Fifty Books Project 2023

Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

 

It took me almost as long to read the Rabbit sequence as it took Updike to write it.  Beginning with Rabbit, Run in 1960, the books come about once a decade and narrate the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom at the dawn of the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s.  I read Rabbit Run in about 1990, read Rabbit Redux shortly after, waited a good ten or twelve years before Rabbit is Rich and only finished the series (today) because I owned a copy of Rabbit at Rest and thought I might as well.

 

A short reaction to each novel:

Rabbit, Run is the best of the four and is pretty brilliant.  The opening sequence, with Harry travelling home from work to a young family that feels like a boring trap then stopping to play basketball with some high school age boys on the street, remembering his own youth and the power and freedom he felt on the court, was worth the price of the entire sequence.  It is a kind of perfect male portrait of how the promise of youth is not kept by later life, how the American Dream never quite lives up to its billing.  There are other sections of the novel that compete with this opening in my memory – the long drive with the DJ’s catalogue of love songs as he leaves his wife, the golf game for his soul with the minister, the drowning of his daughter – but in each case the descriptions go on a little too long and while we see an artist enjoying his medium, we also see him showing off his own talent in ways that distract from the emotional power of the scene.

 

Rabbit Redux is the worst of the four.  It feels generally unnecessary and I remember feeling that Updike wrote it because the 60s did not go as he and Harry had imagined ten years earlier.  Harry’s inability to see real humanity in other people – especially women, but now also Blacks and radicals, starts to feel like it is Updike’s problem.  Certainly, his portrait of the activist/drug dealer Skeeter and the hippy Jill give the impression that Updike’s understanding of those parts of America came from Time Magazine.

 

Rabbit is Rich was a good comeback.  Admittedly, my feelings for it may be colored by the fact that I was close to adult in the years it chronicles, and so remembered the news items Harry obsesses over as part of my own life.  Updike’s continued examination of the economic decline of Harry’s home town, Harry’s new career at Toyota, and his later dealing with gold krugerrands captured something about America’s splitting into two countries – the constant refrain that we are getting soft and losing to the Japanese is complicated by Harry’s own prosperity.  His more settled and believable extra-marital affairs temper his increasingly scummy character, and while he is unlikeable, he is relatable and sympathetic.

 

I found Rabbit at Rest to combine the best and worst of the previous novels.  I grew bored with some of Updike’s undeniable talent.  He has a tremendous visual imagination and calls up the world around his characters in a constant stream of realistic and highly specific detail.  However, this often meant reading lists of fast food places along the highways of Florida, or Harry’s remembrance of what used to exist in the streets of his Pennsylvania hometown.   There are brilliant moments here – in his last visit with his mistress Thelma, now dying of lupus, in his own heart attack while sailing with his granddaughter, in the amazing sequence when he dresses as Uncle Sam for the Memorial Day parade and finds people still remember him as “Rabbit” the star basketball player, and in the brilliant way he ends the entire sequence, with a final, fatal heart attack during another pickup basketball game that gives him a last moment of liberation into his own skills.  The problem is that there is not one such final game, but two, so that the death comes some thirty pages after the reader has recognized the completed circle and the connection to that opening 1500 pages earlier.  Even the second game is not the end, as we get another few pages of doctors opining on his condition and his family discussing whether to forgive his final trespasses.

 

In the end, I found the creation of Harry’s adult life– the way he is so firmly embedded in history, the way he rises above individuality towards something like an American Everyman – a truly remarkable achievement.  At the same time, I got sick of Harry.  He is complex and conflicted in the beginning, but hardens into something simply unlikeable at the end.  He has few good qualities – he is a terrible husband, a terrible father, makes no social contribution and never really attempts to achieve more than his bases desires dictate.  At times I relate to him in a frightening way – Updike does get me to think of my own limitations and I find myself fearing that I am in some ways like Rabbit.  But then he will do something so simply reprehensible that I am let off the hook.  For the same reason, he does not become an American Everyman, and so we are all let off the hook.