Monday, May 25, 2015

The 100 best novels / No 88 / Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 88

Rabbit Redux

by John Updike (1971)

Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, Updike’s lovably mediocre alter ego, is one of America’s great literary protoganists, up there with Huck Finn and Jay Gatsby

Robert McCrum
Monday 25 May 2015 05.45 BST

ohn Updike is 20th-century American literature’s blithe spirit, a virtuoso of language whose perfect pitch illuminated every line he wrote with an airy and zestful brilliance. He was always something of a miniaturist. His first hope was to be a poet. When that ambition misfired, he took his delight in the English sentence and made a name for himself as a New Yorker short story writer. Finally, he brought his gifts of wit, curiosity and invention to the American novel. By the end of his career, he had become one of the most complete and versatile men of letters in his country’s history. Among many possible fiction choices – his debut, The Poorhouse Fair; the sensational scandal of Couples; the exhilarating magical realism of The Witches of Eastwick – I’ve picked his panoramic masterpiece, the Henry Angstrom series, a portrait of America compiled over four decades: Rabbit, Run (1960); Rabbit Redux (1971); Rabbit Is Rich (1981); and Rabbit at Rest (1990).

Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, who owes something to Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, is as much Updike’s fictional alter ego as Zuckerman is Philip Roth’s, a college basketball star of Swedish ancestry who has to reconcile himself, after a dazzling start, to the long littleness of life among the American middle class.

On first meeting, Harry is selling a revolutionary vegetable-peeler on commission (later, he will run a Toyota dealership), and wrestling with a miserable suburban marriage. Harry is a good man whose circumstances provoke him to do bad things. In the first volume, he leaves his boozy wife, Janice, to go off with a call-girl (but not for long).

In Rabbit Redux, my favourite, which is set in America in 1969 (the Apollo moon landing; race riots; the oil crisis etc), it’s Janice who has left Harry. He gets caught up in a sequence of unfortunate events in which he knows he’s in the wrong, but will never get found out. In Rabbit Is Rich, Harry is middle-aged, with all the stresses of mid-life on his back. Finally, in 1990, with Rabbit at Rest, Updike plants his lovably mediocre hero in Reagan’s America, a state of anaesthesia that provoked his contemporary and rival Gore Vidal to deplore Updike’s “acceptance of authority in any form”.

This is unfair. Updike’s dominant mood is of grace under pressure, of Lutheran stoicism, and the acceptance of fate. When Harry finally succumbs to cardiac arrest, he confides to his son: “All I can tell you is, it isn’t so bad.” Ian McEwan, summarising Updike’s achievement on his untimely death in 2009, compared him to Saul Bellow (see No 73 in this series) as “a master of effortless motion – between first and third person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalisation, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic”. Updike was, like all the greatest in this series are, aways the supreme entertainer.

A note on the text

Henry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the account of whose life and times adds up to more than half a million words, is often placed with honour, and a measure of irony, next to America’s great literary protagonists such as Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby and even Captain Ahab. Rabbit Redux was published in the US by Alfred A Knopf, a great literary house and a natural home for a novel that, from the title down, nodded to the Anglo-American literary tradition. Anthony Trollope (see No 22 in this series) published Phineas Redux in 1873, and Updike, who was steeped in English literature, would have enjoyed the allusion. Others critics have noted its “Dickensian” ambitions.

The Angstrom series had many inspirations, including Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. Updike, who also venerated Lewis, always spoke warmly about his admiration for Marcel Proust, though “Rabbit” has little to do, explicitly, with A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Ian McEwan, quoted above, described Updike’s “Rabbit” novels as his “masterpiece”. Philip Roth, a sometime rival, declared Updike to be America’s “greatest man of letters, a national treasure”, while, for Lorrie Moore, Updike is “our greatest writer”, though she prefers his short stories.

After the fourth “Rabbit” book appeared in 1990, there were later, and shorter, outings, notably the novella “Rabbit Remembered”, published in a collection entitled Licks of Love (2001). John Updike died from lung cancer in January 2009. His archive of manuscripts, papers and letters is held in the Houghton Library at Harvard University.