As with my previous post on Updike's Rabbit novels, there will be SPOILERS ahead.
If you don't like SPOILERS, you better run...
I fully note the problem of applying today's mores to the past, but Harry Angstrom seems a deeply selfish cad in Rabbit, Run, even for his own time. I came very close to bailing on the series in the first book when Harry is living with another woman, Ruth, and he objects her using a diaphragm because the very idea basically icks him out, though of course he doesn't like using condoms and virtually never does throughout the course of the novels. How grotesquely selfish can you be? I briefly thought he was acting out of religious faith, but the novels make it quite clear he isn't a Catholic (so isn't placed in the bind of David Lodge's narrator in The British Museum is Falling Down). Well, not surprisingly, Ruth gets pregnant, but Harry abandons her in the end to return to his wife, Janice.
In the second novel, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit has followed his father into a blue-collar profession, setting linotype for a newspaper. The first part of the novel does feel just a bit like slumming, though perhaps Updike's roots were a bit more working class than one would expect from someone who went to Harvard in the 1950s, though arguably it was a bit more of a meritocracy back then when a truly bright boy* could be plucked from the hinterlands of Pennsylvania. Nonetheless, Updike's reportage on the working class rings a bit false (to say nothing of the unlikely events** where Harry takes in a hippie chick and a Black nationalist while his wife has run off!). It isn't until Rabbit is Rich where I find the preoccupations of Harry's country club partners to be a bit more grounded and realistic. It is essentially as though once Updike encroaches upon John O'Hara's turf (and Updike was an admirer of O'Hara) that he blossoms, at least for me. I definitely prefer these later novels, and Rabbit is Rich is my favorite. (Rabbit at Rest contains a very unfortunate portrayal of a Japanese businessman (who cannot pronounce the letter 'r'), which is a bit grating, but mostly I find Updike drags things out here, taking far too long to confirm that Harry's son, Nelson, is a heavy cocaine user and has been embezzling from the car lot. I also was not thrilled about how much Janice (and Janice's mother) enable Nelson's bad behavior, though, to be fair, this began in Rabbit is Rich. But perhaps the most challenging scene of the novel is where Harry sleeps with his daughter-in-law in a set piece that would take too long to explain.)
I have to admit it is hard to decide just exactly how Updike wants the reader to view Rabbit. Is Rabbit an indictment of American society and particularly the hero worship that so many have towards sports figures? Many times Updike makes it clear that Rabbit peaked too soon and has never lived up to his high school "glory days." He lucked into a comfortable lifestyle through his wife's family connections, though he was then basically pushed aside at the car lot by Janice and her mother (into very early semi-retirement) in order to make room for Nelson, far before Nelson was mature enough for the responsibility. Harry does live in the past a fair bit, though he is also a fairly optimistic (and patriotic) fellow. What undermines any general critique that Updike is making is that, time and again, women throw themselves at Harry, including his daughter-in-law, who at one point admits that she wishes Nelson were more like his father!
Nelson is a spectacularly unpleasant character in Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest. While most of Updike's characters make significant mistakes, Nelson is the most self-pitying and the one who blames everything on his lousy upbringing, whereas Harry pretty much doted on his mother. It is truly sad to see how Nelson plays on his mother's guilt (for abandoning him for a few months while she had an affair) to get away with bloody murder, including smashing up two cars at the lot! I will say I was a bit surprised that the rehabilitation clinic he is forced into towards the end of Rabbit at Rest produces lasting results, and he is in much better shape in Rabbit Remembered, even making connections with his half-sister after she comes into their lives. (Harry's illegitimate daughter was only told the truth about her parentage on Ruth's deathbed. Ruth had actually lied to Harry on the few occasions he tried to track her down and offer child support.) I suppose here Updike is advancing the idea that people can change for the better, though others certainly seem stuck in a rut.
I mentioned briefly the way that these books function a bit like a series of time capsules, with headlines a decade apart. There is also a bit of a motif where Harry looks at the movie marquees and sees a jumble of half spelled out titles, such as "2001 SPACE OD'SEY" or "BUTCH CSSDY & KID." In Rabbit is Rich, there is a different (newer?) movie theatre that advertises 4 movies at a time.
It is certainly possible that I warmed up to Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest because I remember the current events and saw many of the movies that Updike name-checks (and during their initial runs long before Netflix or even HBO!). While this isn't quite as sustained as in Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale, where the changes to the town square are catalogued in great detail, Harry and then later Janice do spend a fair bit of time thinking about how Brewer has changed, with gentrification occurring in one neighborhood they used to live in and various businesses failing and city planners putting in a pedestrianized mall.
As before, this post is running fairly long. I think I'll just touch on a few other aspects of the novels that caught my attention (as I am quite unlikely to read them a second time). Harry starts out fairly religious, and while he does think about God and goes to church less and less in the later books, he never completely loses faith. His wife's family persuades their priest, Reverend Eccles, to spend time with Harry and to bring him back into the family, though not necessarily the fold (Harry's upbringing is Lutheran not Episcopalian). Eccles finds a new job for Harry, but mostly takes him golfing in an attempt to build rapport and trust and ultimately convince Harry to return to his wife. In the end, Harry does return, though he is still unstable (a weak reed). Eccles's wife says that the baby probably would still be alive if Eccles hadn't intervened, and he doesn't really have an answer for this. Harry himself wonders several times, particularly in Rabbit Redux, why God didn't cause the bath stopper to come loose and save the life of his child. His faith in a personal God has certainly shrunk a bit by Rabbit is Rich. Still, there is an interesting passage in Rabbit is Rich, where Harry and Janice are flying down to the Caribbean and this excites Harry, who basically only travels for business (this is before they buy a condo in Florida prior to Rabbit at Rest): "Joy makes his heart pound. God, having shrunk in Harry's middle years to the size of a raisin lost under the car seat, is suddenly great again, everywhere like a radiant wind. Free: the dead and the living alike have been left five miles below in the haze that has annulled the earth like breath on a mirror."
I should mention that Harry is a bit obsessed with death from the second novel on. He often thinks about all the dead people he knows, starting with his daughter and his coach, then his parents, then Janice's father and finally some people his own age start passing away, and imagines them practically following him around (though still under the ground). I wouldn't say it comes across as particularly morbid, but it kind of goes along with Harry being more backward-looking than future-oriented. After he has his first heart attack, Harry acts like his life is over, and he's more or less waiting for death.† It's often hard to remember that he is only in his mid 50s by this point! (No question that being pushed aside at the car lot was a huge blow to his psyche, and he probably wouldn't have been so beaten down by his health scare.) He finally does start getting a bit of exercise (not counting golf), walking around unfamiliar streets in Florida, though then he stumbles across a basketball court and overdoes it in a pickup game, leading to his second heart attack.
While Rabbit definitely is a bit too prone to sleep around (and a fairly incredible number of women throw themselves at him), there is an amusing set piece early on in Rabbit is Rich where Janice is feeling a bit frisky, but Harry just wants to finish reading his Consumer Reports article. He has certainly adapted well to his move up the class ladder and become a dedicated consumer (and thus is doing his duty as an American).
I certainly didn't like Harry Angstrom much in the first and even the second novels, but he grew a bit more on me after that, which may just be par for the course, once I decided to invest the time in reading the novels all in one go. If you didn't have the time or interest in that, you could just jump to Rabbit is Rich, which I do think is the best of the bunch.
* Women were still largely confined to Radcliffe until the 1970s.
** This section of Rabbit Redux is almost like that bizarre movie with Mick Jagger (Performance) where the barriers between Harry and Skeeter (the Black nationalist) come down in unpredictable (and unbelievable) ways. But what truly feels unbelievable is that Skeeter knows there is an arrest warrant out for him, but he crashes with Harry for weeks and even starts hanging out in the front yard! It's like no one in this novel has functioning self-preservation instincts.
† There's no question this novel hit a bit too close to home, where I was just waiting to see how quickly Updike would kill off Rabbit with his oversized (and very overweight) body and over-worked heart. That's pretty much what caused my father's death, though he made it into his 70s. During his 50s, he was a much healthier specimen than Harry, who seems incredibly frail by his mid 50s. Still, I had a lot of trouble reading the hospital scenes and found it a relief that Updike doesn't really drag it out, relative to all the other aspects of the novel.
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