was common knowledge, I\u003cbr\u003ehad never made a pass at her. Winifred, sometimes called Freddy, was an\u003cbr\u003eowlish small woman, a graceful white owl, with big dark eyes and untanned\u003cbr\u003eskin and an Emily Dickinson hairdo atop a plump body that tapered to small\u003cbr\u003eand shapely hands and feet. If my wife held herself \u003cbr\u003elike a dancer, it was her lover’s wife who in fact could dance, with a\u003cbr\u003efeathery nestling and lightness of fit that had an embarrassing erotic\u003cbr\u003eeffect on me. Holding her in my arms, I would get an erection, and thus I\u003cbr\u003ewould prudently avoid dancing with her until the end of the evening, when\u003cbr\u003eone or the other of us, in an attempt to persuade our spouses to tear\u003cbr\u003ethemselves apart, would have put on an overcoat. Otherwise, I \u003cbr\u003ewas not attracted to Winifred. Like the model for her hairdo, she had\u003cbr\u003eliterary ambitions and a dogmatic, clipped, willfully oblique style. She\u003cbr\u003eseemed in her utterances faintly too firm.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Well, I won’t say no,” she said, not altogether graciously, one night\u003cbr\u003ewell after midnight when Jeanne suggested that I walk Winifred home,\u003cbr\u003ethrough a snowstorm that had developed during a dinner party of ours and\u003cbr\u003eits inert, boozy aftermath. Couples or their remnants had drifted off\u003cbr\u003euntil just Winifred was left; she had a stern, impassive way of absorbing\u003cbr\u003ea great deal of liquor and betraying its presence in \u003cbr\u003eher system only by a slight lowering of her lids over her bright black\u003cbr\u003eeyes, and an increase of pedantry in her fluting voice. This was before\u003cbr\u003ethe Greers’ divorce. Frank was absent from the party on some mysterious\u003cbr\u003eexcuse of a business trip. It was the first stage of their separation, I\u003cbr\u003erealized later. Jeanne, knowing more than she let on, had extended herself\u003cbr\u003ethat night like a kid sister to the unescorted woman. She kept urging\u003cbr\u003eFreddy, as the party thinned, to give us one more tale of the\u003cbr\u003ecreative-writing seminar she was taking, as a special student, at our\u003cbr\u003elocal college, Bradbury. Bradbury had formerly been a bleak little\u003cbr\u003ePresbyterian seminary tucked up here, with its pillared chapel, in the\u003cbr\u003efoothills of the White Mountains, but it had long loosened its\u003cbr\u003eecclesiastical ties and in the Sixties had gone coed, with riotous results.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This one girl,” Winifred said, accepting what she swore was her last\u003cbr\u003eKahlúa and brandy, “read a story that must have been very closely based on\u003cbr\u003ea painful breakup she had just gone through, and got nothing but the most\u003cbr\u003esarcastic comments from the instructor, who seems to be a real sadist, or\u003cbr\u003eelse it was his way of putting the make on her.” Her expression conveyed\u003cbr\u003edisgust and weariness with all such trans-\u003cbr\u003eactions. I supposed that she was displacing her anger at Frank onto the\u003cbr\u003einstructor, a New York poet who no doubt wished he was back in Greenwich\u003cbr\u003eVillage, where the sexual revolution was polymorphous. He was a dreary\u003cbr\u003esour condescending fellow, in my occasional brushes with him, and\u003cbr\u003edisconcertingly short as well.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese rehashed class sessions were all fascinating stuff, if you judged\u003cbr\u003efrom Jeanne’s animation and gleeful encouragement of the other woman to\u003cbr\u003etell more. A rule of life in Pierce Junction demanded that you be\u003cbr\u003eespecially nice to your lover’s spouse–by no means an insincere\u003cbr\u003eobservance, for the secret sharing did breed a tortuous, guilt-warmed\u003cbr\u003egratitude to the everyday keeper of such a treasure. But even Winifred\u003cbr\u003ethrough her veils of Kahlúa began to feel uncomfortable, and stood up in\u003cbr\u003eour cold room (the thermostat had retired hours ago), and put her shawl up\u003cbr\u003earound her head, \u003cbr\u003eas if fluffing up her feathers. She accepted with a frown Jeanne’s\u003cbr\u003einsistent suggestion that I escort her home. “Of course I’m in no\u003cbr\u003econdition to drive, this has been so lovely,” she said to Jeanne, with a\u003cbr\u003ehandshake that Jeanne turned into a fierce, pink-faced, rather frantic (I\u003cbr\u003ethought) embrace of transposed affection.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWinifred’s car had been plowed fast to the curb by the passing\u003cbr\u003erevolving-eyed behemoths of our town highway department, and she lived\u003cbr\u003eonly three blocks away, an uphill slog in four inches of fresh snow. She\u003cbr\u003edid seem to need to take my arm, but we both stayed wrapped in our own\u003cbr\u003ethoughts. The snow drifted down with a steady whisper of its own, and the\u003cbr\u003epresence on the streets, at this profoundly nocturnal hour, of the\u003cbr\u003echurning, scraping snowplows made an effect of companionship–of a wider\u003cbr\u003eparty beneath the low sky, which was glowing yellow with that strange,\u003cbr\u003esecretive phosphorescence of a snowstorm. The houses were dark, and my\u003cbr\u003eporch light grew smaller, receding down the hill. In front of her own\u003cbr\u003edoor, right under a streetlamp, Winifred turned to face me as if, in our\u003cbr\u003emuffling clothes, \u003cbr\u003eto dance; but it was only to offer up her pale, oval, rather frozen and\u003cbr\u003egrieving face for me to kiss. Snowflakes were caught in the long lashes of\u003cbr\u003eher closed lids and spangled the arc of parted dark hair left exposed by\u003cbr\u003eher shawl. I felt the usual arousal. The house behind her held only\u003cbr\u003esleeping children. Its clapboard face, needing a coat of paint, looked\u003cbr\u003eshabby, betraying the distracted marriage within.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere was, in Pierce Junction, a romance of other couples’ houses–the\u003cbr\u003emerged tastes, the accumulated furniture, the framed photographs going\u003cbr\u003eback to the bridal day and the premarital vacation spots. We loved being\u003cbr\u003eguests and hosts both, but preferred being guests, invasive and\u003cbr\u003einquisitive and irresponsible. Did she expect me to come in? It didn’t\u003cbr\u003estrike me as at all a feasible idea–at my back, down the hill, Jeanne\u003cbr\u003ewould be busy tidying up the party wreckage in our living room and resting\u003cbr\u003ea despairing eye on the kitchen clock with its sweeping red second hand.\u003cbr\u003eTiny stars of ice clotted my own lashes as I kissed our guest good night,\u003cbr\u003esquare on the mouth but lightly, lightly, with liquor-glazed subtleties of\u003cbr\u003ecourteous regret. Of all the kisses I gave and received in Pierce\u003cbr\u003eJunction, from children and adults and golden retrievers, that chaste\u003cbr\u003ecrystalline one has remained unmelted in my mind.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen I returned to the house, Frank, surprisingly, was sitting in the\u003cbr\u003eliving room, holding a beer and wearing a rumpled suit, his long face pink\u003cbr\u003eas if after great exertion. Jeanne, too tired to be flustered, explained,\u003cbr\u003e“Frank just got back from his trip. The plane into the Manchester airport\u003cbr\u003ealmost didn’t land, and when he found Freddy not at their home he thought\u003cbr\u003ehe’d swing down here and pick her up.”\u003cbr\u003e“Up and down that hill in this blizzard?” I marvelled. I didn’t remember\u003cbr\u003eany car going by.\u003cbr\u003e“We have four-wheel drive,” Frank said, as if that explained everything.","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304898842853,"sku":"NP9780345442017","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345442017.jpg?v=1767731405","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/licks-of-love-isbn-9780345442017","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}