Becca Jane Approximately
When your mother sends back your invitations
And your father to your sister he explains
That you're tired of yourself and all your creations
Won't you come and see me, Queen Jane?
John Updike Week: Day 3, John Irving
I have begun to doubt the…efficacy? Purpose?…of JUW, as I have not in point of fact ever read John Updike except for those churlish book reviews of his in the New Yorker. Nonetheless, “I can’t go on, I must go on.” John Irving is also named John and has an intriguing, writerly last name. The only book of his I could ever get through (A Prayer for Owen Meany has a little person in it, little people in books are so gimmicky) is A Widow for One Year, the heroine of which is a writer named Ruth Cole whose father is a bit of a cad and whose mother runs away from home:
” ‘But they’re always married women, Daddy,’ Ruth would say.
‘Yes, I guess that’s why they’re so unhappy, Ruthie.’
‘If you cared about your nudes—I mean the drawings—you would have chosen professional models,” Ruth said to him. ‘But I guess you always cared more for the women themselves than for your nudes.’
‘This is a difficult thing for a father to explain to his daughter, Ruthie. But…if nakedness—I mean the feeling of nakedness—is what a nude must convey, there is no nakedness that compares to what it feels like to be naked in front of someone for the first time.’ “
