For Rabbit, with Love and Squalor: An American Read

Roiphe, a New York memoirist and novelist with a special interest in women's experiences (1185 Park Avenue; Fruitful: Living Contradictions: A Memoir of Modern Motherhood, etc.) has hit upon a clever organizing principle for these seven essays: recollections of literary love affairs with famous male protagonists from recent American literature. Roiphe writes of how these seemingly real characters have permanently affected her understanding of men, relationships and love, from her adolescence to her middle age. As she makes her way through her favorite novels, offering insights from the literary to the confessional, we see how her reading experiences parallel her personal life. In a particularly emotional chapter on John Updike's Rabbit, Roiphe, against her better judgment, confesses her love for such a flawed, immature, yet winning man: ""I understand perfectly well that Rabbit is a stand-in for America's failure of moral courage... I know that he and his friends are vulgar, uneducated bigoted provincials... Still. Who could resist loving Rabbit? Not me."" Roiphe makes a significant contribution to the growing field of ""subjective literary criticism."" She also opens up a subject that has been underexamined: the sexual/relationship fantasies of heterosexual women about male characters (traditionally, scholarly focus has been on male obsession with imagined females). The author also touches on how her Jewish identity factors into her fantasies about (and anticipated rejection by) certain male characters, such as Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman. Roiphe writes that ""the book was enormous fun to write""; any woman reader who has ever fallen in love with a fictional male (that is, just about every female reader of fiction) will find it enormous fun to read. Author tour. (Nov.)