It has certainly taken me a while, but I've reached the end of the Rabbit novels proper. (Each one is longer than the last, so it was like the finish line kept moving further and further away.) There is still a novella called Rabbit Remembered, which I'll probably start in on by Monday, but I wanted a short pause to reflect on the novels as a whole. While there actually isn't all that much plot per se in these novels (they are much more consumed by Rabbit Angstrom's thoughts on all kinds of current events in addition to his family dealings), there are certain life events that could be considered SPOILERS, and I'll have to mention a few of them to do any justice to the novels, so you have been warned.
Again some SPOILERS embedded below.
One of the worst kept secrets in literature is that Updike killed off Harry Angstrom in Rabbit at Rest (there was only a relatively short period where this wasn't discussed openly), although now that I have gotten to the end of the book, I see that he left Harry at death's door (from a second heart attack) and it isn't until Rabbit Remembered that Updike is completely clear that Harry doesn't make it out of the hospital, i.e. if you wore rose-colored glasses you could imagine him pulling through, though with a much reduced quality of life.
What I personally found a bit too cute is that the last section of the book is titled "MI" and of course this would seem to be Michigan, since the other sections are titled FL and PA, corresponding to where Rabbit was living at the time. When Rabbit makes yet another run for it, avoiding facing the music for yet more bad personal decisions, I kept expecting him to turn north and drive up to Michigan (though Ohio would have been a slightly more logical choice), but in fact he returns to Florida. Thus, MI stands for myocardial infarction (or heart attack). There really isn't any logic to this, just a desire on Updike's part to mislead the reader. (It should either be FL or FL/MI, but the first chapter would then also be FL/MI, since Harry had his first heart attack in Florida as well.)
It's difficult to really assess the novels as a whole. It seems to me the first one was a bit of a one-off about an American male who really had trouble facing up to his responsibilities and his family life and basically wouldn't grow up. There were a few interesting asides about Harry's thoughts on current events, but this wasn't really the focus. At some point, Updike decided to return to the Rabbit character and age him about a decade and have this youngish man largely forged in the 1950s (but with some memories of WWII) deal with the upheaval of the 1960s. Then the success of Rabbit Redux convinced Updike to periodically return to the scene, very much like the 7Up series where we (the readers) could see how people changed with the times (and adapted or failed to adapt). It's a really interesting concept, and I'm struggling to think of another case where it has been applied in such a rigorous way in literature. Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time definitely has the main characters moving in time from the 1920s to the late 1960s (or even 1971, according to Hilary Spurling), but the gaps aren't quite so regular. Quite a few of those novels are closely spaced, so there isn't the same jump cut to the next decade, which Updike maintained. Dos Passos's USA Trilogy is a bit more compressed in time, though it ranges a bit further afield in geography (we virtually never see Rabbit outside of Pennsylvania or Florida or driving between the two states, with one notable vacation to the Caribbean in Rabbit is Rich).
No question the most interesting or successful aspects of the Rabbit novels are when Harry reflects on the big events of the day -- the moon landing, the oil crisis which marked Carter's presidency, the Iran hostage situation (which was fairly central to Adam Langer's Crossing California), Ollie North and the Iran-contra affair, Jim Bakker, Tammy Faye & Jessica Hahn, and even Sally Ride and the Challenger explosion. (Not that his thoughts are particularly profound...) While Rabbit does occasionally ruminate on Nixon and Watergate, the main events happen off-screen as it were, between Rabbit Redux and Rabbit is Rich. Harry also thinks quite a bit about sports, naturally enough, as he was a high school basketball star, which in many ways marked his entire life, but the nature of sports is to be completely transitory and frankly meaningless in the larger scheme of things. While I suspect Updike did the research and put in the actual scores of the various Phillys and Eagles games mentioned throughout these novels, the only sports story that really had much cultural resonance was Pete Rose being banned from baseball -- and Giamatti's death by heart attack almost immediately afterwards!
One of the downsides of all the attention that the novels got is that Updike is occasionally writing with "his legacy" in mind, self-consciously making links between the novels. Harry's son, Nelson, does a runner when his daughter is about to be born (the apple doesn't fall far from the tree...), spoiling that fancy Caribbean vacation. However, in this case, Nelson actually is out of the state when the girl is born, unlike Harry, who does leave Ruth (a woman he's shacked up with) to rejoin his wife Janice in time for the birth of their daughter, Rebecca. History doesn't precisely repeat itself. In the first novel, Harry only makes it as far as West Virginia before turning back around and returning to Brewer, PA. In Rabbit at Rest, Harry does make the entire drive from Pennsylvania to Florida over a couple of days, though perhaps the highways had improved by that point... Probably the most pointed linkage is through Harry's playground misadventures. Rabbit, Run begins with a young Harry wanting to play pick-up basketball with some kids in the neighborhood, clearly not ready to grow up and forgo the adulation he got as a basketball star. In Rabbit at Rest, he is an over-the-hill, shambling wreck (at least this is how he sees himself) who, nonetheless, plays a bit of HORSE with some Black kids in Florida, and then a few days later, plays a too vigorous game of one-on-one, which leads to the second, fatal heart attack.
While he never gets quite so "literary" again, Updike borrows very heavily from Joyce's Ulysses in Rabbit, Run, though you could say there are some ironic inversions. Ulysses is almost entirely about Leopold Bloom's travels around Dublin (largely though not always inside his head) and then Joyce ends the book with Molly's inner monologue. Similarly, Rabbit, Run is pretty much all wrapped up with Rabbit and his unwillingness to stick with his conventional marriage, leading to his aborted flight to West Virginia, though most of the novel takes place in the small towns surrounding Brewer (apparently a composite of Reading, PA and a few other places). The one time you get into Janice's head in Rabbit, Run is an inner monologue where she gets drunk, upset at Rabbit heading out and abandoning her for yet another long night, and accidentally drowns the infant Rebecca. Aside from the fact, I wasn't thrilled at how much conscious or unconscious woman-shaming or blaming goes on in the novels, it was a bit of a shock that Updike would actually go there in the first place. However, Rabbit, Run doesn't end with the death of the baby, but rather Rebecca's funeral, where Harry, overwhelmed by life (and death), runs off yet again.
He's definitely an irresponsible jerk in the first novel, and it's a bit of a surprise that Updike managed to build such a literary legacy on the back of Harry Angstrom. To get there, Updike starts off with Janice taking Harry back, despite everything, apparently relatively soon after the funeral, though we don't find this out until Rabbit Redux. Then Rabbit Redux is more or less an inversion of Rabbit, Run, where Janice is ground down by everyday life and runs out on the marriage and into a fairly long affair with a co-worker at Springer Motors, the car lot owned by her father. Harry has to be the responsible one for once, taking care of their son, Nelson. For a while, he seems to be doing reasonably well, but then some crazy 60s stuff happens, some of which is more than a little implausible, though I'll return to that shortly.
This is turning out to be an extremely long post, and I'm probably not even halfway through, so I will cut this short and start a second post to conclude my impressions of the books. My last word on the "literary" aspect of these novels is that all of them end with one word sentences.
Rabbit, Run: "... his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs."
Rabbit Redux: "... comes upon the familiar dip of her waist, ribs to hip bone, where no bones are, soft as flight, fat's inward curve, slack, his babies from her belly. He finds this inward curve and slips along it, sleeps. He. She. Sleeps. O.K.?"
Rabbit is Rich: "Through all this she has pushed to be here, in his lap, his hands, a real presence hardly weighing anything but alive. Fortune's hostage, heart's desire, a granddaughter. His. Another nail in the coffin. His."
Rabbit at Rest: "'Well, Nelson,' he says, 'all I can tell you is, it isn't so bad.' Rabbit thinks he should maybe say more, the kid looks wildly expectant, but enough. Maybe. Enough."
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