It was very close to the time when novelist John Updike died early in 2009 that I came across his final two “Rabbit” novels in a collected paperback edition while browsing at National Book Store.
Picking up the collection, I pondered its heft and found I enjoyed it: 900 pages comprising the latter two novels, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest. Enough to keep me reading about Harry Angstrom, his wife Janice, his neighbors and acquaintances and lovers for a good three, four months. That’s if I took my time.
I had, for some reason, stopped following Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom — the former high school basketball star from Brewer, Pennsylvania who, through Updike’s lyrical prose, became a kind of social barometer of American life in the late 20th century — after finishing the second installment, Rabbit Redux. Over the course of four novels, each set a decade apart, readers got a glimpse of the ‘60s (Rabbit Run, in which Harry attempts to leave his wife and kids behind, knocks up a local prostitute and makes a pass at the local pastor’s wife), the ‘70s (Rabbit Redux), the ‘80s (Rabbit is Rich) and Harry’s closing decade of the ‘90s (Rabbit at Rest).
Maybe I left Angstrom back in the early ‘70s (having shacked up with a blond hippie girl and a seething African-American named Skeeter, then seeing his house burn down) on purpose, because the ending of Rabbit Redux seemed cataclysmic enough — like the revolution had come, failed, and Harry was left picking up the pieces of an uncertain America. Or maybe I found the first two books nearly perfect and couldn’t face a chance that Updike would somehow disappoint, go soft, or get the next two decades all wrong.
No such worries. Finishing Rabbit is Rich (only three decades late) I’m reminded again of how the novel form finally unshackled Updike’s vaulting, marathon talent (more so, even, than his fine short stories); he could draw on his love of James Joyce (Ulysses, mostly, echoed in the long stream-of-consciousness passages in all the Rabbit novels) and indulge himself in a character that people had come to love, flaws and all.
But why did we love Harry? He was a thickheaded, reactionary jock, but he also had a sense of humor, an odd self-effacement (“He was never sure who loved him”), and an unstoppable libido. This last is the characteristic that Gen-X novelist David Foster Wallace found so distasteful in Updike’s later work, such as the scathing review he gave Updike’s sci-fi novel, Towards the End of Time, in his book of essays titled Consider the Lobster. He forgave Rabbit, but never forgave Updike, or his collective Baby Boomer brethren, for thinking that sex was some magical genie power that only their generation possessed. Sure, Updike did dwell heavily on adultery, oral sex, even anal sex (in Rabbit is Rich, it’s depicted as a kind of moral vacuum). Sure, the Boomers probably did confer unrealistic powers upon sexuality, perhaps precisely because their generation laid claim to having “unleashed” it, for good or bad, upon the world.
Wallace’s beef seemed to be that all this open sexuality ever amounted to was turning Updike/Harry/the Boomers into misogynistic a-holes. Perhaps. But it often also made for engaging fiction. (It’s worth noting that Wallace and his generation have yet to find anything as elementally diverting as the subject as sex, while Wallace seemed to have given up on pretty much everything when he committed suicide last year, reportedly after a long battle with depression.)
What really distinguishes the Rabbit books from the rest of Updike’s formidable output is its conference of a sense of wonder on everyday observation, a sensibility he may have picked up from Joyce or Walt Whitman — or perhaps from poetry itself, transforming prosaic sentences on the page — and passed on to countless other writers and novelists still toiling in the gardens of modern “realism” (such as Richard Ford with his lyrical Frank Bascombe trilogy).
One of Updike’s gambits was using the present tense in Rabbit Run, a style that lends an urgency to thought, and a stylistic trick that many other writers (including Ford) have since appropriated. In the present tense, Updike has said, “You can move between minds, between thoughts and objects and events with a curious ease not available to the past tense. I don’t know if it is clear to the reader as it is to the person writing, but there are kinds of poetry, kinds of music you can strike off in the present tense.”
It certainly lent his prose an immediacy, whether describing Rabbit’s decaying hometown (“These acres of dead railroad track and car shops and stockpiled wheels and empty boxcars stick in the heart of the city like a great rusting dagger”) or ruminating on the nature of discovery (“From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.”).
Critics claim Updike never wrote a truly “great” novel, one that engaged historical forces and epic character development. It’s true that Updike chose to stake his claim on Brewer, Pennsylvania, a dying industrial town with wannabe aspirational suburbs lining its perimeter. Nothing much or monumental could ever happen in Brewer, so Updike chose to refract the daily news and popular pulse of America through the lives of Angstrom and his small clan. Movie marquees give a glimpse of the current box office hits during each decade of Rabbit’s saga; the trials and tribulations of each American president provide a backdrop for discussion and gab; the economy is the main barometer for how people feel about being American, much as it is now.
More strikingly, Updike populates Brewer with the ghosts of Rabbit’s own life: people he’s known, encountered briefly, slept with, had kids with, who still occupy his mental landscape, a terra incognito as real and as engaging as the neighborhoods and basketball courts, car dealerships and diners that make up the fictional town. The casual threads stringing together Harry Angstrom’s daily ruminations are often as vivid, if less memorable, than the wandering peregrinations of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. Of course, it’s a valid criticism that no crew-cut, beer-bellied ex-jock from Brewer would ever possess such abstract, almost poetical thoughts in the first place; but Updike, the creator, allows us to imagine that such elevated meditation lies just at the tip — almost within grasp — of even the most prosaic thinker’s consciousness.
So this is really Updike’s great American novel: a four-part invention that might take you half a year to read, but will stay with you forever, no matter how close or how far you are from the imaginary Brewer, Pennsylvania.