Tumortown

‘I figure she should take care of herself, put herself in a deep freeze, and in a year or two in all likelihood they’ll develop a pill that’ll clear this up simple as a common cold. Already, you know, some of these cortisones; but the doctor tells us they don’t know but what the side effects may be worse. You know: the big C. My figuring is, take the chance, they’re just about ready to lick cancer anyway and with these transplants pretty soon they can replace your whole insides.”
—Mr. Angstrom Sr. in John Updike’s Rabbit Redux (1971

ROAD TO REMISSION?
The author in front of his apartment building, on Columbia Road in Washington, D.C.

Updike’s novel was set in what might be called the optimistic years of the Nixon administration: the time of the Apollo mission and the birth of that all-American can-do expression that begins: “If we can put a man on the moon … ” In January 1971, Senators Kennedy and Javits sponsored the “Conquest of Cancer Act,” and by December of that year Richard Nixon had signed something like it into law, along with huge federal appropriations. The talk was all of a “War on Cancer.”

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