My friend, John’s wife, Margaret, is a member of three book groups. John’s request to join any of the three was met with a succession of vetos on the ground that he was not a woman.
So John started his own book group. I, recently, became a member
John Updike died, earlier this year, just short of his 77th birthday. One of our members, another John, suggested that we should read an Updike. Having previously read, at various times, the first three Rabbit books, I suggested Rabbit at Rest, the fourth in the teratology and my colleagues agreed.
I am a long term Updike fan. There was a time in my life when my reading would consist of an Updike novel, followed by a John Irving novel3, followed by an Updike novel, ad infinitum or, at least, for most people, ad nauseam.
John Irving and John Updike are very different novelists. John Irving takes big themes (abortion, religion, suicide, class, the aftermath of wars) and explores them through extraordinary characters and almost lyrical language. Reading a John Irving is like moving through a kaleidoscope of brightly coloured dreams.
John Updike, in contrast, writes in a super-realist style recreating everyday life down to the detail of the last piece of furniture; the last song on “hits and memories” radio stations and the last detail of the Toyota small car released in 1988. The Penguin Classic edition of Rabbit at Rest (the novel was first published in 1990) contains two Afterwords, one by Justin Cartwright4 and one by Updike, himself. Cartwright quotes Updike speaking about his writing as taking the ordinary and giving it its beautiful due. The quote from Updike goes on: “… out there was where I belonged, immersed in the ordinary which careful explication would reveal to be extraordinary”.
It is true that ordinary life is not devoid of challenges, revelation, and tragic happenings. They occur in Updike’s novels and are experienced by his characters. The ordinary nature of the context in which they occur is never lost, however, as the flood of detail continues to bombard the reader.
Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is an extraordinary alter ego for Updike. Born in the same year as Updike, 1932, Harry is, ipso facto, always Updike’s age. Rabbit, unlike Updike, was a High school basketball star (in the imaginary suburb, Mt Judge, of the imaginary city of Brewer, Pennsylvania) who never went on to College. Like many former sports stars, Rabbit does not cope well with the rest of life. The four Rabbit books chronicle that life at decadal intervals. Rabbit, somehow, survives but not without crises and disasters and not without considerable help from others, help that he rarely acknowledges with any true graciousness. Thus, although Rabbit is a very different personality to his creator, he is experiencing and reacting to (and interpreting) the same events as the author, at the same stage of their respective lives.
Rabbit, Run is set in 1959. Rabbit is married with children. Neither Rabbit nor his wife, Janice, is happy. Janice struggles with alcoholism. The running of the title occurs in the concluding pages as Rabbit drives south, hoping to leave it all behind.
Rabbit Redux is set ten years later. Rabbit is now heading towards forty. Janice has left him for another man. Rabbit, his 12 year old son, Nelson, an African-American drug dealing Vietnam Vet called Skeeter, and a wealthy white teenager called Jill make a strange household before the house burns down killing Jill, and leading to reconciliation between Rabbit and Janice.
Rabbit is Rich is set in 1979. Janice’s father has helped the family out by placing Harry in the Toyota dealership which he (the father-in-law) had built up in the days when Americans still looked at everything Japanese with the suspicions of World War 2 survivors. Nelson is at Kent State. Janice is still drinking. Life is comfortable but Harry is never quite relaxed.
And so to my book group reading, Rabbit at Rest. The book’s title is more a foreshadowing than a description of its action. Rabbit is into his mid to late fifties. He is overweight and exercises insufficiently and eats poorly. Heart disease threatens. Janice and Harry divide themselves between a Florida Condo and life back in Brewer, Pennsylvania in which the other books are set. Nelson runs the Toyota dealership but has drug issues which threaten the whole family’s security and peace of mind.
Harry’s health issues contribute to a reflective state of mind on his part. Much of the action of Harry’s earlier life (and of the three earlier books) occupies his reflections. As Harry and Janice try to assist Nelson, interaction occurs between Harry and his two grandchildren and, particularly, Nelson’s wife, Pru.
John Updike was born just over twenty years before me. Reading Rabbit at Rest, twenty years after it was first published, meant that I had approached a similar age to that of the author, Updike, and the main character, Rabbit Angstrom. The normal reflections stimulated by the reader of any good novel were given a heightened interest for this reviewer with this book.
The Afterword by Updike, himself, reveals that each of the four books was written almost at the same time, in each case, as the events against which Harry Angstrom’s life was being lived. This allowed Updike to record Harry’s reaction to significant news events like the Lockerbie air disaster of 21 December 1988 even as the author was reacting to the same events. The differences between the washed up high school sports star and the budding author had perhaps diminished over the thirty years since the first novel had been penned and many of those reactions may have resembled those that John Updike was, himself, feeling at the time.
The novels are written in the present tense. In the Afterword, Updike explains how he made this “happy discovery” of a literary device. The novels are written from the viewpoint of an omniscient narrator but, almost exclusively, the narrator (and the reader) is looking at Harry’s world through Harry’s eyes. While Harry Angstrom has lived a selfish, indulgent life, creating havoc for most people close to him, understanding his point of view often disguises the least likeable aspects of Harry’s personality. One gets to like Harry despite one’s better judgment.
Nevertheless, one suspects that Harry’s judgments of people are not always correct or fair. Harry has always disliked Ronnie Harrison, his old team mate and friend whom Harry has cuckolded for well over a decade. Ronnie is thought of by Harry as crude and overbearing yet Harry is happy to have him as a golf partner when no one else is offering and enjoys Ronnie’s company much more than he had expected. Perhaps, Harry has been projecting.
For a few pages, the omniscient narrator leaves Harry’s side and looks at the world through Janice’s eyes, another person who, one suspects, is not judged with complete fairness in Harry’s thoughts. Perhaps, to stress the importance of Janice to Harry, to the family, and to the world created across four novels, the reader gets to see the world as Janice sees it as she goes about her lifelong quest for a sense of competence through studying to qualify as a real estate agent.
And then there is the sex. John Updike is one of the great writers about that activity so fundamental to the existence of life on earth. Any group of readers, whether all male (like my book group) or all female (like those from which my friend was excluded) or even a mixed group can spend many a happy hour arguing about which aspects of human relationships Updike gets right and to what extent his writing is diminished by his male outlook. None of this will detract from the quality of his writing on the subject.
What seems strange from the viewpoint of a modern reader is that the sex created difficulty for the publication of Rabbit Run and the author had to do considerable re-writing5 to satisfy his first publisher.6
In the Afterword, Updike describes his influences in this form of writing:
“My models in sexual realism had been [Edmund] Wilson and DH Lawrence and Erskine Caldwell and James M Cain and of course James Joyce, whose influence resounds, perhaps all too audibly, in the book’s several female soliloquies.”
The Rabbit series is a magnificent creation reflecting consistency and change in America across thirty years. The method of its writing also creates a series of snapshots, a decade apart on each occasion, of small town life in that country. I am not surprised that John Updike’s artistic fascination with the ordinary has proved so popular or that its appeal has continued through the nearly fifty years since Harry Angstrom first shared his thoughts with us. At times when Harry read about the history of Florida, I was reminded of Don Watson’s American Journeys, a travel documentary, which I was reading at about the same time. It struck me that John Updike’s super-realism combines the charm of the travel book with the flexibility and grand vision of the novel.
If you are an old fan of John Updike, I recommend that you revisit the Rabbit series. If you have not yet ventured into the world of Brewer, Pennsylvania and the messy life of Rabbit Angstrom, I recommend that you do so.7 It matters not whether you wish to start at the beginning and work your way through or simply read Rabbit at Rest. The novel works even without the background of its older sisters.
Stephen Keim SC
Footnotes
- As usual, Wikipedia has an extensive entry.
- The Penquin website for the novel may be found here.
- The World According to Garp (1978); The Hotel New Hampshire (1981); Setting Free the Bears (1969) and so on.
- Cartwright is a South African born writer, living in England, whose books include Look At It This Way and Masai Dreaming about a central character, a journalist called Curtiz.
- Updike restored much of what he had edited from the text in later editions.
- Not so strange when one considers that the Australian Oz trials occurred in 1964 and the celebrated British trial and appeal in which John Mortimer led the young Geoffrey Robertson took place in 1971, in each case, well after the publication of Rabbit Run in 1960. the Oz trials also merit a mention in Wikipedia.
- The web site lists the book at thirteen British pounds. I bought my copy at Folio Books in Edward Street without having to order it in.
