Rabbit Redux by John Updike

Three classes behind his, Peggy Gring had gone to high school with Rabbit and had seen him when he was good, had say in those hot bleachers screaming, when he was a hero, naked and swift and lean. She has seen him come to nothing.

I read, but didn’t review, Rabbit, Run, last year. It follows Rabbit Angstrom, aged 26, as he lives his post-high school life, tries, and fails, to make his marriage to his high school sweetheart work, and suffers some pretty heavy-duty heartbreak. It’s a tragic book, and Rabbit is a tragic character, both unique and universal—he’s his own man, but the narrative of Rabbit, Run is a universal chronicle of one man’s failure to live up to whatever potential he has. It’s also an exercise in both character and reader debasement, disturbing and moving in equal part.

Rabbit Redux takes place 10 years later, with much of the cast returning, picking up where Run left off, with Rabbit, in the aftermath of the tragic event that closes Run, trying—and once again, failing—to shape his life into something that makes him less miserable. After discovering his wife is having an affair with a co-worker, George Stavros, Rabbit’s life again goes off the rails. His wife leaves him, and he takes in a young female runaway, Jill, and her “friend”, a black drug dealer named Skeeter. Things don’t go well.

The title. Rabbit Redux, speaks to a restoration, and, in the end, there is a restoration of sorts. It comes at a cost, of course, and most of Redux doesn’t seem redemptive at all. If anything, Rabbit is a bigger jerk than in Run, more confused, volatile, misogynist, and, adding a new wrinkle, racist. He descends into drug use and, regarding Jill, what could easily be construed as sexual abuse, and, frankly, is pretty reprehensible. It speaks to Updike’s skill that Rabbit still feels human and, in the end, pitiful, if not exactly sympathetic.

Parts of Redux are hard reading—the bleakness rarely lets up, and there’s a dearth of reader surrogates. Updike dares us to sympathize with Rabbit, the cruel screw-up, as he watches those around him collapse. And watch, he does; Rabbit’s defining characteristic is his passivity, his impotence. He is acted upon and around. Even in his seductions, which in Run were at least initiated by Angstrom himself, are thrust upon him by others. He allows terrible things to happen under his roof, allows his wife to leave when she all but tells him she wants him to fight for her, lets his son do as he pleases. In the end, even Rabbit’s redemption, such as it is, is a sad, passive affair, as he is restored, not by his own actions, but by the actions of a woman he has wronged.

In the end, the title ends up being a cruel irony: Rabbit’s restoration at the end of the novel only restores him to less than the state he was in at the beginning. He is renewed only in the sense that his situation has changed, for the worse—the man in the middle is the same as always, growing older as the world revolves around him. Rabbit stifles every attempt at epiphany, never striving to be a better man, drowning in his own confusion and pity, kept from the deepest depths by the outstretched hands of the people he hurts.

One more thing: I don’t know if it comes through in this review, but Rabbit Redux is a very strange, very adult book. It’s disturbing, creepy, and can be kind of disgusting. Let the buyer beware.

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

As a shark nudges silent creases of water ahead of it, the green fender makes ripples of air that break against the back of Rabbit's knees. The faster he walks the harder these ripples break. Behind his ear a childishly twanging voice pipes, "I beg your pardon. Are you Harry Angstrom?"

With a falling sensation of telling a lie Rabbit turns and half-whispers, "Yes."

I don't even know where to begin. Chris swore this book was amazing, and it delivered. It was a little eerie, too, that I picked this up just one day before John Updike died. Now I can say that I truly appreciate the greatness that we've lost.

Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is 26, married with one child and another on the way, and living in the suburbs of a small city in Pennsylvania. Rabbit was a regional basketball star in high school, something that he clings to as validation of his self now that he sells vegetable peelers to housewives. He also has one of the best names ever, and earned himself a place on my list ("Nathan's Favorite Names of Northeastern American Literature 2009"). Harry's frustration with his life, small in comparison to his brief fame, is omnipresent throughout the book, and stifling at times. His tendency to flee an uncomfortable, or less than ideal, situation results in darker consequences than I'd expected. This is a person totally absorbed in pursuing his desires completely, however much they change moment by moment. His train of thought flits from love to hate to remembering wondering as a child if pine trees would cushion your fall from a great height. Rabbit seems incapable of empathy, which must be nice, to some degree, to feel guiltless in following your every whim to the letter. But for being so flighty, Rabbit has some moments of surprising clarity.

"I'll tell you," he says. "When I ran from Janice I made an interesting discovery. If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price."

So sad and true, that sometimes to really be true to your self, you'll have to break someone else's heart. Fortunately for the sake of the story, Rabbit doesn't compromise. His heart leads him from his wife and back again several times, never showing much remorse, and justifying his actions with the thinnest excuses (such as "if she had said the right thing right before I left I definitely would have stayed").

What's most amazing is Updike's incredible insight into the human mind. His invented observance of every character's tics and motivations and inner thoughts are so believable as to be chilling, and definitely gripping. Following Rabbit's own inner-workings somehow manages to make such a despicable, thoughtless person seem sympathetic, like he doesn't know any better. And his prose is fuller and richer than I felt after downing a dozen donuts on Saturday. I was nervous writing this review, because there's no hope of me doing Updike and his writing any justice. Without a doubt, read this book.

Has anyone read Rabbit Redux or Rabbit is Rich? I want more Updike.

Rabbit Remembered by John Updike

This novella finds Rabbit's family in the early 2000's, ten years or so after Rabbit's death. Rabbit's wife Janice is now married to Rabbit's longtime friend/archrival Ronnie Harrison, with whose late wife Rabbit had an extended affair dating back to Rabbit is Rich. Rabbit's son Nelson, now approaching forty, is still living at home, separated from his wife Pru (also with whom Rabbit had sex--the man got around, basically). But the main plot thrust here is the appearance of Annabelle, Rabbit's illegitimate daughter by Ruth, the girl he shacked up with in the first book, Rabbit, Run. When the book opens, Ruth has died and on her deathbed told Annabelle the truth about her father, recommending--quite in the contrary to the way she acted when Rabbit visited her in the previous two books--that Annabelle look up the family she never knew so that she might be alone in the world.

This book really belongs to Rabbit's son Nelson, who welcomes Annabelle into the family with open arms despite resistance by Janice, Ronnie, and basically everyone else in the book. I'm not sure the novella was necessary, but it's nice to see that ten years on Nelson has cleaned up his drug habit and become a good person instead of the little shit he was in Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest; in his eagerness to make everything right he reflects his father's finest qualities and creates not only a welcome post-mortem assessment of his father's life but a sense of reprieve for Nelson, who throughout the first four books had not yet come into his own.

One of the strangest things about this one is that I am old enough to actually remember events and pop culture references that appear in this book--for example, the denouement of the story takes place as Nelson, Pru, Annabelle, and another character I haven't mentioned named Billy go to see American Beauty. Weird! But this is one of the reasons I am grateful for this epilogue; while Updike labors dutifully to encapsulate the America that exists in each decade, until now I have been unable to connect to the books by experience.

Carlton asked for my final thoughts on the whole series, and I told him I'd wait until I'd read this novella, so here they are, though not quite to the extent of my final thoughts on Harry Potter: I love these books. Much of it has to do with aspects I cannot describe to you, but I think that the crux of it is this: I have never read a book in which the life of one man is described in such intricate detail as the Rabbit series; no character is as real to me in the entire corpus of world literature. Updike gives us not only the great crisis moments of Rabbit's life, though they are there, but the mundane details, the songs on the radio, the changing of the movie marquee like the changing of the seasons, the small things that make up a human life. When beautiful moments appear--and in each book I can think of two or three passages which simply awe me every time I read them--it as if they are a validation of the infrequent but real moments of beauty that occur in my own life. The Rabbit novels are proof positive that beauty and insight are the realm of the common man as much as the romantic hero. The worst part of Rabbit Remembered is that it lacks a single moment as vivid and arresting as Rabbit's dream about death.

I wouldn't recommend reading the whole series to everyone; it's simply too detailed and, well, dull for everyone to appreciate. But I think that everyone here ought to read Rabbit, Run.

Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

I don't think that I'm revealing any spoilers by saying that at the end of the final full novel in the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, Rabbit at Rest, Rabbit dies. After all, it's right there in the title when you think about it, and furthermore, where else could a series meant to span a man's entire life end? If Rabbit doesn't die, the work is not complete.

But on another level, Rabbit must die because as his lover Ruth calls him in one of the novels, he is Mr. Death. For fifty-odd years Rabbit has lived a charm life while those who come into contact with him seem to drop like flies. There is his newborn child in Rabbit, Run (and the baby that Ruth supposedly aborts), the runaway girl Jill in Rabbit Redux. In Rabbit is Rich we get the news that the enigmatic black troublemaker Skeeter has been shot and Rabbit's parents have passed away; in this final novel we find that his wife Janice's mother has died and so has Janice's friend Peggy, whom Rabbit fucks when Janice leaves him in Rabbit Redux, and even some of Rabbit's friends have begun to die. Rabbit has always been preoccupied with death*, but he has always been one step ahead of it, leaving it for those in his wake.

In the first of this novel's thre parts, Rabbit saves his grandaughter Judy from drowning in a sailing accident, but has a heart attack in the process, and from that moment on is marked by death--so long Rabbit has slipped away from death, but to save his grandaughter he must face it head on. When, in the hospital, his daughter-in-law Pru remarks to his son Nelson that he is in an awfully good mood for having had a heart attack, Nelson says, "I had that baby sister, you know... who drowned... Maybe he was happy to save this one." And that is exactly it--it is as if Rabbit has been given a second chance to save his daughter but he must sacrifice himself in the process. Death must take someone, and to this point Rabbit has chosen the other over himself.

It is sad to see that despite this newfound goodness in Rabbit, the problems of life continue to dog him--chief among them is Nelson's coke addiction and resultant embezzlement of thousands of dollars from the family's Toyota dealership. In typical Rabbit fashion--that is to say, overpowered by his sexual organs--Rabbit makes a huge mistake that threatens to cripple his family. It would be nice to say that he has developed the courage to face the music, but the end of Rabbit's saga mirrors its beginning: Just as Rabbit, Run opens with an impromptu basketball game and an opportunistic flight from responsbility, so Rabbit hightails it down to Florida to escape his troubles, where he and Janice have a summer condo. His second and final heart attack occurs on the basketball court, where he is playing HORSE with a young black kid. It is the only place he has ever felt comfortable, himself; it is where he is not Harry but Rabbit, his secret and true self. And that, though he dies flawed and unredeemed, is some comfort.

*To show how striking Updike can be when writing about death, I've reproduced a passage from Rabbit, Run where Rabbit has a dream concerning the death of his newborn daughter which has always been moving to me. To read it view the full post:

During this stolen doze he has a vivid dream. He is alone on a large sporting field, or vacant lot, litered with small pebbles. In the sky two perfect discs, identical in size but one a dense white and the other slightly transparent, move toward each other slowly. At the moment they touch he feels frightened and a voice like over a loudspeaker at a track meet announces, "The cowslip swallows up the elder." The downward gliding of the top one continues steadily until the other, though the stronger, is totally eclipsed, and just one circle is before his eyes, pale and pure. He understands: "the cowslip" is the moon, and "the elder" the sun, and that what he has witnessed is the explanation of death: lovely life eclipsed by lovely death. Intensely relieved and excited, he realizes he must go forth from this field and found a new religion. There is a feeling of the discs, and the the echo of the voice, bending over him importunately, and he opens his eyes.

Rabbit is Rich by John Updike

Running out of gas, Rabbit Angstrom thinks as he stands behind the summer-dusty windows of the Springer Motors display room watching the traffic go by on Route 111, traffic somehow thin and scared compared to what it used to be. The fucking world is running out of gas.

John Updike's third Rabbit Angstrom novel, Rabbit is Rich, opens up to find Rabbit in an unaccustomed state: He is satisfied. In the ten years that have passed since Rabbit Redux, Rabbit has started working at his father-in-law's Toyota dealership and, ultimately, upon Springer's passing, found himself in charge of it. It is a cushy job and provides him with financial success. His relationship with his wife, while never quite what one might call affectionate, has become stable and intimate, and he no longer feels the pull to run. Rabbit has even made peace with Charlie Stavros, the man who cuckolded him in Rabbit Redux, working with him side-by-side at Springer Motors and going so far as to call him one of his best friends.

But satisfaction causes a few problems of its own, of course--the backdrop is spelled out in the opening paragraph above: During the 1979 gas crisis, Rabbit himself feels his life--and his country--"running out of gas," losing spirit and movement to gravity, torpor, and "satisfaction." No longer are we in a world where Rabbit Angstrom can run off and find a girl to fuck--he seems to stumble upon them without looking in the first two novels--because he's far too old and it seems far less appealing. When his son Nelson brings home two girls in succession, his friend Melanie and his knocked-up fiancee Pru, he marvels at his own disinterest in having sex with him. Unlike in Rabbit Redux, in which we find Rabbit in a "devil's threesome" with Jill and Skeeter, there are no opportunities for strange trysts and absurd drug-addled affairs. Once, Rabbit sleeps with his friend's wife (they pee on each other, no joke) as part of a wife-swapping scheme, but even that happens on a holiday to the Caribbean, an otherworld far removed from the real time and space of Rabbit's Pennsylvania.

External conflicts frame Rabbit's internal struggles: Foremost is the return of his son Nelson from Kent State, shiftless and angry, looking for a job at Rabbit's Toyota dealership so that he can both support his pregnant fiancee and avoid going back to college, which he feels is phony. Nelson and Rabbit do not understand each other: Rabbit refuses to give Nelson a job and resents his alienation from his son; Nelson seethes with anger and hatred for his father over the tragedies of the first two books (which I will not enumerate for Brent's sake). But unlike Nelson and Rabbit we have the benefit of Rabbit's very youth documented in Rabbit, Run, and we see how much Nelson is like his father, in his frequent nastiness toward Pru, in his stubborn avoidance of his problems, of the way he finally leaves his wife as she is about to give birth and escapes back to Ohio. What Rabbit only knows in a halfway fashion is that much of his resentment toward Nelson stems from how closely Nelson's life is coming to mirror his own. When he insists that Nelson is a "Springer, through and through," we recognize his willful ignorance. And then there is the girl who comes into the dealership one day in whom Rabbit also sees something from himself, and who he believes might be the child his ex-lover from Rabbit Run claims to have aborted.

And then there are the ghosts of the dead, whom Rabbit faces because in the downswing of his own life he faces his own death as well. Rabbit thinks of them while running near his vacation home in the Poconos:

Becky, a mere seed laid to rest, and Jill, a pale seedling held from the sun, hang in the earth, he imagines, like stars, and beyond them there are myriads, whole races like Cambodians, that have drifted into death. He is treading on them all, they are resilient, they are cheering him on, his lungs are burning, his heart hurts, he is a membrane removed from the hosts below, their filaments caress his ankles, he loves the earth, he will never make their mistake and die.

When Updike is really on, I can't think of anything I've ever read more affecting. Though I doubt any of the Rabbit books could be as powerful as the first, I liked this one much more than Rabbit Redux, because it is more full with moments like that one. Updike wisely tones down some of the period details, resisting the impulse to make Rabbit the "prototypical American," as I wrote about that book. Rabbit isn't a metaphor; he's his own man, unique, individual, lonely, and that's why we identify with him.

Up next: Rabbit at Rest.

Rabbit Redux by John Updike

When Updike published Rabbit, Run, his protagonist Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom was only two years his junior; at intervals of almost exactly ten years he wrote the next three Rabbit books, wherein Rabbit ages at exactly the same rate. This is, I think, an achievement of unparalleled ambition. Rabbit is Updike's everyman, and it seems as if Updike spends each of his ten years gathering material for Rabbit; for this reason Updike's legacy is tied to his character just as Updike's life is. The effect is like meeting an old friend--ten years have passed since you've last seen each other, but life has not stalled since then, and Rabbit grew with the rest of his generation in real time.

Rabbit Redux finds Rabbit back with his wife Janice, living in a small starter home in the suburbs of Brewer, Pa. with their now 12-year old son Nelson. Harry's infidelity and the tragedies of the first book (which I will not recount because Brent is going to read it) have been pushed to the corners of the Angstroms' consciousness, but not forgotten; they inform much of what the characters do or think. When Janice leaves Rabbit to stay with her lover, Greek car salesman Charlie Stavros, Rabbit, through a strange series of plot turns, takes in a rich young runaway from Connecticut named Jill, who pays her rent in nookie. It isn't long before a friend of hers, a young black radical named Skeeter, ends up at Rabbit's house on the lam from the cops.

What this sets up is a strange chunk of the novel in which Rabbit, Nelson, Jill, and Skeeter live in Rabbit's house in a peculiar commune-type situation: Skeeter, who styles himself as a "Black Jesus," spreads his dogma to the other three during nightly discussions. I looked for a passage from these discussions to quote, but I got lost and exhausted really quick; they're dense and full of odd anger and mishmash radicalism. It is this section that didn't feel quite right to me--Rabbit, despite his frequent escapes from domesticity, is a conservative man who believes strongly in the Vietnam war and is suspicious of blacks. In some way I think that Rabbit clings to this life because it is peculiar and perverse, and refreshing after a stagnant and not particularly satisfying twelve years of marriage, but I find some scenes (especially those in which Rabbit does not rebuke Skeeter for his savageness toward Jill or Nelson) to not quite jibe with Rabbit's character. The culmination of this is a scene in which Rabbit and Skeeter very nearly double-team Jill in the living room--what the fuck? It's Updike's prose that is the saving grace here, turning the ridiculous into the believable.

The other thing I didn't like quite so much about Rabbit Redux is that Updike seems to keen to turn Rabbit into a reflection of the American psyche. In Rabbit, Run, Rabbit was just Rabbit, and didn't need to be anymore--we could identify in him the human desires to be loved and to be free, and all the mess and complications that result from them. But in making Rabbit the prototypical American--and not the prototypical human being--Updike actually narrows his focus and Rabbit's relevance. Updike places Rabbit Redux squarely against a backdrop of social and political change and upheaval: the moon landing, Vietnam, race riots. At one point, Rabbit has a lengthy argument about Vietnam with his Stavros, his wife's paramour (who is a dove). And then, of course, the Skeeter sections. These all have their charms and their positives, but forty years later, I find this aspect of the book to be the least appealing.

Of course, I still recommend this book strongly, if only not quite as strongly as I do Rabbit, Run. Up next: Rabbit is Rich!

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

I love this book for reasons I don't think that I can fully explain. I first read it some years ago solely because I had picked it up at a used bookstore--I don't think that it's something I would have sought ought if I hadn't simply stumbled across it. The plot is mind-numbingly simple: Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, former basketball star and current twenty-something nobody, leaves his pregnant wife. That's it. Sounds like a page turner, right?

I didn't think so either, but now it's one of my favorite books. Updike really seems to capture the experience of being human--the fickle, unconnected nature of our emotions and the petty meanderings of our thought. One of the reasons creating believable characters is so difficult is that we spend so much of our lives doing menial and insignificant things, thinking obtuse thoughts and wasting time. Characters are too often constructed around plot; they do concrete, planned-out things, but that isn't what life is like. It's a hard thing to explain, I think, but the point is that Updike makes Rabbit seem like a living, breathing, eating, shitting, fucking thing. Someone you could meet on the street. When tragedy befalls Rabbit, most of which is the result of his own negligence and monstrosity, it feels frighteningly real. (I would talk more about what exactly happens to Rabbit--two particularly heartbreaking scenes come to mind--but I don't want to ruin it for anyone who might read this book. Which you should.)

But also I love this book because of Updike's style. He has a real sense of verbal economy--no word is extraneous or out of place--but still remains versatile and adapts his style to each scene. I was reading this at the same time as The Corrections, and the simplicity and starkness of Updike's style made Franzen sour to the taste, in a way. Here's a phrase I particularly liked:

With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they're a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone.

Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. Maybe no one else feels this way, but that's the sort of sentence that makes reading rewarding for me. Updike takes a concept that informs just about every one of Rabbit, Run's 284 pages and distills it into eleven words: Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. Jonathan Franzen would have turned that into a sentence with eighteen distinct clauses that took up half a page. But there simply is no way to make Updike's sentence any more succinct, and I think that makes it beautiful. But again, maybe that's just me. I repeat this sentence over and over in my head.

So, I try not to re-read books (because there are so many left to read), but I want to read the sequels to this book: Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest, which detail the rest of Rabbit's life from his twenties to his death. I doubt the novels where Rabbit is older will speak to me as strongly, but I've heard that the books themselves actually get better.

Sidenote: The cover above says "Rabbit, Run, by the author of Rabbit Redux." The cover of mine, which is otherwise similar, says, "Rabbit, Run, by the author of Rabbit is Rich." What book have you ever seen where the cover namechecks the sequel?