Anne Roiphe

I've been a fan of Anne Roiphe's writing since college (which was a looooong time ago), beginning with her then-bestseller UP THE SANDBOX! More recently I've been reading her various memoirs:

1185 PARK AVENUE,
ART AND MADNESS, and
EPILOGUE - all of them excellent.

This book, FOR RABBIT, WITH LOVE AND SQUALOR, is a different sort of book altogether, and I enjoyed it immensely. It is a very personalized sort of literary criticism, I suppose, as Roiphe writes of her special and long relationships show more with several established fictional characters from contemporary American Literature, namely: Salinger's Holden Caulfield, Hemingway's Robert Jordan, Fitzgerald's Dick Diver, Updike's Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, Roth's Nathan Zuckerman, Richard Ford's Frank Bascomb, and Maurice Sendak's Max and Mickey.

Like Roiphe I am a booklover of epic proportions and know all these classic characters. The only one I don't know is Dick Diver, and I probably never will, since even THE GREAT GATSBY never really engaged me, so I doubt if, at this late stage of my life, I really want to read TENDER IS THE NIGHT.

Her title is, of course, an amalgam of Updike and Salinger, and I did feel that perhaps she felt the closest to those two characters: Harry Angstrom and Holden Caulfield. (Salinger's precocious and weird Glass family I was never quite so crazy about, and I suspect neither was Roiphe.) She feels an inordinate affection and protectiveness toward the big clueless Rabbit, despite what she sees as a subtly veiled anti-Semitism here and there in the tetralogy, a subject that arises in the Roth chapter too. Well, me too, Anne, about loving Harry, I mean. I loved all of the Rabbit books and remember being quite devastated when Updike killed him off in RABBIT AT REST. I always hoped he might write a more complete 'prequel' about Harry's high school and army days. No such luck, since Updike himself is now gone - another devastating blow back in 2009.

Too much I could say here, so I'll just say Holden has been important to me since I was fourteen. I recently read CATCHER again, and it holds up, even now, fifty-five years later. Rabbit? Well, I miss him and his "user" attitude towards women and other people. He really was a lot like a rabbit, living "inside his skin," instinctively, his only defense, to run, "ah, run."

Except for the Fitzgerald, I loved this lovely sometimes funny, often warm meditation on all these guys, and the way Roiphe actually inserted herself into their lives to react, comment, gently criticize, and even give comfort. It was fun, and often very moving too. Thanks for reviving the memories of all these great books and characters, Anne.

If you're a lover of serious literature, and know all these fictional guys, you'll like this book. I recommend it highly. show less

A raw and painful book of loss and grief. Roiphe is so honest, so brutal, so courageous in sharing with the reader the depth of her sorrow.

The lost, disjointed emptiness that follows the loss of a lifetime love is so well-expressed I felt myself nodding in agreement over and over. It was so interesting to read about her progress through the dark tunnel of pain, experiencing so much that I experienced but describing it so much better than I ever could.

I enjoyed her forays into dating, in show more response to a personal ad placed by her daughters. They were amusing and sad and infuriating and comforting. Men suffer in their losses too - an obvious concept that I somehow hadn't thought of before.

This book is hard to read at times, but if you've been there, you will find comfort and an easing of your loneliness. show less

This is an intriguing, odd book. The author tells, in a disjointed, scene-shifting fashion, the story of her life from her late teens to her early thirties. She marries a playwright and becomes part of the young intellectual scene in New York in the fifties and early sixties. Author Roiphe brings the era to life with all its failed promise.

It's amazing how different things were then. Roiphe falls in love with a man who is in love with himself; he doesn't bother to hide it. He drinks so show more heavily it's alarming; he gambles; he cheats; he squanders her money and ignores their child. He's a repellent personality with no sense of responsiblity. The modern reader is apt to become impatient with the whole thing, and wonder why Roiphe doesn't just ditch the guy and go on with her work. But, as the author makes very clear, she sees no role models for female authors (Cather and Woolf seem too alien to apply to herself); in an astonishing paragraph, we learn that she had never met a woman doctor or lawyer. She knew they existed, but not in her sphere. In this time and place, women were seen to be servers of men, and men, especially talented men, were granted almost god-like status, suitable objects of worship by the women they used and abused. How and why Roiphe breaks away from this self-destructive pattern makes up the arc of the book.

There are one or two unusual aspects here: The author refers to her husband only as "Jack" and insists that he's a failed dramatist, yet he won an Obie. She calls her daughter "the child" almost always; she never mentions the child's name, and only calls her "the baby" or "my daughter" two or three times. As a mother, I found this somewhat offputting and yet interesting. She clearly loves her daughter deeply; why doesn't she use her name? And I noted that, with the exception of her ex-husband, all the authors she exposes are dead. I'm not saying that she's not telling the truth--I'm saying I thought she was still protective of authors still alive, in spite of their singular failings as human beings.

Most of the book is written in short sentences, very reminiscent of Hemingway's style. I found this a very moving, and very disturbing exploration of a time and a way of life that has almost disappeared.

Highly recomended if you are interested in the fifites or in feminist issues. show less

I have been of two minds about this book – being so conflicted that I held off on my review until I had a chance to read the book again. From the outset, let me say I loved the dreamlike, disjointed and free-flowing quality of her writing style. Isn’t this exactly how our memories come to us? Her spare portrayal has a reportorial aspect. I would have liked a little more judgment in hindsight. I was taken enough with the book to consider some of her other autobiographical work to see if show more it would change or inform my opinion of this book. After two readings, though, I still can’t seem to answer, why does Anne Roiphe make me so angry?

Could it be class differences? She was born into wealthy circumstances, lived on Park Avenue and was well educated. Even when she was abandoned and mistreated by her husband and subsequently divorced, she suffered the ‘rigors’ of summers in the Hamptons, and affording frequent babysitters on her whirl as a peripatetic partner, all the while apparently not holding down a job. She turned up her nose at the trappings of upper class life (lawyer/stockbroker husbands and country club memberships) as being unexciting. Yet, in the service of “Art,” she faced another drudgery of typing manuscripts, being the sole source of money, the sole (often negligent) caretaker of her children and waiting on end for her husband to return home.

More so, I think it was Roiphe’s use of “Art” as excuse and justification which roused my anger. Her youth and young adulthood appears to have been spent as handmaiden at the altar of – capital A – Art, in service of the male writers and artists who produce it. In her portrayal (and others I’ve read) these men are essentially arrested children: Narcissistic, avoiding adult responsibilities to their wives and children and focused on satisfying sensory desires for booze and sex. Cloaking this boorish behavior as the rightful attributes of artistic endeavor (“Art”) was a means to achieve their selfish ends.

Reading the recent novel, “A Paris Wife” (novel about Hemingway’s first marriage), I excused his wife’s passivity and masochism for her husband’s art as being a product of her time. Forty odd years later, Roiphe portrays herself as an active and eager participant. She is a free spirit, running from suburban conformity and sexually adventuresome. After a while, her escapades seem less about “Art” for Art’s sake, but rather a way of chasing fame and fortune. She left both her boyfriend in Spain and her husband as much for their lack of success. Her many conquests – no matter how dispassionately related – eventually seem gloating notches on a literary bedpost.

Ultimately, Roiphe comes to value the creation of art herself rather than servicing artists. She went on to be a well received writer. She did so in a time when so many other women were only just beginning to ‘raise consciousness’ and ‘self-actualize.’ There were no roadmaps and a few role models. This book is best read as an insider’s experience of a peculiar time in feminism and women’s taking possession of Art as their own. show less