Monday, July 21, 2014

the last book I ever read (John Updike's Rabbit at Rest, excerpt three)

from Rabbit at Rest by John Updike:

Though Judy swears Roy has been to the movies before, he doesn’t seem to understand you can’t talk up as in your own living room. He keeps asking why, with a plaintive inflection: “Why she take off her clothes?” “Why she so mad at that man?” Harry likes it, in the movie, when you see that Melanie Griffith in her whorehouse underwear has a bit of honest fat to her, not like most of these Hollywood anorectics, and when she bursts in upon her boyfriend with the totally naked girl, like herself supposed to be Italian but not like her aspiring to be a Wall Street wheeler-dealer, riding the guy in the astride position, her long bare side sleek as the skin of a top shell and her dark-nippled boobs right on screen for a good five second. But the plot, and the farce of the hero and heroine worming their way into the upper-crust wedding, he feels he saw some forty years ago with Cary Grant or Gary Cooper and Irene Dunne or Jean Arthur. When Roy loudly asks, “Why don’t we go now?” he is willing to go out into the lobby with him, so Janice and Judy can see the picture to the end in peace.



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