“’Who’ll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise between doing what you want and doing what other people want’” (116).
John Updike’s second Rabbit Angstrom novel Rabbit Redux takes place approximately ten years after the end of the first novel Rabbit, Run. And as the title suggests, this novel is intended to be a “revival” or “restoration” of Rabbit (here “redux” is pronounced phonetically like “re-ducks,” rather than “re-doo,” though John Updike pronounced it more often as “ray-ducks”). Now, a middle-aged, slightly paunchy 36-year-old man, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is sensing change both within himself and in the greater world around him (interestingly enough, I read this novel at the age of 36). His city and the surrounding county of Brewer has entered a period of stagnation and decline –“The city, attempting to revive its dying downtown, has torn away blocks of buildings to create parking lots, so that a desolate openness, weedy and rubbled, spills through the once-packed streets, exposing church facades never seen from a distance and generating new perspectives of rear entryways and half-alleys and intensifying the cruel breadth of the light” (3). And “…The downtown is really sad now, isn’t it? All black-topped parking lots and Afro-topped blacks. And linoleum stores” (392). Rabbit is now working as a Linotyper (which he calls “honest work”) alongside his near-retirement age father, Earl, at a printing company called Verity Press. Throughout the novel, we are given various reprinted newspaper clippings to remind us of this profession.
With Rabbit back together with his wife Janice, they live in Penn Villas, a development west of Mt. Judge in Brewer County, PA. Rabbit’s mother has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease and she desires to see him as much as possible, but sadly he pays her little attention. And Rabbit’s son, Nelson, is now a young teenager coming into his own. After the tragic loss of their newborn in the previous book, Rabbit has refused another pregnancy to Janice. He feels dark and morose about their sex life, and clouded by the child’s death –even if Rabbit coarsely admits his wife’s increasing attractiveness in middle-age: “God, she is dumb, even if her ass has shaped up in middle age” (49). And some of the characters from the first novel have now passed on, like Coach Tothero.
Rabbit Redux is very much a novel of the 1960s. This book features the heavy presence of drugs, sex, color television, the Vietnam War, and racial strife. Gone are the days of the Eisenhower fifties. Now, we see the JFK-LBJ-Nixon sixties. Still disgusted by the prospect of aging and uncomfortable with all non-white people in his town, Rabbit fears the United States has become a nation of partiers, pill-popping long-haired hippies, and people who have simply taken advantage of the country rather than building it up. He frequently gets into arguments with other characters over his defense of the Vietnam War (Rabbit served in the army when he was younger, but was never actually deployed to Korea). One such character is an unmarried Greek immigrant named Charlie Stavros whom Rabbit likens to a “hotshot crap-car salesmen dripping with Vitalis sitting on their plumped-up asses bitching about a country that’s been stuffing goodies into their mouth ever since they were born” (47).
“’I don’t think about politics,’ Rabbit says. ‘That’s one of my Goddamn precious American rights, not to think about politics. I just don’t see why we’re supposed to walk down the street with our hands tied behind our back and let ourselves be blackjacked by every thug who says he has a revolution going… We’d turn it [Vietnam] into another Japan if they’d let us. That’s all we want to do, make a happy rich country full of highways and gas stations. Poor old LBJ, Jesus, with tears in his eyes on television, you must have heard him, he just about offered to make North Vietnam the fifty-first fucking state of the damn Union if they’d just stop throwing bombs. We’re begging them to rig some elections, any elections, and they’d rather throw bombs. What more can we do? We’re trying to give ourselves away, that’s all our foreign policy is, is trying to give ourselves away to make little yellow people happy, and guys like you sit around in restaurants moaning, ‘Jesus, we’re rotten’” (47).
“America is beyond power, it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains and darkness strangles millions” (49-50).
In these scenes it is clear that Janice and Rabbit have grown distant from one another like ‘locked doors,’ and Janice begins to explore her own sexuality, often masturbating and eventually striking up a secret affair with Charlie Stavros. When she fesses up to it with her husband, Rabbit beats her but suggests that she simply keep her lover on the side. This confuses Janice so she simply leaves her husband, wondering if she had ever meant anything to him at all. She moves out to live with Charlie for much of the rest of the novel, as Rabbit and Nelson live alone together, and Rabbit has a light affair of his own with a neighbor, Peggy Forsnacht, who is facing her own marital discord. Then one evening, a black co-worker of Rabbit’s at the printery named Buchanan introduces him to a teenage white girl (a “rich bitch”) named Jill who is fleeing from her upper-middle-class family. Predictably, Rabbit and Jill begin a torrid, wildly graphic sexual affair in which she moves into his house and essentially serves to please Rabbit, while also titillating Rabbit’s young thirteen-year-old Nelson.
Amidst the ever-present voice of the television set (from which we are given depictions of important historical events like the assassination of JFK as well as the moon landing), Rabbit and Jill smoke marijuana and have near constant sex until another oddball character suddenly moves into Rabbit’s house –a pseudo-messianic caricature of a revolutionary black liberation leader who describes himself as “black jesus” named Skeeter. Naturally, Skeeter and Jill also start having sex, taking mescalin, and shooting up heroin and so on, all of which is met with Rabbit’s shrugging, seemingly careless, indifferent approval. All the while, Rabbit and Skeeter engage in extensive dialogue about the legacy of slavery and the history of racial oppression in the United States –these lengthy scenes seem to drone on and on throughout the latter half of the novel.
At this point, Rabbit’s house has become a “commune” of sorts –the very thing he feared and decried about his changing country. The climax of the novel comes when Jill, Skeeter, and Rabbit are about to engage in a threesome when all of a sudden a face is spotted in the window outside as Rabbit’s conservative WASP neighbors grow increasingly concerned about the goings on at his home. Soon, Rabbit’s house is mysteriously set on fire and naturally the police blame the black man, Skeeter.
“The flames are slowly smothered, the living-room side of the house is saved. The interior of the kitchen side seems a garden where different tints of smoke sprout; formica, vinyl, nylon, linoleum each burn differently, yield their curdling compounds back to earth and air. Firemen wet down the wreckage and search behind the gutted walls. Now the upstairs windows stare with searchlights, now the lower. A skull full of fireflies. Yet still the crowd waits, held by a pack sense of smell; death is in heat” (346).
“Under pressure the door pops open. Splintered glass on the other side scrapes white arcs into the hall floor finish. Rabbit begins to cry from smoke and the smell. The house is warm, and talks to itself; a swarm of small rustles and snaps arises from the section on his left; settling the noises drip down from the charred joists and bubble up from the drenched dark rubble where the floor had been. The bed’s metal frame has fallen into the kitchen. On his right, the living room is murky but undamaged” (355).
Tragically, Jill (while apparently high on heroin) is killed instantly in the swirling housefire, much to the sorrow of Rabbit and Nelson. Her body is carried off by the authorities while Rabbit drives Skeeter away instructing him never to return, thereby shielding him from any potential blame for the fire. And later, Rabbit experiences a powerful vision of grief over the loss of Jill, a notable passage which struck me as a moment of unique humanity in Rabbit’s otherwise morally abhorrent world:
“One night while he is letting his purged body drift in listening Jill comes and bends over and caresses him. He turns his head to kiss her thigh and she is gone. But she has wakened him; it was her presence, and through this rip in her death a thousand details are loosed; tendrils of hair, twists of expression, her frail voice quavering into pitch as she strummed. The minor details of her person that slightly repelled him, the hairlines between her teeth, her doughy legs, the apple smoothness of her valentine bottom, the something prim and above-it-all about her flaky-dry mouth, the unwashed white dress she kept wearing, now return and become the body of his memory. Times return when she merged on the bed moonlight, her young body just beginning to learn to feel, her nerve endings still curled in like fernheads in the spring, green, hardness that repelled him but was not her fault, the gift of herself was too new to give. Pensive moments of her face return to hurt him. A daughterly attentiveness he had bid her hide. Why? He had retreated into protest and did not wish her to call him out. He was not ready, he had been affronted. Let black Jesus have her; he had been converted to a hardness of heart, a billion cunts and only one him. He tries to picture, what had been so nice, Jill and Skeeter as he actually saw them once in hard lamplight, but in fantasy now Rabbit rises from the chair to join them, to be a father and lover to them, and they fly apart like ink and paper whirling to touch for an instant on the presses. Jill Comes Again. Angstrom Senses Presence. She breathes upon him again as he lies in his boyhood bed and this time he does not make the mistake of turning his face, he very carefully brings his hand up from his side to touch the ends of her hair where it must hang. Walking to find his hand in empty mid-air he cries; grief rises in hi out of a parched stomach, a sore throat, stinged eyes; remembering her daughterly blind grass-green looking to him for more than shelter he blinds himself, leaves stains on the linen that need not be wiped, they will be invisible in the morning. Yet she has been here, her very breath and presence. He must tell Nelson in the morning. On this dreamlike resolve he relaxes, lets his room, with hallucinatory shuddering, be coupled to an engine and tugged westward toward the desert, where Mim is now” (408).
By the end of the novel, Charlie Stavros cheats on Janice with Rabbit’s sister, Mim, and Charlie suffers a near-fatal heart attack (likely caused by a heart murmur he’s had since childhood). This leads Janice to awkwardly return to her husband. They are reunited at a motel, get naked, and hop into bed together, but instead of having sex, they simply fall asleep. And before the book ends, Rabbit is suddenly let go from his job at the printery, replaced by a new wave of automation –“Well I was nursemaid to this machine but now they’ve retired the machine. I was nursemaid to Janice but she upped and left” (385).
Thus ends this rather outrageous, filthy, utterly crass, vulgar novel. That Rabbit Redux has been regarded as a masterpiece of American fiction, particularly by the likes of prominent 20th century literary lights, such as Anatole Broyard and Martin Amis, is somewhat shocking to me. But perhaps the vulgarity is partly the point of Rabbit Redux –to shock middle-class suburban sensibilities with political incorrectness and puerile indecency, and thereby reveal its limited horizons. But with graphic scenes of rape, domestic violence, and racism, John Updike is simply not to my taste. I see a great deal more ugliness, rather than beauty, in this novel. This ridiculous satire of suburbia is amusing at points, and Updike’s prose does indeed bear the mark of true literary talent, but scenes of Rabbit ejaculating onto a flower-child teenager and comparing the act to napalm being dropped in Vietnam? Or scenes of Rabbit callously dismissing his wife after beating her and sending her off to live with her lover? Or scenes of Rabbit reading aloud the words of Frederick Douglass while a teenager is being raped by a self-proclaimed black messiah in front of him? This is all just a bridge too far for me. And for what? What is the grand message here? Unfortunately, I have two more books to read in this series as part of my quest to read all the books that won a Pulitzer Prize.
Updike, John. Rabbit Redux. Random House Trade Paperbacks. New York, NY, 1988, 2012 (originally published in 1960).