The Cavalier daily :: Thursday, January 6, 1972 :: University of Virginia Library

John Updike has praised
Vladimir Nabokov as the only
writer working in America
"whose books, taken as a
whole, give the happy
impression of an oeuvre, a
continuous task carried
forward variously, of a solid
personality, of a plenitude of
gifts explored knowingly."

Indeed, Updike himself no,
rather his admirers, for Updike
is scrupulously modest in most
ways might put forward a
similar claim for his own
books. Last year there was the
appearance of Bech: A Book,
in which an imaginary Jewish
writer, having fought his way
to the top of the literary
intellectual heap, finds
himself horribly,
hilariously reflected in a
looking-glass of self-doubt,
snared ego.

If Bech showed a sharp
departure from the world of
Updike's earlier (and
overworked) themes, the small
town in Pennsylvania,
Massachusetts suburbs,
Eisenhower torpor and Sick
Sixties, then it served
masterfully in rebuffing (and
even in charming) many of his
critics. The Bech stories proved
once and for all that if Updike
was a skillful hick (never a
hack) then he was moreover a
sort of lovable, brilliant
country cousin whose wit was
one that stood him well.

And just when his detractors
were starting to burn
underneath the "smartass"
labels Updike's admirers had
affixed to certain critical
hindquarters, Rabbit returns,
alive (or is he possibly deader?)
and in any case 10 years older
than the Rabbit Angstrom who
ran in Updike's second (some
say best) novel, Rabbit, Run.

Yes, and redux means more
than returned, means restored
to health, so let no one deceive
himself: Updike from the
outset intends to take good
care of his boy Rabbit. Rabbit.
Rabbit. Rabbit is nothing if
not close to Updike's home
and heart, though not his head,
for Rabbit is kind of a dumb
bunny when you get down to
it.

But in Rabbit Redux, unlike
the companion book, Rabbit
Angstrom is a plugger, a
steady, hardworking linotypist,
a devoted father and a fading
image of the star basketball
player who ran away from wife
and child in Run. This time,
Janice runs away to live with a
car salesman, and the anti-hero
stays home to care for his 13
year-old son, Nelson, whose
shoulder-length hair doesn't
offend Middle American
Rabbit so much as it freaks

John Updike

him out: "the resemblance to a
girl is frighteningly strong."

Richard Locke, who may be
counted among Updike's
boosters, suggests a
complementary relationship
between the latter and Norman
Mailer. Both, Locke insists,
have made it their separate
efforts to explore
contemporary social issues and
public events in fictional form:
"the novel as history/history as
the novel" was Mailer's
much-acclaimed approach in
The Armies of the Night.
Updike holds, of the two,
much closer to a traditional
novelistic position.

For Mailer, whose genius
inclines him to tackle
momentous occasions head
on event supersedes
personality, except of course
his own there is a long list of
apt epithets (megalomaniac,
male chauvinist pig, bully,
Super-hack). Likewise, for
Updike, whose "masculine
tenderness" Locke really
admires, another literary mob
(whose flagship is best to be
called The New York Review
of Books) reserves its own
catalog of dirty names.

(A friend of mine, whose
taste and wisdom I admire,
once called Updike's style
"cancerous," which set me
back a bit, until I worked out a
small equation, whereby:
cancerous=deadly. Yes, deadly,
that's what Updike is.)

So here we are. The late
sixties have slouched on to the
summer of the moon shot,
1969, Manson, rioting blacks,
Vietnam...somehow the word
deadly begins to assume
ominous proportions. Brewer,
Pennsylvania-Rabbit's town-is
pocked with the scares of
urban renewal, parking lots,
moonburger stands, chemical
sludge. The landscape is lunar.

Rabbit says: "Everybody's
the way I used to be," and
indeed the public psyche seems
as unsettled, as chaotic, as full
of the passionate desire to
escape itself as was Rabbit's
own head ten years before.
There has been a calculated
shift from the arena of
Rabbit's inner space to the
portentous, even menacing
reaches of outer space.

Updike constructs a
well-linked series of
parallelisms between the state
of Rabbit's marriage and the
ongoing voyage of Apollo II.
Lift-off backgrounds the
beginning of the end;
touch-down on the moon
marks the collapse of the
marriage; and a safe return to
Earth parallels the inevitable
reconciliation.

Inevitable because Rabbit is,
to repeat, too much a part of
Updike for Updike to throw
him out with an admittedly
dirty tub of bath water. Before
he re-earns his wife he must
achieve something larger than
he has had in the past,
something luminous and
frightful, something to which
the decade of the book would
affix unequivocally a high
premium self-knowledge.

So Rabbit, lonely and thirty
six years old, takes into his
suburban home a runaway girl,
Jill, who used to live
fashionably in Connecticut and
who still drives Porsche. She
calls Rabbit's house "tacky"
(which it is), and Updike calls
Jill a "hippie" (which she isn't)
despite her Zen, her guitar, her
failure to wear underpants, and
her apocalyptic badmouth
black angel, Skeeter.

Skeeter? Yes, a real live
Negro, just back from Vietnam
and full of dope and
revolution. Rabbit takes
Skeeter in, too. "Black Jesus"
is being pursued by the police
on dope charges, and, after a
few rap sessions, old Rabbit's
mind is blown. A point to be
granted is the funk Updike
turns on in drawing his black
characters in Redux. They
seem almost real.

Only just when the mix is
starting to ferment, the
neighbors, who seem slightly
less real, burn down Rabbit's
house and Jill with it: Skeeter
gets away; Rabbit returns to
Mom and Pop, until Janice's
boyfriend tires of her, at which
opportunity Rabbit and
Janice—older and wiser,
Updike thinks—come together
again. Neat. Life goes on.

But, my God, for a writer
whose highest hope it is to
affirm and not to deny, this is
really deadly. Good deadly
reading.