London Review of Books Vol. 12 No.

21 · 8 November 1990

pages 19-20 | 2596 words

Rabbit Resartus

Edward Pearce

The thought did occur during the Eighties that it wouldn’t do to leave Rabbit Angstrom – Toyota dealer,
wife-swapper, gone-to-seed athlete, conservative, citizen of Brewer, Pennsylvania, ex-working man,
Scandinavian American and emblematic mess – just where he was after a mere three books. Indeed,
although Rabbit, at the end of what is now a tetralogy, looks sick to the terminal rim, I would hesitate to
take bets that resurrection is ruled out.

Thirty years ago John Updike gave us in Rabbit Run Harold ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, the basketball-player lately
wed to tippling slatternly Janice Springer, who failed to cope. When baby Becky drowns through the
negligence of Janice, Rabbit runs away. In Rabbit Redux, the title elegantly lifted from Trollope, Rabbit
hits the Sixties, begets or does not beget a child on Ruth, loses Janice temporarily to Charlie Stavros,
ultimately his most reliable friend, strikes up with crazy Jill and crazier black Skeeter and literally walks
through fire.

Rabbit is rich (1980) is the account of a Rabbit made comfortable when a long-reconciled Janice inherits
her father Fred’s motor dealership, which he has enriched with a Toyota agency. Rabbit speculates, at
the height of inflation, in Krugerrands, makes love on a pile of them and sells in time, tries for one girl
but, in a rich man’s yachting swop, draws another, Thelma Harrison, who, unnervingly, loves him.＊

That brings us to the start of Rabbit at Rest and represents the barest narrative bones. Sex plus money,
plus a slick of current events, plus the small-town scene: the casual impulse may be to expect the least –
a soap, a saga, a good thick book for the airport lobby, a comfortable fuck-flecked yardage of domestic
aggravation. Nothing could be more systematically wrong.
It is the genius of Updike that he can take a weak popular medium and invest it with his own delicate
understanding. The tenderness of Updike allows complexities to bloom. Harry is supposed to be a
conservative, and indeed he will vote for Reagan. But he has little of the hardness, indifference or
aggression of many conservatives. He is curious and without contempt, capable of learning new things
and people, oddly tolerant of blacks and gays, an admirer of the Jews. His prejudices incline towards the
past: he is a laudator temporis acti, a melancholy conservative rather than a sour or combative one. Long
ago and here in Britain a radio interviewer observed to Updike that Rabbit Angstrom was broadly a low
odious redneck. The author quizzically dissented. He liked Harry. Although not obviously political, Updike
was saying (in 1971, the era of Vietnam, the Nixon Presidency and much lightweight anti-Americanism)
that he was essentially happy with America.

Harry is a bundle of appetites and relationships, given to taking what he wants, yet imbued with old
loyalties: to his own townships – Brewer, Mount Judge and Penn Park – the way they had been, to the
women he has slept with, to the houses he has lived in, to Baby Becky and, not at all self-pityingly, to his
old, slowly hazing-out disappearing self. For all his appetites and misdemeanours, Harry is
understandable and, if understood, forgivable. He is a lens or prism, a middling man who serves his
creator by perceiving and assessing, without quite judging, the United States. In Rabbit is rich, he rails
against the A-rabs who with their oil price hike have struck at the automobile tradition, at the games of
chicken in which two petrol-devourers would have run at each other head-on. He laments the loss
(yesterday) of good, old, no-tomorrow, spend-and-throw-away America.

In Rabbit at Rest, older, sadder, what we call mellow, he mildly regrets the passing of US power and is
misunderstood to speak of himself. He is talking to a woman sales representative, new, assured –
unthinkable to his generation, leave alone to Fred Springer, whose car lot this had been.

‘Do you ever get the feeling,’ he asks her, ‘now that Bush is in, that we’re kind of on the sidelines, that
we’re like a big Canada, and that what we do doesn’t much matter to anybody else? Maybe that’s the
way it ought to be. It’s a kind of relief, I guess, not to be the big cheese.’

Elvira has decided to be amused ... ‘You matter to everybody, Harry, if that’s what you’re hinting at’.

He insists that he was not talking about himself but about the country. But then, handy-dandy, which is
Rabbit Angstrom, which the USA?
Symbolism isn’t what it was, thank God, not, at least, in the self-conscious attitudinising French way –
and Updike, after all, is a relaxed, storytelling naturalist. But one never quite escapes from the idea of
Angstrom as intended emblem of the States. Updike is usually too shrewd to spell this out: he has, after
all, been the victim of one PhD mind which read into Harry’s serviceable Swedish surname (minus its
umlaut), the angst upon which young academics new to the scholarly meadow delight to nibble. But
there is a passage late in the present volume where Harry, to please his granddaughter Judy and her
guide troop, dresses for the Fourth of July parade in the full costume of Uncle Sam, with defective
goatee, star-spattered waistcoat and striped, flared top hat. It is a crude notion for Updike, an
uncharacteristic piece of underlining, but it gives the symbolic school of Angstrom studies all the
footnotes it needs. And if Rabbit Angstrom isn’t symbolic, he is jolly representative, a walking emporium
of American fits and starts. The fecklessness of fleeing Harry in the late Fifties, Harry-meets-the-youth-
revolt in the Sixties, his son Nelson attending Kent State University, Ohio, where the National Guard once
opened fire, Angstrom making it and effecting entry across class lines into the Flying Eagle Country Club:
all these events are heavy-scented with what bullying activists call relevance – political and social
relevance (in the given time-snapshot of each book) to the doings of the whole country.

And so much about Harry is echt American: the consumerism (he avidly reads Which and Consumer
Reports), the hurry and the shortcut-taking, the fascination with statistics (Toyota sales or baseball hits),
even the preoccupied little runs at lust. Rabbit at Rest highlights Harry’s very American self-indulgence –
a diagnosed heart-case wolfing Munchies. Appetite is never far from centre-stage. More of the verbal
palette goes into descriptions of glutinous delight – of eating a macadamia nut or a corn crisps – than
into the perfunctory litany of sexual congress.

Harry is also an American for our time in that his values shift as he comes to live uneasily with the
country’s didactic hedonism. One particular instance will give Updike most trouble as Rabbit at Rest
comes to be reviewed. The author has a large element of intelligent social conservatism, and his account
of the homosexual Lyle, Nelson’s accountant – indifferent, rapacious, doomed by Aids, and annihilatory
of poor Nelson, Harry’s son and truly a rabbit – will, on my guess, turn upon Updike that most American
of things, the special-interest pressure group, with its gift for orchestrated anathema and insistence on a
correct line.

Rabbit at Rest depicts a slowed-down Rabbit (Rabbit in a Florida condominium, for heaven’s sake) quietly
destroying himself by an inert life-pattern and too many fats in his diet. It shows the wretched Nelson,
weak, clamorous, wrecker of an expensive car in the previous volume, stealing money (by accounting
devices discovered for him by HIV-positive Lyle) to pay for Lyle’s medication and his own addiction to the
drug alloy, crack. If there is analogy in this book, Updike’s feelings about present generation USA must be
etched in ice.
Harry and Janice are coping in semi-retirement with a Florida observed by Updike with a beautifully
phrased, unsnobbish dismissiveness – the State Tourist Board will be roasting his image at Statewide
clambakes. Nelson and his wife Pru visit with their two children. Pru is tight-mouthed and careful, Nelson
fazed, irked and erratic, not quite holding the wheel. A sail-board trip involving Harry and the
granddaughter who echoes dead Becky, a watermark in this text, ends with a spill. Judy is saved from
Becky’s fate but at the cost of Harry’s having a heart attack on the beach – the occasion of long, detailed
hospital and operating-theatre copy. Return to Pennsylvania brings desultory re-acquaintance with
characters from his past: Charlie Stavros, himself heart-bypassed, coolly sidelining life but still good for
sense and solid advice; Thelma Harrison, who loves him and dies by swift degrees; Ronnie Harrison
spitting hatred for Rabbit at her graveside. There are also the great inanimates of this chronicle: Fred
Springer’s Barcalounger, the Chuck Wagon Café (big in an earlier book, now a Pizza Express), the old
Springer house, the Norway maples of the street and, of course, the car lot.

The Angstroms have learned from Pru that Nelson is on crack; they learn by degrees that he and Lyle
have systematically robbed the business and Toyota. Janice, long limply obdurate, begins to pull herself
together in crisis; Nelson goes to rehabilitation and comes back with the secular piety Americans use as a
substitute for religion; the Japanese, with all the courtly grace of a ship’s flogging, delete Springer
Motors from their agency. Harry, angiplasted, ignores his diet, has intercourse with his daughter-in-law, is
again estranged from Janice, makes a final flight from Pennsylvania to Florida (Rabbit’s last run), plays a
casual (and quite crazy) street game of ball before suffering a massive infarction – he has been with a
black youth, Tiger, who, echoing Rabbit Mark One, runs away. Harry is brought to hospital where we
suppose he will die. Americans might prefer none of this to be symbolic.

When Mr Shimada of Toyota Head Office, Torrence, California, delivers his sentence, he makes some
ferocious observations:

In United States is fascinating for me, struggle between order and freedom. Everybody mention
freedom all papers terevision anchor people everybody. Much rove and talk of freedom. Skateboarders
want freedom to use beach board-walks and knock down poor old people. Brack men with radios want
freedom to self-express and make super-jumbo noise. Men want freedom to have guns and shoot others
on freeways in random sport. In California dog shit much surprises me. Everywhere dog shit dogs must
have important freedom to shit everywhere.

With a flash of wide white cuff, he taps the page of figures on Harry’s desk.
 Too much disorder. Too much dog shit. Pay by end of August, no prosecution for criminal activities. But
no more Toyota franchise at Singer Motors.

Japanese perplexity awakening to contempt dismisses Harry, effectively dismisses the United States. This
passage, with its burden of foreign diction so liable to be farcical, is not on the plane of brilliant writing
which again and again illuminates Rabbit at Rest. But it is a level judgment on American society.
‘Freedom to self-express and make super-jumbo noise’.

The direction of this book is quite close to Kipling, the Kipling of ‘The Gods of the Copybook Headings’.
The burned hand has come wambling back to the fire. Interestingly, the tolerance the author held out to
semi-stoic Harry is not available to Nelson, chief wambler. Even though Harry’s fatty appetites will kill
him, and though those compulsive nibblings are cognate with Nelson’s horrendous addiction, he retains
Updike’s pained sympathy. ‘Daddy has a lot of little pipes and things,’ says the innocent granddaughter.
Nelson is a whiner, a shifter of responsibility, a rationaliser away of fault and consequence. Harry can
only destroy himself: a wider spectrum is vulnerable to his opiate-fuelled son. The debts accumulated by
addiction and embezzlement threaten mother, wife and children. When Mann delimited the feeble
cobweb spirit of Hanno Buddenbrook, he was striking up as artist against the artistic spirit and its frailty,
and praising good North German Protestant drawers of bills of lading. Updike here suggests a general
rottenness, a going to the dogs which is not intelligently to be dismissed. He is speaking to America, and
beyond, as wry, sophisticated, ironical blimp. It is doubtful if the good humour Mr Updike felt for his
country in more tumultuous times any longer holds. Too sceptical to make anything as crass as an
indictment, he has nevertheless delivered a true bill, and it is a bill of mortality.

This grave purpose alone, never mind the art of the writing, should wipe out jibes about soap opera. To
make a comparison with another long, many-volumed family chronicle, we should try Updike against
Galsworthy, not a fashionable but a proper and observant writer. The flaw in The Forsyte Saga lies in
Galsworthy’s softness. Notoriously, he came to scoff and remained to take tea. The satire of A Man of
Property and In Chancery became the near-celebration of later books, and the wimpish immunity from
real pain and consequence of the later generation of Fleurs and Michael Mounts let the Saga fade and
decline until, like the King Emperor, it slowly sank.

Updike began with affection, and he never loses tolerance – the fat Harry of Rest is kin to the slender
Harry of Run – but the Angstroms, far from ensucring the palate as the books develop, become ashes in
the mouth. A tender god to his characters, Updike is yet ready to chastise them and make a historical
point to slobbish, devouring, air-rotting Western man.
The writing has that fish-in-water faculty of being able to do anything. Unlike Saul Bellow, with his
epigrams and mandarin manner, Updike can be high or demotic as mood or requirement takes him. It
gives him the power to devastate, as here on Reagan and Bush: ‘at least he was dignified, and had that
dream distance; the powerful thing about him as President was that you never knew how much he knew,
nothing or everything, he was like God that way, you had to do a lot of it yourself. With this new one you
know he knows something, but it seems a small something.’ That surely is the last word on the last two
Presidencies. Then there is Harry on history, which he reads a little: ‘It has always vaguely interested him,
that sinister mulch of facts our little lives grow out of before joining the mulch themselves, the fragile,
brown, rotting layers of previous deaths, layers that if deep enough and squeezed hard enough make
coal as in Pennsylvania.’

Updike is an unconceited writer who makes grave things accessible. The work achieves a certain
grandeur: it makes a perambulation of the walls of a stricken city. It represents the superb conclusion of
a historic labour of writing, a roman fleuve undertaken in the age of river-pollution. There is no living
writer I would as quickly hasten to read. ………….

Book Review: Rabbit at Rest, by John Updike

Posted by: Robert Lashley February 3, 2006 in Book Reviews

Out of what many American literature enthusiasts call the Big Four (Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Norman
Mailer, and John Updike), it is Updike who is the most underrated, as well as the most likable. Granted
he has his flaws: few writers as gifted has him have resorted to formula more, and ever since Couples got
him on the cover of Time, he has more than often resorted to a D.H Laurence-styled sex scene, which a
previous generation found licentiously liberating, but I find unreadable. But unlike Bellow, Roth and
Mailer, he almost always has a genuine affinity for the women his protagonists sleep with. Another thing
that separates him from the aforementioned three is that Updike understands that his protagonists have
real human flaws, a literary trait that the other men have failed to grasp after dozens of books and
thousands of pages. Even in race, Updike stands tall, as his progressive moderation has a basic decency
and common sense that towers over the Bellow and Mailer’s diametrically opposite reactionary politics.

Oh yeah, there’s one more thing, he’s one of the greatest stylists in the history of the English language.
America’s preeminent Nabokovophile, Updike has crafted his own Antierra out of the American suburb.
Like many great writers, his body of work is inconsistent: the aforementioned Couples is cheap
Penthouse porn, Month of Sundays tries to fuse Hawthorne’s Black Veil with the sexual revolution of the
70s and ends up grasping neither, while Brazil, Memories of the Ford Administration, and Villages (his
worst and most recent novel) find him repeating himself. But his best books could take up a small library.
1964’s The Centaur turned the story of a father and a son caught up in a rainstorm into a Greek epic.
Roger’s Version and In the Beauty of the Lilies effortlessly fused religion, pop culture, and the sexual
perversity that men can sometimes stoop to. The collection of his early stories, published in late 2003, is
excessive, but the best stories show a master at the form of short fiction.

But the books that Updike will be remembered for, and rightly so, will be the one’s in his rabbit series, a
four book tale detailing the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Through four novels, Angstrom moves from
being a basketball player, to a single dad, to a wealthy owner of a car dealership. And throughout that
transition, Angstrom remains a brutally misogynist, anti-social, ugly American bastard. He is also wildly
successful in almost everything he does, no matter how hard he tries to do otherwise. In each book,
Updike captures a certain American feeling in Rabbit’s ambling and bumbling ascension: Angstrom’s
blood boiling misanthropy symbolized the darker aesthetics of the Baby Boom era in 1960’s Rabbit Run;
1969’s Rabbit Redux saw a slice of the racial and sexual schizophrenia of the 60s; and 1979’s Rabbit is
Rich showed a generation coming to terms with age and money. Rabbit at Rest, the book in which
Angstrom’s luck begins to go sour, is his masterpiece, a Greek tragedy articulated through the downfall of
a flawed nuclear family. To the extent that he is successful in doing so makes it his best novel and one of
the very best American novels ever written.

The first part of the book finds Rabbit genuflecting on his “wild, American luck”. Too old to sleep around,
or, let me rephrase that, too old to be good looking enough for women to give him some, Rabbit
wonders around from wife to friends to old mistresses. His car dealerships, save his son’s, are wildly
successful. He has a a loving family and a son with a wife and grandkids. Yet, he is miserable. Almost
brutal towards his wife, he throws a temper tantrum when he finds out that Janice is basically running
his businesses. He meanders in his son’s dealership and family and even cusses out his grandkids. I
repeat his grandkids. In what basically is an American Eden, he walks out, complaining that the clouds
are too big, the light is too bright, and the wings are too heavy.

Ah, but pretty soon darker clouds begin to form in the horizon of our misanthropic hero’s seemingly
endless summer. Rabbit discovers that his son’s dealership is losing money hand over fist, and macho
pontification and belittlement, the father’s raison d’etre, ensues. But shortly afterwards, he finds out the
real reason why the dealership is losing money: Nelson’s a crackhead. Nelson, the child Angstrom
abandoned in the first book and the sweet curious boy and teenager in the second and third has become
a sobbing, hypersensitive, drug-addicted bastard, so consumed with his own pain and self-pity that he
doesn’t mind beating up his wife to numb it.

Nelson’s base head pathos comes to fruition when Pru calls both Rabbit and Janice to pick his son up
after a domestic violence incident. The conflict spurs Nelson to go in to rehab, Pru to come in closer
contact with the family, and Rabbit to lose that majestic luck that came so easy to him for 56 years.
Suddenly everything that Rabbit touches doesn’t turn to gold. More than that, it’s destroyed. His friends,
long men of leisure and sexual play, start to die off and realize how bloody fucking miserable their lives
were. Janice, the character that Updike is the most sympathetic to, develops her own life to the point
that Rabbit seems like an antiquated albatross. And Rabbit brutally undercuts his son and the Son, in
response, whines like a child, symbolizing two dysfunctional schools of male thought that have been
pervasive through the 20th and 21st century.

But his slow, gradual slide becomes a quick and steep one when Rabbit decides to sleep with Pru. When
found out, Janice moves away, Nelson’s heartbroken when Pru tells her, and even his grandkids(I repeat,
his grandkids) come to the realization that everyone who has came in contact with Rabbit Angstrom has
found out, that he’s a fucking bum. And this, contrary to the his conservative fans’ assertions, is the
theme of the Rabbit books; not “the plight of the suburban male” but the portrait of a man who has
everything and blows it, not because he’s “oppressed” but because he’s a couple of humanity genes
short. The final part of the book finds Rabbit doing what he did in the beginning of the book and what he
did at the beginning of his first book: Running. He goes from place to place, hotel to hotel and, in the
ultimate T.S Eliot ” in my end is my beginning” moment, from basketball court to court, having a heart
attack while shooting hoops with black street toughs, leading to the final, climatic scenes with his family.

Along the way there are the usual delightful literary accoutrements from Updike. Once again I have to
refer to his prose, as even his worst books have a quality burnished by his style. Like Nabokov, Updike has
a lovely ear for surfeit detail, but in his own way, clear with a language invested in the American idiom. In
that lyrical sense, Rabbit, with his compositely flawed sense of manhood and his good natured
demagoguery is a Hemingway hero in a time where Hemingway heroes are obsolete to the point of
being dangerous. (Side note: I like Hemingway, I just know his flaws) Rabbit’s misogyny, which critics
have harped on, is a tricky issue. There are books to hang him on in that department, (Witches of
Eastwick), but this isn’t one of them, and Updike has sided with his better angels on that subject the
overwhelming majority of the time. And one shouldn’t pin Updike, a poor kid from a Pennsylvania sticks
who ended up being the most cosmopolitan American literary critic since William Dean Howells,
translating Borges and backing writers as diverse as Alice Munro to Gayl Jones, to Rabbit, an all American
schmuck who curses out women like a gangster rapper.

In June of this year, Updike will release Terrorist, his 22nd novel about a disillusioned 18-year-old boy
who discovers radical Islam. It will be by far the most radical and the most controversial book Updike has
ever written, but the subject, the tangled web woven from, to quote Greil Marcus, “that old, weird,
America”, is his bread and butter. His last novel might have flopped, but I’m betting he still has a grand
slam in him. But even if he doesn’t; Updike has done more than enough. His best work, and there’s a lot
of it, has given him an indelible place in our American letters. He is one of our literary masters and
Rabbit at Rest is where he is at the peak of his powers. ………………..

The Guardian - Rabbit At Rest, John Updike

James Wood

Thursday 25 October 1990 08.00 BST

Floating in a nimbus of greed and deceit, Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is America's cloudy barometer (the
needle always pointing to bad) and John Updike its lofty rain-maker, deluging his hero and his country in
a shower of words. This disjunction Updike and Rabbit at their different work has always been one of the
satisfactions of the Rabbit series: Harry, with his vulgarity, his crude simplicities, his clumsy yearning,
placed and propelled by Updike's rich prose, its elastic brilliance. Rabbit is the swine before which
Updike casts his pearls: beauty and the beast.

The beast, in three previous novels, has been running, returning, rich, and is now at rest. Resting, for
Harry, means living in retirement with Janice in a Florida apartment, while his son Nelson runs the Toyota
garage in Brewer, Pennsylvania. Rabbit is now 55, has reached the national speed limit of his life, and is
vainly trying to keep his gassy 230lb bulk on the road. The direction, as it always is in Updike, is towards
death. Nowadays, Rabbit's body is stabbed by strange pains, he feels 'mysteriously full in the chest, full
of some pressing essence.' Death-filled thoughts come easily and frequently. 'Being alive is monstrous.
Those crazy molecules' but death is still worse, and whenever death approaches, Rabbit feels an urge to
eat. So he eats a lot.

In fact this book groans with food, Updike's prose lavish with every granular detail. Rabbit likes 'anything
salty and easy to chew,' which means Planters peanut bars, California corn chips, Macadamia nuts,
pretzels, as well as candied yams, pecan pie, Key-lime pie and vanilla Cameos.

Rabbit guzzles anything he guzzles America in fact, and Updike turns America and everything in it into a
vast foodstuff, instantly and deliciously consumable. Rabbit for instance, admires the 'amazing protein
perfect' of his little granddaughter's hair, and while driving past, thinks of Washington as 'the frozen
heart, ice cream white, of the grand old republic.' Harry's own heart is not too good in fact. Down in
Florida, he has a heart attack, and Updike typically relishes with grotesque finesse, the chance to go
inside Rabbit's body, to go even further into matter, towards the very heart itself. Drugged and wired up,
Rabbit hears his doctor tell Janice that 'it's the usual thing tired and stiff and full of crud. It's a typical
American heart, for his age and economic status.' The heart of America, it seems, is not frozen
Washington but Rabbit's frantic piece of muscle. Rabbit's heart it seems, is not really his own, but
America's; an American heart.

Here is one of the threads of the Rabbit series, stretching right back to Rabbit Run: Rabbit is singularly
average, and there is comedy and grimness in this. He is never truly his own master, but is owned by
America. His every thought is mediated by television, by the advertisers, by averageness. His
blockheaded moralism, his sexism, his endless lechery. His life, he reflects sadly, near the end of the
book "seems no realer than the lives on TV shows," except that his is not interrupted every six minutes
by commercial breaks. Owned by America, he is also (paradoxically) lost in it, rattling around the vast
American drum: on the way to the funeral of his mistress Thelma, he and Janice lose their way and end
up in a shopping mall, complete with six-theatre cinema. Lying in the hospital bed, Harry feels he has at
last attained serenity, is 'at last at the still centre,' but this still centre is entirely artificial and medicinal
'the drug-induced peace inside his rib cage.'

Nelson, meanwhile, has been inducting other drugs (cocaine, some crack) and running through $200,000
of Toyota money. Harry and Janice pack him off to a rehab centre, but Toyota strips the garage of its
franchise. Things are winding down. Harry, as if to throw in a last misdemeanor before his demise, sleeps
with Nelson's wife Pru, his own daughter-in-law ("This is the worst thing you've ever done," Janice tells
him). Unwilling to face the music when the news of this infidelity leaks out, Rabbit drives on his own
from Brewer south to Florida, where he has another heart attack, and dies. Or almost. Updike's last three
self-conscious words of this vast four-book series, are " . . . enough. Maybe. Enough." The end is left
open and ambiguous, ripe for resurrection.

This self-consciousness is fitting. The Rabbit series has become something of a joke, an enterprise that
teeters (deliberately) on the edge of parody. It is a kind of jokey balancing act: to what extent can the
writer meet America on its own terms the food, the Toyota garage, the soap opera triviality of it and still
produce art? Is it possible to turn the trivial into something significant, and still leave the triviality
untouched, naked and for all to see? Updike's Rabbit books aim for the unremarkable density of film,
and yet a film with Updike's gorgeous verbal wrappings, the miraculous openings of his prose. Harry (like
Updike) finds "something tragic in matter itself, that keeps watch no matter how great our misery."
Updike's prose, with its plush attention to detail, is a lament for this sad stolidness. He has a nostalgia for
the present. One sentence, selected from many candidates: "A sense of doom regrows its claws around
his heart: little prongs like those that hold fast a diamond solitaire." Harry imagines his grandaughter and
how she sees the world with her young eyes, "every little thing vivid and sharp and new, packed full of
itself like a satin valentine," but it is Updike who at 58, has the artistry of his long maturity, but still the
relentless and greedy eyes of the child.

…………..

The Washington Post – Obituaries

By Matt Schudel

Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Updike was best known for peering into the bedrooms and unquiet minds of suburban couples and
small-town entrepreneurs in dozens of novels and stories that mirrored America's march from postwar
optimism to the dimming dreams of a chastened generation.

His most famous works were probably the quartet of novels about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, whose life
was a continual search, whether in business or the beds of other men's wives, for the crystallized feeling
of joy he had known as a small-town high school basketball star.

Updike was often labeled the bard of suburban adultery -- "a subject which, if I have not exhausted, has
exhausted me," he once said -- and many of his early works of fiction were considered scandalously
explicit. Updike's reputation as a novelist and a sexual provocateur in print was secured with his novel
"Couples," which became a No. 1 bestseller in 1968. The book, which tells the intertwined stories of the
longings of five New England couples, landed Updike on the cover of Time magazine under the heading
"The Adulterous Society." "People read it as a report from the field," The Washington Post's David
Streitfeld wrote in 1998, "wondering in amazement if their neighbors were really living such erotic lives."

Updike's literary reach went far beyond a study of the nation's sexual mores. His first novel, "The
Poorhouse Fair" (1959), features a 90-year-old protagonist; "Brazil" (1994) sets the timeless Tristan and
Isolde love story in modern South America; and the 2006 novel, "Terrorist," views the world through a
post-9/11 prism.

…Updike may have been the finest prose stylist of his generation, with a precisely calibrated command of
observation, pacing and diction that made his novels and essays extended poetic evocations.

"No one else using the English language over the past 2 1/2 decades has written so well in so many ways
t he," critic Paul Gray wrote in 1982, in one of Time magazine's two cover stories about Updike.

In "Rabbit at Rest" (1990), Updike turns his eye to something as mundane as a character munching on a
bag of chips: "Keep on Krunchin', the crinkly pumpkin-colored bag advises him. He loves the salty ghost
of Indian corn and the way each thick flake, an inch or so square, solider than a potato chip and flatter
than a Frito and less burny to the tongue than a triangular red-peppered Dorito sits edgy in his mouth
and then shatters and dissolves between his teeth."

…"It is a book that works by a steady accumulation of a mass of brilliant details, of shades and nuances,
of the byplay between one sentence and the next, and no short review can properly honor its intricacy
and richness," critic Jonathan Raban wrote in his Washington Post review of "Rabbit at Rest."
The two final volumes in the series won the Pulitzer Prize and prompted critic Thomas M. Disch to take
the measure of the novels: "Updike's Rabbit and the landscape he inhabits more closely resemble the
world I've witnessed during the time span of the four novels -- 1959 through 1989 -- than any other work
of American literature I know."

………………………

New York Times - 'Rabbit at Rest'

Review by JOYCE CAROL OATES

Published: September 30, 1990

With this elegiac volume, John Updike's much-acclaimed and, in retrospect, hugely ambitious Rabbit
quartet - ''Rabbit, Run'' (1960), ''Rabbit Redux'' (1971), ''Rabbit Is Rich'' (1981) and now ''Rabbit at Rest'' -
comes to an end. The final word of so many thousands is Rabbit's, and it is, singularly, ''Enough.'' This is,
in its context, in an intensive cardiac care unit in a Florida hospital, a judgment both blunt and touchingly
modest, valedictory and yet enigmatic. As Rabbit's doctor has informed his wife, ''Sometimes it's time.''
But in the nightmare efficiency of late 20th-century medical technology, in which mere vegetative
existence may be defined as life, we are no longer granted such certainty.

''Rabbit at Rest'' is certainly the most brooding, the most demanding, the most concentrated of John
Updike's longer novels. Its courageous theme - the blossoming and fruition of the seed of death we all
carry inside us - is struck in the first sentence, as Harry Angstrom, Rabbit, now 55 years old, more than
40 pounds overweight, waits for the plane that is bringing his son, Nelson, and Nelson's family to visit
him and his wife in their semiretirement in Florida: he senses that it is his own death arriving, ''shaped
vaguely like an airplane.'' We are in the final year of Ronald Reagan's anesthetized rule - ''Everything
falling apart, airplanes, bridges, eight years . . . of nobody minding the store, making money out of
nothing, running up debt, trusting in God.''

This early note, so emphatically struck, reverberates through the length of the novel and invests its
domestic-crisis story with an unusual pathos. For where in previous novels, most famously in ''Couples''
(1968), John Updike explored the human body as Eros, he now explores the body, in yet more detail, as
Thanatos. One begins virtually to share, with the doomed Harry Angstrom, a panicky sense of the body's
terrible finitude, and of its place in a world of other, competing bodies: ''You fill a slot for a time and then
move out; that's the decent thing to do: make room.''
Schopenhauer's definition of walking as ''arrested falling'' comes to mind as one navigates Rabbit's
downward plunge. There is an angioplasty episode, recounted in John Updike's typically meticulous
prose, that is likely to be quite a challenge for the hypochondriacs and physical cowards among us. (I'm
not sure I met the challenge - I shut my eyes a few times.) There are candid and un-self-pitying
anecdotes of open-heart surgery. We come to know how it probably feels to suffer not one heart attack
but two, how it feels to strain one's ''frail heart'' by unconsciously (that is, deliberately) abusing one's
flabby body.

A good deal is made, in the Florida scenes, of the American retired elderly. Rabbit thinks, with typical
Rabbit crudeness, ''You wonder if we haven't gone overboard in catering to cripples.'' A former mistress
of Rabbit's named Thelma (see ''Rabbit Is Rich'') reappears in these pages as a lupus sufferer, soon to die,
not very gallantly described, when they kiss, as smelling faintly of urine. There is an AIDS patient who
exploits his disease as a way of eluding professional responsibility, and there is a cocaine addict - Rabbit's
own son, Nelson - whose dependence on the drug is pushing him toward mental breakdown.

The engine that drives the plot in John Updike's work is nearly always domestic. Men and women who
might be called ordinary Americans of their time and place are granted an almost incandescent allure by
the mysteries they present to one another: Janice Angstrom to Harry, in ''Rabbit Redux,'' as an
unrepentant adulteress; a young woman to Harry, as possibly his illegitimate daughter, in ''Rabbit Is
Rich''; and now Nelson to Harry, as his so strangely behaving son, whose involvement with drugs brings
the family to the edge of financial and personal ruin. Thus, though characters like Janice, Nelson and,
from time to time, Rabbit himself are not very sympathetic - and, indeed, are intended by their
resolutely unsentimental creator not to be - one is always curious to know their immediate fates.

John Updike's choice of Rabbit Angstrom, in ''Rabbit, Run,'' was inspired, one of those happy, instinctive
accidents that so often shape a literary career. For Rabbit, though a contemporary of the young writer -
born, like him, in the early 1930's, and a product, so to speak, of the same world (the area around
Reading, Pa.) - was a ''beautiful brainless guy'' whose career (as a high school basketball star in a
provincial setting) peaked at age 18; in his own wife's view, he was, before their early, hasty marriage,
''already drifting downhill.'' Needless to say, poor Rabbit is the very antithesis of the enormously
promising president of the class of 1950 at Shillington High School, the young man who went to Harvard
on a scholarship, moved away from his hometown forever and became a world-renowned writer. This
combination of cousinly propinquity and temperamental diamagnetism has allowed John Updike a
magisterial distance in both dramatizing Rabbit's life and dissecting him in the process. One thinks of
Flaubert and his doomed fantasist Emma Bovary, for John Updike with his precisian's prose and his
intimately attentive yet cold eye is a master, like Flaubert, of mesmerizing us with his narrative voice
even as he might repel us with the vanities of human desire his scalpel exposes.
Harry Angstrom, who tries to sate his sense of life's emptiness by devouring junk food - ''the tang of
poison that he likes'' - the very archetype of the American macho male (whose fantasies dwell not, like
Emma Bovary's, on romance, but on sports), appears as Uncle Sam in a Fourth of July parade in ''Rabbit
at Rest,'' and the impersonation is a locally popular one. Rabbit, who knows little of any culture but his
own, and that a culture severely circumscribed by television, is passionately convinced that ''all in all this
is the happiest . . . country the world has ever seen.'' As in ''Rabbit Redux'' he was solidly in favor of the
Vietnam War, so, as his life becomes increasingly marginal to the United States of his time, in ironic
balance to his wife's increasing involvement, he is as unthinkingly patriotic as ever - ''a typical good-
hearted imperialist racist,'' as his wife's lover put it in the earlier book.

Rabbit is not often good-hearted, however, living as he does so much inside his own skin. Surprised by
his lover's concern for him, he thinks, funnily, of ''that strange way women have, of really caring about
somebody beyond themselves.'' From ''Rabbit, Run'' to ''Rabbit at Rest,'' Rabbit's wife, Janice, is
repeatedly referred to as ''that mutt'' and ''that poor dumb mutt,'' though she seems to us easily Rabbit's
intellectual equal. A frequent noun of Rabbit's for women is unprintable in this newspaper; a scarcely
more palatable one is ''bimbo.'' As a younger and less coarsened man, in the earlier novels, Rabbit
generates sympathy for his domestic problems, but even back then the reader is stopped dead by his
unapologetic racism (''Niggers, coolies, derelicts, morons'').

In ''Rabbit at Rest,'' an extreme of sorts, even for Rabbit, is achieved when, at Thelma's very funeral, he
tells the dead woman's grieving husband that ''she was a fantastic lay.'' Near the end of the novel, it is
suggested that Rabbit's misogyny was caused by his mother! (Of course. Perhaps women should refrain
from childbirth in order to prevent adversely influencing their sons?) It is a measure of John Updike's
prescience in creating Rabbit Angstrom 30 years ago that, in the concluding pages of ''Rabbit, Run,''
Rabbit's ill-treated lover Ruth should speak of him in disgust as ''Mr. Death.'' If Mr. Death is also, and
enthusiastically, Uncle Sam, then the Rabbit quartet constitutes a powerful critique of America.

Of one aspect of America, in any case. For, behind the frenetic activity of the novels, as behind stage
busyness, the ''real'' background of Rabbit's fictional Mt. Judge and Brewer, Pa., remains. One comes to
think that this background is the novel's soul, its human actors but puppets or shadows caught up in the
vanity of their lusts. So primary is homesickness as a motive for writing fiction, so powerful the yearning
to memorialize what we've lived, inhabited, been hurt by and loved, that the impulse often goes
unacknowledged. The being that most illuminates the Rabbit quartet is not finally Harry Angstrom
himself but the world through which he moves in his slow downward slide, meticulously recorded by one
of our most gifted American realists.
Lengthy passages in ''Rabbit at Rest'' that take Rabbit back to his old neighborhoods - ''hurting himself
with the pieces of his old self that cling to almost every corner'' - call up similar nostalgic passages in
John Updike's autobiographical novel ''The Centaur'' and his memoir, ''Self-Consciousness,'' as well as
numerous short stories and poems tasked with memorializing such moments of enchantment. This, not
the fallen adult world, the demoralizing morass of politics, sex and money, the ravaging of the land, is
the true America, however rapidly fading. The Rabbit novels, for all their grittiness, constitute John
Updike's surpassingly eloquent valentine to his country, as viewed from the unique perspective of a
corner of Pennsylvania.

After Rabbit's first heart attack, when he tells his wife of an extraordinary sight he has seen on one of his
drives through the city, pear trees in blossom, Janice responds, ''You've seen [it before] , it's just you see
differently now.'' But John Updike has seen, from the first.

HEART LIKE A ZEPPELIN

Behind the wheel of his car, he gravitates to Mt. Judge, the town where he was born and raised, on the
opposite side of Brewer from Penn Park. In this cumbersome sandstone church with its mismatched new
wing, the Mt. Judge Evangelical Lutheran, he was baptized and confirmed, in a shirt that chafed his neck
like it had been starched in lye, and here, further along Central, in front of a candy store now a
photocopying shop, he first felt himself in love, with Margaret Schoelkopf in her pigtails and hightop
shoes. His heart had felt numb and swollen above the sidewalk squares like one of those zeppelins you
used to see in the sky, the squares of cement like city blocks far beneath his floating childish heart. Every
other house in this homely borough holds the ghost of someone he once knew who now is gone.

From ''Rabbit at Rest.''

……………….

harvardmagazine THE BROWSER – Rabbit reread

With the republication in one hefty volume of John Updike's Rabbit novels-Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux;
Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest-one question seems unavoidable: Is it possible to sustain interest for 1,516
pages in an ignorant, insensitive, uneducated, self-pitying bigot of no particular talent, imagination, or
intelligence? Put-ting the question so baldly may seem harsh, but it is, in fact, a fair description of Harry
"Rabbit" Angstrom. Over the four decades covered by the novels, Harry ages, but he does not change.
His flesh softens and his sex drive weakens, but he does not learn anything nor, despite his occasional
urges to run away, does he ever deviate from the predictable, tedious, narrow conventions in which
Updike (and presumably his nation, class, and background) confine him.

Rabbit, Run was a great hit when it was first published. Like Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Saul
Bellow's Seize the Day, it looked beneath the surface of post-World War II complacency and prosperity in
America. It showed a lower middle class entangled in a materialist culture and in the consequences of
their own petty vices, hypocrisy, and inertia. It is a very American book, not only because of its themes,
but also in the nature of its popularity and its status as a product as well as a would-be mirror of the
'50s. Despite the impression that might be given by a brief plot summary, few readers are likely to
confuse Updike with Gogol or Zola. There is no unmitigated wrath in the Rabbit novels and not a trace of
radical ideology.

Politics figure in Harry's life and in the novels, much as new song hits and automobile designs do, as
markers of time, momentary items of entertainment, something to complain about, but mainly as a
source of instant nostalgia. The Kennedy brothers, the civil-rights movement, landing on the moon, the
Cold War, Nixon and Watergate, Jimmy Carter and the rise of oil prices, Ronald Reagan and trickle-down
economics-all float past in the background like pages of photographs in a special anniversary edition of
Life magazine. Implicit and at the same time all too obvious is that Harry and his ilk are clueless about
the big political and social forces that are raging around them and may even, to some degree, determine
the course of their lives. But if Harry doesn't think politics matter very much, Updike does little to
contradict him. The "system" may be corrupt and incomprehensible, but Harry's problems stem from
many other sources. The gene pool seems to have hurt him more than Eisenhower or Nixon. Harry just
doesn't seem too bright. Then too, his upbringing was flawed. His father was a weakling and his mother
bitter, hypercritical, and undemonstrative. Furthermore, Harry seems, in the first two volumes especially,
to be plain unlucky. A loser himself, he stumbles into the paths of deadbeats of both sexes even more
pathetic than he is.

If reading through the Rabbit foursome often gives the odd sensation of watching Theodore Dreiser
shaking hands with Norman Rockwell, it is in part because the material for a truly devastating portrait of
a social system or indeed of human nature is repeatedly diverted by bathos. The treatment of the death
of the Angstroms' infant daughter is a case in point. Responsibility for the baby's death shifts from
person to person and cause to cause until it drifts invisibly into thin air. Neither the report of the accident
nor the motley mourners at the funeral have any moral or emotional power precisely because the
incident, like so much else in these novels, evaporates into literary conventions that are as vague and
muddled as the moral and emotional lives of the characters. Janice let it happen because she was drunk;
Janice was drunk because Harry was away all the time; Harry was away all the time because he was a
weakling; Harry was a weakling because a) his father was a weakling, b) his mother didn't love him, c) his
job as a demonstrator of MagiPeel Peelers in five and dime stores deprives him of his manhood, d) John
Foster Dulles was paying too much attention to the Russians, et cetera, et cetera.
At each moment when these novels might have taken on a moral, political, or, most important, an
emotional edge, the potential is dissipated into sentimental condescension. Harry, Janice, Ruth, Nelson,
Ma Springer, the whole lot are neither victims nor agents. They are just dumb clucks, trying to get by like
all the rest of us, doing the best they can with what they have, a new car when they can afford it, a hot
dog and french fries while they watch the football game or a moon walk, a beer or two on Saturday
night, a little (or a lot of) sex on the side.

Sex is another source of Harry's and Janice's dull fate. More an urge than a drive, more an idle pastime
than a pleasure, more a habit than a passion, sex has no power to lift the characters out of their
tiresome lives or to thrust them into genuinely destructive debauchery. In Rabbit Redux, the second of
the series, published in 1971, Janice is having an affair with Harry's friend Charlie while Harry takes up
with an 18-year-old runaway hippie named Jill. Neither Harry nor Janice has enough imagination to be
truly depraved. Updike's original publishers asked him to tone down or delete some of the more explicit
prose, which, he tells us in the author's introduction, has been restored in this new edition. As labored in
the writing as in the actions being described, the sex scenes-which serve as a kind of refrain for the four
volumes-are as erotic and appealing as the packaged baloney and old lettuce that Janice leaves in the
fridge for Harry's dinner. Sometimes thinking about sex seems to be the only thing that keeps Harry
going, yet when it comes down to it, anxieties about his boxer shorts, his ability to "keep it up," and his
alternating lust and distaste for his various partners' pulpy flesh give new meaning to the concept of
anticlimax.

…In Rabbit at Rest Janice and Harry spend several months a year in their condo in Florida. Nelson has
become a drug addict and Harry has developed a bad heart. This last volume is filled with Harry's
awareness of physical and mental fatigue and his dim recognition that, despite modest prosperity, not
much has changed in his life. World-weariness would not be the right word for what Harry experiences,
since he has remained so oddly untouched by the world beyond his own tiny radius. It is almost as
though the narrative is tired of itself and is beginning, at last, to run down. The process of self-
acknowledged fatigue starts quite early, actually. There are lines that seem to leap out of the books and
address the reader directly about what it feels like to follow Rabbit's career. In Rabbit Redux, for
example: "Something has gone wrong. The ballgame is boring." Yes! Or, in the same volume, a passing
comment on the terrain around Harry's housing development: "I think it's the flatness." Yes! Two
passages jump out in Rabbit Is Rich. When Harry sees the corpse of his dead father-in-law, "He looked
downÉand felt nothing." Right! And during a typically gross conversation among his friends, he is
"appalled by this coarse crowd he's in." Who could disagree? Such lines seem to read the reader's mind.
It is almost as if Updike is seeking sympathy. How did we (author and reader) get stuck with such people?
And for so long?
In the end the question returns: Can interest in such a life be sustained over fifteen hundred pages?
Certainly great long books have been written about the "common man." Updike mentions Joyce as an
important influence. But Joyce had a higher, richer, more complex opinion of the "common man" than
Updike seems to have. Harry Angstrom is no Leopold Bloom. If we try to locate Harry in the twentieth-
century American literary tradition, he would fall somewhere between Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt and
Forrest Gump. He is a personification of the American as untalented lowbrow that is part apology and
part boast. "We may be stupid," he seems to say, "but we are survivors." Perhaps, like Babbitt and Gump,
Rabbit will find a secure niche in the American hall of fictional antiheroes. But if readers are seeking a
more vital, challenging, entertaining portrait of life in postwar America, they will be better served by
Flannery O'Connor and Saul Bellow, Thomas Pynchon and Ralph Ellison. Each of these writers extends
American realism into new and often daring directions.

On the contrary, Updike's form of realism-his fondness for cataloguing the details, the bric-a-brac of daily
life-while densely authentic, is inert, without vitality or poetry. The characters never just drive a car, but
a particular model Chevy or Toyota; they never just watch TV, but the Mouseketeers or M*A*S*H; they
never just have fast food, they go to Taco Bell or Wendy's. At one point, Harry checks out the contents of
a neighbor's medicine cabinet and, to be sure, we get the list: Parepectolin, Debrox, Chloraseptic,
Cepacol, Maalox, and on and on.

But these lists, while instructive and entertaining up to a point, do not define a character or a society.
They reveal a void. And in doing that, Updike's Rabbit Angstrom succeeds. But for fifteen hundred
pages?? On his deathbed, Harry tries to tell Nelson something: "All I can tell you is, it isn't so bad." The
narration concludes with what might be the thoughts of the father or the son or the author: "But
enough. Maybe. Enough." An alternate and perhaps more accurate ending would have been: "Too much.
Maybe. Too much."

Robert Kiely is Loker professor of English and American literature and Master of Adams House. He is
the author of Reverse Tradition: Postmodern Fiction and the Nineteenth Century Novel and has
recently edited The Good Heart, the Dalai Lama's commentary on the Christian scriptures, to be
published in October. ……….

SLATE - Bringing out the dead.

Jan. 27 2009 10:01 PM

Rabbit at Rest

The best of Updike, the worst of Updike, and why the two are connected.
By Troy Patterson

What superlatives shall we settle on in memorializing John Updike, dead today of lung cancer at age 76?
It is possibly true that he was the best Talk of the Town writer The New Yorker will ever have, though
saying that feels like a heresy against James Thurber. Was he the dominant novelist-critic of his
generation? That's even truer, though Cynthia Ozick turns out dense and mind-expanding essays,
whereas Updike was foremost a reviewer with exceptional antennae. To consider the 1,700-odd pages of
his Harry Angstrom saga—the bounding tetralogy of Rabbit books and their limping postscript—is to find
yourself considering a work with an excellent claim as the Great American Novel, but you'd be forgiven
for preferring to spend time with four or five Very Good ones.

Updike's most enduring legacy exists at the level of the sentence. If you count swinging Saul Bellow as a
Canadian, Montreal-born, and also class Vladimir Nabokov as a transnational, all-transcending anomaly,
then Updike is, line for line, without peer, the finest American prose stylist of the postwar era:
meticulous, crystalline, and luminously hyperrealist, his opulent language hanging on austere forms.
Even his bad writing—and the consequence of his three-pages-per-day prolificity is that there's no
shortage of it—sparks with phrases that send the heart skittering.

The precision is painterly in the way of photorealism, except when it's cinematic. (Updike once said that
he imagined Rabbit, Run as a movie, with the present-tense narration intended to catch the fluidity of
filmic motion and the opening basketball-court scene "visualized to be taking place under the titles and
credits.") The grace of the style is such that the felt ecstasy of composition renders even descriptions of
physical desolation and emotional grief intoxicating. Martin Amis, Updike's only rival as a post-Nabokov
virtuoso, wrote that "having read him once, you admit to yourself, almost with a sigh, that you will have
to read everything he writes." Nicholson Baker, another scintillating miniaturist, embarked on the
memoir/homage U and I despite not having read even half of Updike's books. Do writers as inimitable as
Updike leave heirs? Or just addicts?

It also must be said that, on the subject of sex, Updike could be the worst writer Knopf has ever known.
David Foster Wallace, in a review of Toward the End of Time that sized up Updike as a "phallocrat,"
counted 10 and half pages devoted to the protagonist's thoughts about his penis, and that cannot be a
record. Anyone with the stamina to get through Brazil, a beachy retelling of the Tristan and Isolde myth,
will discover at least as much space fruitlessly expended on the hero's "yam." Last month, Updike justly
earned a lifetime-achievment prize in the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. He clinched it with
a passage in the new Widows of Eastwick that includes—avert your eyes, children—the following
sentence: "Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room, there on the far end of
East Beach, within sound of the sea."
This is a very rare kind of dreck, the sort that can be secreted only by a brilliant professor of desire, and it
cannot be separated from the masterly understanding of lust and physical love Updike displays
everywhere from Couples to "A&P" to a review of Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. The same refinement of
sensibility that kept Updike marvelously attuned to the motions of a mind in heat could have a way of
aestheticizing sexual experience to awkward effect. One of this magician's very best tricks was to address
this problem in the stories gathered in The Complete Henry Bech. There, in a collection starring a priapic
novelist who was Updike's counter-ego, the author's exquisite mind reconciles itself with the farce of the
flesh. The voice is not quite like anything else in Updike's expansive oeuvre, and the reader feels himself
safe in the hands of the funniest writer never to make a career of comedy.

Troy Patterson is Slate’s writer at large and a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine.

…………………….

THE INDEPENDENT - Book of a lifetime: Rabbit at Rest, By John Updike

Justin Cartwright

@justincartwrig1

Friday 13 September 2013

0 comments

Honest and perceptive: John Updike

My choice is almost entirely self-serving. I have just looked, and see that I have 23 books by John Updike.
In 2006, he suggested me to write the foreword (it ended up as an afterword) for the new Penguin
edition of Rabbit at Rest. So in a sense I am trying to attach myself to the great man's memory by
choosing it as my Book of a Lifetime.

Other books which were highly influential – a different thing from literary favourites – were Peter
Abrahams's Mine Boy and Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. In their very different ways, these two
books opened my eyes at a very young age to what was going on in South Africa. I was about 17 when I
first read anything by Updike, Pigeon Feathers. I was entranced. Although there are many books which
are more obviously striking and even ground-breaking, Updike's novels - to use his own phrase – "take
the ordinary and give it is beautiful due". He also said that he had no instinct for social criticism.
Rabbit at Rest is a wonderful book, honest, detailed, perceptive and moving. Although quietly charming
and without any symptoms of Bohemia, Updike was ruthlessly forensic with his characters. His
description of Rabbit's wayward son, Nelson, is devastating: in contrast to the free pass to life that Rabbit
grants himself – he is, in his reckoning, tall, athletic, open and attractive, with a full head of hair - his son
is small, balding and furtive with a drug habit and – worse – a trite kind of philophy, confidently uttered.
How accurately Updike captures the new banality.

Updike wrote: "Rabbit Angstrom was for me a way in – a ticket to the America all around me." And this, I
think, is his beautiful legacy: that, for all his profligacy, he was always a generous and observant
chronicler of America and the ordinary life, ever mindful of his own background in small-town
Pennsylvania.

I think that Rabbit at Rest may be the finest America novel of the late 20th century. And it has my name
on it, in very small print, on the Penguin editon, which is a source of pride to me.