Editor’s note: A longer version of this piece on John Updike’s Rabbit Is Rich originally appeared on “Critical Mass,” the National Book Critics Circle blog (see http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/Its_Not_About_the_Car_John_Updikes_Rabbit_is_Rich). Re-posted here by kind permission of the NBCC.
My introduction to John Updike’s work came courtesy of a history course I took as an undergraduate. Said course focused on America in the 1960s and early ’70s. Bless my brilliant professor, though I have forgotten his name. One of the “textbooks” he assigned us was John Updike’s Rabbit Redux. I read it in a single night and I’ve never been the same. Updike’s cinematic, journalistic style certainly appealed to me, but what was even more impressive was his firm grasp of American life, with all its foibles, failures and, yes, epiphanies and ecstasies.
Redux, published in 1971, was the sequel to Rabbit, Run, published in 1960. But Updike was just getting started. Rabbit Is Rich came in 1981 and Rabbit at Rest, which saw print in 1990, completed the life story and the oh-so-American story of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom - dreamer, fool, Everyman sage, car salesman, seeker. One reason Updike’s work pleases me is that I believe writers are supposed to get better - and that’s exactly what Updike did through the decades during which he wrote the Rabbit series (which also includes a worthy postscript, by the way; you’ll find the novella “Rabbit Remembered” in Updike’s Licks of Love story collection).
Rich and Rest both won Pulitzers, the coveted prizes that eluded the first two volumes. And Rich swept the major book honors for work published in 1981, including the National Book Critics Circle Award. Rabbit Is Rich remains one of my favorite novels. To be honest, my list of the half-dozen greats varies depending on which day you ask me, but this one is always there.
The other three Rabbit books are tragedies. In them, children die, marriages break up or come close to doing so, and, in the final novel, Rabbit’s own heart literally breaks; in Rabbit at Rest, we see the former high-school basketball star as a corpulent and increasingly irrelevant man. Out of touch with his own time, he turns more and more, as the novel progresses, to the songs and rhymes and memories of his youth. Rabbit Is Rich, though, is the comedy of this tetralogy, and its high spirits give it a different edge. In these pages, Updike gets up to all kinds of highjinks, resulting in both a stunning literary novel and an exhilarating read.
Rabbit, formerly a Linotyper, has inherited his chintzy father-in-law’s position as front man of a Toyota dealership in fictional Brewer, Pa. It’s 1979, and as the energy crisis deepens and the American dollar turns to mush, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom couldn’t be happier. Those Toyota cars get great gas mileage, and Rabbit is getting richer by the day from their sales (no Prius crisis back then to tarnish the carmaker’s reputation).
When he’s not peddling imports, Rabbit’s at home jousting with his willful wife, Janice, and her stubborn mother, Bessie. But the novel’s true first crisis looms in the homecoming of Nelson, Janice and Rabbit’s sullen college-age son. Nelson never has forgiven his father for what he sees as Rabbit’s unpardonable sins: Letting the hippie girl Jill burn to death in Redux and letting Becky, Nelson’s infant sister, drown in Run. Forget the fact that Rabbit wasn’t present when either accident happened; every family needs its scapegoat, and Rabbit, guilty by association but determined to get what he can out of life, lives out that role in the Angstrom universe.
Despite the tension, the book has a charming, almost magical feel - and it is shot through with rituals and rites of passage. Nelson, whether he likes it or not, is his father’s son; he has impregnated his girlfriend, Pru, just as Harry impregnated Janice a generation ago. Thus there’s a wedding - at which Rabbit, to his great surprise, finds himself weeping, perhaps for Nelson’s vanishing youth and certainly for his own.
How powerful a writer is Updike? Well, I was 22 when I read Rabbit Is Rich - just about the same age as petulant, pesky Nelson. Yet never once did I identify with him. Rabbit with all his faults - his womanizing, his shallow politics, his certainty that life should be a ribald play with himself at center stage - was nevertheless our stalwart hero, the one whose rangy, athletic thoughts we were allowed to listen in on. Rabbit’s saving grace always was his innocent faith in ... oh, you name it - God, America, cars, music, Consumer Reports magazine and, most movingly, the landscape itself. Whether swimming in a murky Poconos pond or jogging down the gritty streets of Brewer and Mt. Judge or sunning himself in the tropics, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom was at home, at ease, at play, at large in the world. In the next book, of course, he would be “at rest,” but the title of the more downbeat fourth book would be deeply ironic.
The late Mr. Updike often said of Rabbit Angstrom that the character provided him with a kind of window on the American dream. In one of my interviews with him, Mr. Updike observed that without Mr. Angstrom, he would have won “almost nothing” in terms of literary prizes, although The Centaur got its due. In addition, it’s hard not to see Harry as John’s alter ego. Both men played golf, believed in God but questioned his ways, and shared, I think, a view of life that was more smile than grimace.
I don’t know if Rabbit Is Rich is Updike’s greatest book. Of the Farm is a marvel and Rabbit at Rest is an elegiac summation and Americana is a remarkable collection of poems and The Early Stories gathers the author’s most important short fiction. But I do believe Rabbit, the character, is Updike’s greatest single creation, the achievement for which he’ll most be remembered.
Near the end of Rabbit Is Rich, a child is born - a granddaughter, Rabbit’s granddaughter, his. His flesh and blood recreated. His. The melancholy and the pain of Rabbit at Rest lie some years in the future; Harry, like us, does not know what challenges and disappointments await him. Thank heaven for that, yes? It is our curse to be hungry and human; much worse, though, would it be to know the petty torments Trickster Fate has in store. Better, at day’s end, the pleasures of life. Of love, of the night air, of a good book - even four of them - about a flawed, fantastic man, a man twitchy and alert and exasperating enough to be nicknamed Rabbit.
Often, I have revisited the Rabbit books. Even when months have passed without my doing so, they stay with me. A man named Updike made them. After all this time, though, they’re really ours, aren’t they? Ours. Pages and pages, turning, turning, with the years. Ours.