“The fucking world is running out of gas” (3).
For reasons that continue to elude me, John Updike has often been ranked among the greatest American authors of the 20th century. During his lifetime, he published no less than sixty books, in addition to hundreds of New Yorker stories, poems, reviews, and works of criticism. He won every major American literary accolade imaginable –the Pulitzer (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and so on. And yet his novels tend to be salacious, his characters morally repulsive, and his prose peppered with titillating bouts of shocking obscenity. The third installment in his Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom tetralogy, Rabbit is Rich, swept the awards season in 1981-1982 – the National Book Award (Hardcover), the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was an extraordinary string of honors for his tenth novel. And Updike would later go on to win a second Pulitzer for his fourth Rabbit novel Rabbit At Rest. Winning one Pulitzer Prize is remarkable enough, but winning two vaults an author like Updike into an elite club of two-time Pulitzer-winners which includes only Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and Colson Whitehead in the fiction category. But is it justified for Updike? You would be forgiven for thinking that, with so much praise, Rabbit Is Rich must surely be the Great American Novel par excellence along with the rest of the Rabbit series. However, having read three-quarters of this series thus far, the Rabbit novels are rife with a remarkably vile, crass, tasteless, and disagreeable collection of characters and scenarios. Perhaps this is why John Updike’s reputation seems to have suffered so profoundly since his passing in 2009.
Each Rabbit novel takes place about a decade after its predecessor. Rabbit Is Rich is set ten years after Rabbit Redux. It is 1979, the height of the oil crisis, the era of stagflation. Jimmy Carter is President, the Soviet Union has invaded Afghanistan, the Ayatollah Khomeini has launched a successful revolution in Iran, and Pope John Paul II has been elected supreme pontiff. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom (now age forty-six) and his wife Janice have been reunited after the utterly ludicrous events of the previous novel, and they are now living with her elderly mother Bessie. They also co-own her late father’s business Springer Motors, one of two Toyota agencies in the Brewer area (the dealership sells about three hundred cars per year). And amazingly, Janice’s former lover Charlie Stavros now works at the car dealership, though there doesn’t seem to be too much bad blood between him and Rabbit, despite the fact that Janice left Rabbit for Charlie during the bulk of Rabbit Redux. At any rate, as the title “Rabbit Is Rich” suggests, Rabbit has become rich and he seems to be fairly satisfied with his life. He even begins speculating in silver and gold Krugerrands (naturally, these become periodic sexual motifs for Rabbit as he and Janice eventually have sex atop a pile of gold at one point –the image confronts readers with a sick metaphor for the moral decline of American culture). Likewise, Janice seems perfectly content to play tennis at the country club each day and drink glasses of Chablis with her friends. Here, the accumulation of wealth serves as a key theme in the novel –do riches provide the sufficient or necessary conditions for living a happy life?
As with the prior novels in the series, I was keen to learn what has happened to Rabbit’s city in the ensuing decade since the conclusion of Rabbit Redux. Angstrom notes: “Railroads and coal made Brewer. Everywhere in this city, once the fifth largest in Pennsylvania but now slipped to seventh, structures speak of expended energy. Great shapely stacks that have not issued smoke for half a century. Scrolling cast-iron light stanchions not lit since World War II… The old textile plants given over to discount clothing outlets teeming with a gimcrack cheer of banners Factory Fair and slogans Where the Dollar Is Still a Dollar. These acres of dead railroad track and car shops and stockpiled wheels and empty boxcars stick in the heart of the city like a great rusting dagger. All this had been cast up in the last century by what now seems giants, in an explosion of iron and brick still preserved intact in this city where the sole new buildings are funeral parlors and government offices, Unemployment and Join the Army” (37).
At any rate, in an age of seeming stagnation and decline, and in between bouts of country club golfing, Rotary Club gin-drinking, obsessive scrutinizing of women’s bodies, random sex with his wife (she has now “cauterized” her tubes), trips to the Springer family cottage in the Poconos, and reading occasional Consumer Reports, Rabbit seems to experience brief moments of tranquility, reflection and –dare I say it– even introspection. Or at least he is no longer trying to flee from his family, nor join a small “commune” that nearly burns his house down (both physically and metaphorically). In particular, Rabbit is haunted by the specter of Ruth Leonard, the “plump” prostitute he impregnated and abandoned in the first novel. What has become of his daughter? Did Ruth keep the baby? Rabbit grows curious after he starts seeing a young woman around Brewer who bears a striking resemblance to himself. Could it be his daughter? Occasionally, Rabbit drives outside town to the plot of land where Ruth lives and he watches from afar to see if he can catch a glimpse of his potential daughter. Also, he sometimes hears the faint whisper of his late mother at night in the corner of his room saying “Hassy.” Rabbit’s life seems to be a ghostly existence burdened by troubled memories and unanswered questions. He has also learned that his old comrade, Skeeter, from Rabbit Redux has tragically been killed in a Philadelphia shootout with the police (Rabbit receives an anonymous clipping of the story).
However, in the meantime Rabbit’s wayward son Nelson (“Nellie”) abruptly arrives home from Kent State University flanked by a kooky vegetarian from California named Melanie (her large breasts are frequently commented upon). She reminds Rabbit of “those somehow unreal but brave women who hang by their teeth in circuses, or ride one-footed the velvet rope up to fly through the spangled air, though she is dressed in that raggy look girls hide in now” (84). He also refers to her as “a gorgeous frog” (86). For some reason, Nelson does not have plans to return to college. Despite Nelson and Melanie occasionally sleeping together from time to time, Rabbit quickly notices something is off with his son. Several hundred pages later, we learn that Melanie decides to leave Nelson in order to run away with Charlie Stavros (who is significantly her senior). The truth about Nelson is then revealed –he has actually impregnated another young woman from Ohio named Teresa (“Pru”). She has been writing to Nelson nearly every day and soon moves in with him. Somehow Nelson manages to disappoint his father in other ways, as well –he accidentally experiences several car crashes throughout the novel, costing his father thousands of dollars, and he starts working at Springer Motors, which he insists should be selling convertibles (much to his father’s chagrin). He often accuses his father of being too shallow and materialistic, all while echoing many of the same dilemmas his father once faced in Rabbit, Run. But, considering the events in Rabbit Redux, Nelson has his own reasons for being a troubled young man. At one point, Nelson confesses his anger toward everything his father put him through: “He is bad, really bad. He doesn’t know what’s up, and he doesn’t care, and he thinks he’s so great. That’s what gets me, his happiness. He is so fucking happy.” To which Melanie responds: “Come on Nelson, let it go… Forget everything for now. I’ll help you… Here’s my ass. I love being fucked from behind when I have a buzz on. It’s like occupying two planes of being” (152-153). Despite being yet another moment inspiring raised-eyebrows and clutched-pearls from readers, all of these characters seem so painfully dead behind the eyes, lacking in any moral compass, and ceaselessly shrugging their way from scene to scene in search of momentary sexual gratification.
Nelson and Pru are quickly married, but despite being pregnant, Pru goes out dancing and smoking pot, while Nelson gets angry and calls her “whorey.” At one point, annoyed with his fiancé, Nelson (accidentally?) pushes her down a flight of stairs, fracturing her left arm. But the baby is fine. Not long thereafter, Rabbit and Janice decide to move out of Ma Springer’s home and buy a home of their own in the upscale community of Penn Park. Around the same time, they join three other couples on a trip to the Caribbean which rapidly devolves into a rowdy, swinging, couples-swapping weekend. As with the previous two novels, it is truly jarring to watch all the characters act so blasé about everything –even as their spouses are openly unfaithful and their children are a mess. Despite lusting after Cindy Murkett for much of the novel (particularly after discovering nude photos of her hidden inside a drawer), Rabbit is then paired up with another woman, Thelma, who confesses her own love for him. Here, in an unnecessarily vivid passage, Thelma performs fellatio on Rabbit and encourages him to have anal sex with her before they both retire to the bathroom to urinate on each other… again, how did critics ever come to regard this as an American classic? It baffles me.
Before Rabbit can enjoy a similarly debauched night with Cindy the following evening, he and Janice are suddenly summoned home. Their son Nelson has haphazardly abandoned his pregnant wife Pru without warning in the midst of an argument (he has fled back to Melanie at college in Ohio) and when Rabbit and Janice arrive in Pennsylvania, Pru has already delivered the baby girl. The novel concludes with Rabbit realizing he is now a grandfather –and this means the slow encroachment of death for him. He finally musters up the courage to drive out and confront his old fling, Ruth Leonard, who now lives alone, her husband died years ago. She is still a bit of an oddball, but she gives a somewhat unsatisfying claim that Rabbit is not the father of her daughter. Should Rabbit trust her? Is she telling the truth? Rabbit is not exactly confident, but he departs with a few lingering questions, knowing he and Ruth will never see each other again.
************
Suffice it to say Rabbit Is Rich is a shockingly ribald novel, filled with seedy old men and their nasty thoughts, as well as a shameless contempt toward women and WASP-influenced fears of non-white people. Unlike in the prior novel Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich features lengthy sections that drone on painfully into drab boredom, but these sections are bookended by graphic titillating passages of heart-racing erotica (some of which border on grotesque). I’m not really sure what purpose these graphic scenes serve, aside from leaving readers with a detestable feeling of disorienting sickness, and thereby rendering them memorable, I suppose. As an example, consider the quotation below which shows Rabbit’s inner monologue while he is mid-conversation with his wife about a serious topic:
“He shifts his hand down the silvery slick undulations of her belly to her patch of hair, that seems to bristle at his touch. He ought to eat her sometime. Bed her down on her back with her legs hanging over the side and just kneel and chew her cunt until she came. He used to when they were courting in that apartment of the other girl’s with its view of the old gray gas tanks by the river, kneel and just graze in her ferny meadow for hours, nose, eyelids rubbing up against the wonder of it. Any woman, they deserve to be eaten once in a while, they don’t come so your mouth is full like with an oyster, how do whores stand it, cock after cock, cuts down on VD, but having to swallow, must amount to pints in the course of a week. Ruth hated it that time, but some cunts now if you read the sex tapes in Oui lap it up, one said it tasted to her like champagne” (403).
Life is just too short to be enmeshed in endless paragraphs like this. Here is another example, from an earlier chapter of the book, when Janice passes out from drinking too much and Rabbit continues having sex with her anyway (or put another way, he proceeds to sexually assault her). With these types of scenes rampant throughout the book, it is difficult for me to understand why John Leonard, writing a 1981 review in The New York Times, dubbed Rabbit Is Rich “a splendid achievement” which shows Rabbit “has grown up from Peter Rabbit to the Babbitt of Sinclair Lewis.” But Leonard was certainly not alone; praise was heaped upon Updike’s Rabbit novels for decades, even if at least some of it seems warranted, I suppose. Updike’s vast suburban cosmos is surely enriched and enshrined by a certain spiritual quality, and his novels are vitalized by the need for erotic love, even if his depiction of sexual gratification is often alarmingly gratuitous. But while the Babbitt comparison is somewhat apt (George Babbitt is even acknowledged in the novel’s epigram), if Rabbit Is Rich is intended to portray a maturing American middle-class, we should all be deeply troubled. I tend to agree with the younger generation’s criticisms of the Rabbit novels, much of which concerns the rank misogyny and wildly exploitative licentiousness in the novels. Updike is often grouped together, with Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, as the “Midcentury Misogynists” or the “Great Male Narcissists.” Forcing us to see the world through Rabbit’s hollow, morally depraved eyes can still serve a purpose, in deliberately awakening a certain level of disgust in readers in order to show us some deeper truth about human nature, but the effect in these novels is really more nauseating than transportive. I found some solace in the critical writings of James Wood (see his essay “John Updike’s Complacent God” which argues that there is indeed great beauty in Updike’s novels, but that his novels ultimately lack any greater depth) and Harold Bloom, who called Updike a “minor novelist with a major style,” and lastly David Foster Wallace, who famously dismissed Updike as “just a penis with a thesaurus.” Unfortunately for me, John Updike’s rich, stylistic prose and effortless maneuverability between differing character perspectives is not enough to salvage these novels –they offer more style than substance, and the indulgent shock-value approach really did not resonate with me. Ironically Updike once referred to his works as an attempt “to give the mundane its beautiful due.” Perhaps one day I will learn to discover this “beautiful due” in Updike, though admittedly, I am not looking forward to reading the fourth and final book in this series, Rabbit At Rest, which also won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991.
Notable Quotations:
“People are going wild, their dollars are going rotten, they shell out like there’s no tomorrow. He tells them when they buy a Toyota, they’re turning their dollars into yen. And they believe him. A hundred twelve units new and used moved in the first five months of 1979, with eight Corollas, five Coronas including a Luxury Edition Wagon, and that Celica that Charlie said looked like a Pimpmobile unloaded in these first three weeks of June already, at an average gross mark-up of eight hundred dollars per sale. Rabbit is rich” (3-4).
“A man fucks your wife, it puts a new value on her, within limits” (13).
“The day is still golden outside, old gold now in Harry’s lengthening life. He has seen summer come and go until its fading is one in his heart with its coming, though he cannot yet name the weeds that flower each in its turn through the season, or the insects that also in ordained sequence appear, eat, and perish. He knows that in June school ends and the playgrounds open, and the grass needs cutting again and again if one is a man, and if one is a child games can be played outdoors while the supper dishes tinkle in the mellow parental kitchens, and the moon is discovered looking over your shoulder out of a sky still blue, and a silver blob of milkweed spittle has appeared mysteriously on your knee. Good luck” (32).
“Every evening passes in a stale crackle of television and suppressed resentment” (55).
“Her breasts hang down her nipples, bumply in texture like hamburger, sway an inch above his belly” (58).
“Cindy’s towel hangs on her empty chair. To be Cindy’s towel and to be sat upon by her: the thought dries Rabbit’s mouth. To stick your tongue in just as far as it would go while her pussy tickles your nose” (77-78).
“As they walk up the front steps his feet feel heavy, as if the world had taken on new gravity. He and the kid years ago went through something for which Rabbit has forgiven himself but which he knows the kid never has. A girl called Jill died when Harry’s house burned down, a girl Nelson had come to love like a sister. At least like a sister. But the years have piled on, the surviving have patched things up, and so many more have joined the dead, undone by diseases for which only God is to blame, that it no longer seems so bad, it seems more as if Jill just moved to another town, where the population is growing. Jill would be twenty-eight now. Nelson is twenty-two. Think of all the blame God has to shoulder” (83).
“’I like the kid. To me, he’s just another basket case. At his age now they’re all basket cases’” (148).
“To hell with this scruffy kid. Rabbit has decided to live for himself, selfishly at last” (244).
“…he hears a car motor start up not far away he doesn’t connect it to himself until a squeak of rubber and a roar of speed slam metal into metal. That black gnashing cuts through the red. Rabbit turns around and sees Nelson backing off for a second go. Small parts are still settling, tinkling in the sunshine. He thinks the boy might now aim to crush him against the door where he is paralyzed but that is not the case. The Royale rams again into the side of the Mercury, which lifts up on two wheels. The pale green fender collapses enough to explode the headlight; the lens rim flies free… Seeing the collision coming, Harry expected it to happen in slow motion, like on television, but instead it happened comically fast, like two dogs tangling and then thinking better of it. The Royale’s motor dies. Through the windshield’s granular fracture Nelson’s face looks distorted, twisted by tears, twisted small. Rabbit feels a wooden sort of choked hilarity rising within him as he contemplates the damage. Pieces of glass finer than pebbles, bright grit, on the asphalt. Shadows on the broad skins of metal where shadows were not designed to be. The boy’s short haircut looking like a round brush as he bends his face to the wheel sobbing. The whisper of Sunday traffic continuing from the other side of the building. These strange awkward blobs of joy bobbing in Harry’s chest. Oh what a feeling” (194).
“Nellie, you’re caught. They’ve got you and you didn’t even squeak. I hate to see it, is all. All I’m trying to say is, as far as I’m concerned you don’t have to go through with it. If you want to get out of it, I’ll help you” (238).
“You must let go, Harry. The boy’s life is his, you live your own” (275).
“Laughing, Rabbit pops the clutch and digs out, the thing inside his chest feeling fragile and iridescent like a big soap bubble. Let it pop. He hasn’t felt so close to breaking out of his rut since Nelson smashed those convertibles” (321).
“Life. Too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday” (404).
“Harry wouldn’t have given him [Charlie Stavros] such an all-out handshake this way a week ago, but since fucking Thelma up the ass he’s felt freer, more in love with the world again” (491-492).
“This is crazy. Run… But, as with dying, there is a moment that must be pushed through, a slice of time more transparent than plate glass; it is in front of him and he takes the step, drawing heart from that loving void Thelma had confided to him” (499).
“No point in keeping secrets, we’ll all be dead soon enough, already we’re survivors, the kids are everywhere, making the music, giving the news” (527).
“Maybe the dead are gods, there’s certainly something kind about them, the way they give you room” (528).
“Fortune’s hostage, heart’s desire, a granddaughter. His. Another nail in his coffin. His” (533, closing lines).
The 1982 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The 1982 Pulitzer Prize Fiction Jury included the following three individuals:
- Margaret Manning, Chair (~1921-1984) was a native of Omaha, Nebraska and grew up in Kenilworth, Illinois before she attended Vassar College. She was an American journalist and book reviewer who initially began working for the United Press in Washington and The Chicago Tribune. She later became the book editor at The Boston Globe for the final ten years of her life, and was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. She was a founding member and director of the National Book Critics Circle. Mrs. Manning was married to journalist Robert J. Manning, who served as the London bureau chief for Time Magazine, Sunday Editor of The New York Herald Tribune, and editor in chief of The Atlantic (he also served as assistant secretary of state for public affairs under President John F. Kennedy). She died of cancer in 1984 and was survived by her husband and three sons.
- Julian Lane Moynahan (1925-2014) was an American academic, librarian, literary critic, poet, and novelist. Much of Moynahan’s academic work was focused on D. H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov. He was active as a book reviewer for leading publications on both sides of the Atlantic and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983. He received his AB, AM, and PhD from Harvard University. He then worked as an instructor at Amherst College, Princeton University, Harvard University, and University College Dublin before becoming a full-time professor of English and librarian at Rutgers University in 1969. He was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and wrote book reviews and literary criticism for The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post Book World, and the American Irish Historical Society’s journal, as well as The Observer, New Statesman, and The Times Literary Supplement. He died of pneumonia in March 2014 on his 89th birthday.
- N. Scott Momaday (1934-2024) was a Professor of English at Stanford University and a celebrated novelist and poet whose works inspired the Native American Renaissance in American literature. His novel House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. Click here for my full review of the novel.
Aside from Rabbit Is Rich, the Pulitzer jury also nominated Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson and A Flag for Sunrise by Robert Stone. Interestingly, the jury’s order of preference was:
- Robert Stone’s A Flag For Sunrise: “a fiercely intelligent novel, sad, ironic, dramatic… it is superb reading. It asks the questions we try to hide from. ‘We are all vulgarizations of history.,’ Stone says. This is the kind of comment that from the typewriter of another, lesser, man would turn to cliché. But Stone creates tension and malaise in a Central American country where his violent plot is played out against the bloody tapestry of Vietnam, where many of his characters had spent unfortunate time. It is contemporary in the most compelling way.”
- Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: ”It’s so American a story that probably a European or anyone other than who we are, could not even understand it. It involves women who are trying to organize their lives in the face of dislocation and loss. This is a first novel of unusual quality.”
- John Updike’s Rabbit is Rich: “Updike, le maestre, has brought Angstrom back, conjoining the eternal and the ephemeral, life’s continuation and its end. And done in the most luminous words. No one writing in English today can match his purity of style.”
I was not able to confirm why the Pulitzer board apparently rejected the jury’s preference for A Flag For Sunrise and Housekeeping before Rabbit Is Rich.
Who Is John Updike?
John Hoyer Updike (1932-2009) was born in Reading, Pennsylvania and grew up in the nearby town of Shillington (later the setting for his Rabbit novels). He was the only child of Wesley Russell Updike, a junior high school math teacher whose ancestry was Dutch, and Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, who later also published fiction in The New Yorker and elsewhere. Updike recalled as a child being fascinated with her typewriter and the brown envelopes she would use to send off her stories. When Updike was thirteen, his family relocated to his mother’s 80-acre farm near the unincorporated community of Plowville, Pennsylvania. As a boy, he dreamed of being a Disney animator or a magazine cartoonist. He took up writing after a summer working as a copyboy for a local newspaper, The Reading Eagle. All the while, in childhood, he suffered from both a stutter and psoriasis.
Updike graduated from high school as co-valedictorian and senior-class president. He then attended Harvard on a scholarship, majoring in English, and he served as editor for The Harvard Lampoon where he continued his love of cartooning. He graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard in 1954. The year before (in 1953), he married Mary Entwistle Pennington, a Radcliffe fine arts major.
Updike then won a Knox Fellowship at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts at Oxford before returning to the United States. Then he published his first short story in The New Yorker “Friends From Philadelphia” along with a poem. It was an event, he later said, that remained “the ecstatic breakthrough of my literary life.” Following the birth of his first child, Elizabeth, Updike took a job writing “Talk of the Town” pieces for The New Yorker. Two years later, with the arrival of his second child, David, the Updikes moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, about an hour north of Boston (Like Thomas Mann, Updike sought the life of a Burgher). In 1959, a third child, Michael, was born, followed the next year by a fourth child, Miranda.
In this period, Updike’s early stories bore the influence of Salinger, Cheever, Proust, Joyce, Nabokov, and others. His themes often wrestled with marriage, infidelity, sex, and religion in fictional small towns like Olinger, Pennsylvania. Updike suffered an early spiritual crisis before eventually reading the theologians like Soren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth. Updike later described himself as a “card-carrying Episcopalian” who was raised a Lutheran, with Presbyterian ancestors, and later became a Congregationalist before eventually settling on Episcopalianism. In a 1966 interview for Life Magazine, Updike told Jane Howard: “My subject is the American Protestant small-town middle class… I like middles… It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.” Once he began publishing novels, Updike signed a deal with Alfred A. Knopf, which remained his publisher throughout his career. But his contract with The New Yorker gave the magazine the right of first offer for his short-story manuscripts, but William Shawn (editor of The New Yorker from 1952 to 1987), rejected several stories for being too explicit. Starting in 1954, he published hundreds of stories, reviews, and poems in The New Yorker. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books.
In Ipswich, Updike got involved in public affairs, serving on the Congregational Church building committee and the Democratic town committee, and even writing a pageant for the town’s 17th-Century Day. For a while he worked downtown in Ipswich, in an office located above a restaurant. It was here that Updike wrote Rabbit, Run (1960) on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Although politically liberal, Updike held fairly conservative values and was among the few prominent American writers to declare his support for the Vietnam War. Still, he claimed to be a lifelong democrat, speaking highly of Bill Clinton in the 1990s and endorsing Barack Obama in 2008.
In 1974, after years of being serially unfaithful to his wife, Updike separated from Mary and moved to Boston, where he taught briefly at Boston University. In 1976, the Updikes were officially divorced, and the following year he married Martha Ruggles Bernhard, settling with her and her three children first in Georgetown, Massachusetts before later relocating to Beverly Farms, Massachusetts.
Always kind and gracious in public, Updike often faced criticism for his portrayal of women in his works. In an interview with The New York Times in 1988, Mr. Updike acknowledged the criticism that “my women are never on the move, that they’re always stuck where the men have put them.” Nevertheless, Updike was one of the most highly praised authors of his generation. Following the publication of his novel Couples (1968), which was all about adultery, Updike appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the title “The Adulterous Society.” He won a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, two Pulitzers, two O. Henry Prizes, two National Book Critics Circle Awards for Fiction, the National Medal of the Arts, the William Dean Howells Medal, the National Humanities Medal, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and honorary doctorates from Harvard and Emerson College. In 2008, The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Updike to present the prestigious Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. government’s highest humanities honor. Updike’s lecture was entitled “The Clarity of Things: What Is American about American Art.”
For decades, Updike worked at an extraordinary pace, turning out approximately three pages a day of fiction, essays, criticism, or verse. Throughout his lifetime, he published a total of sixty books, more than twenty novels and more than a dozen short story collections, along many poems, collections of art and literary criticism, and even children’s books. He was often compared to his nineteenth century precursor Nathaniel Hawthorne as well as his fellow “midcentury misogynists” like Philip Roth and Norman Mailer.
In 2009, John Updike died at the age of 76 due to lung cancer in Danvers, Massachusetts. The New York Times obituary wrote that Updike was: “the kaleidoscopically gifted writer whose quartet of Rabbit novels highlighted a body of fiction, verse, essays and criticism so vast, protean and lyrical as to place him in the first rank of American authors.” He was survived by his wife, four children, three stepsons, his first wife, seven grandchildren, and seven step-grandchildren.
Film Adaptations
- None, though there was a 1970 film adaptation of Rabbit, Run directed by Jack Smight and starring James Caan.
Further Reading
- The complete Rabbit Angstrom series:
- Rabbit, Run (1960)
- Rabbit Redux (1971)
- Rabbit Is Rich (1981)
- Rabbit at Rest (1990)
- Rabbit Remembered (2001), a novella
- Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1962), an early short story collection
- The Centaur (1963), a novel which won the National Book Award
- Collected Poems: 1953-1993 (1993), poetry collection
- Updike (2014) by Adam Begley – a biography of John Updike
Literary Context 1981-1982
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1981): awarded to the Bulgarian-born British writer Elias Canetti (1905–1994) “for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power.”
- National Book Award Winner (1982): Rabbit is Rich by John Updike (hardcover), and So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell (paperback). Click here to read my review of the book.
- Note: this was during a brief period wherein the National Book Awards divided out their winners between paperback and hardcover awardees (1980-1983). It was also an era when the National Book Award calendar lined up with the Pulitzer Prize, both of which awarded prizes in the calendar year after the eligibility period. Post-1984, however, the National Book Award switched back to awarding its prizes in the same calendar year.
- Booker Prize Winner (1982): Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1981 was Noble House by James Clavell. Other notable bestsellers that year included: The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving and Cujo by Stephen King, among others.
- In 1981, John Gardner successfully revived the literary James Bond novel series with Licence Renewed, technically the first original Bond novel since 1968’s Colonel Sun by Kingsley Amis.
- Also in 1981, The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction was given for the first time. It was awarded to How German Is It by Walter Abish.
- What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver was published.
- Distant Star by Samuel R. Delany was published.
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez was published.
- Red Dragon by Thomas Harris was published.
- God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert was published.
- Tar Baby by Toni Morrison was published.
- Strata by Terry Pratchett was published.
- Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie was published (it also won the Booker Prize in 1981).
- The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux was published.
- Creation by Gore Vidal was published.
- Jumanji by Chris Van Allsburg was published.
- A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein was published.
- Ramona Quimby, Age 8 by Beverly Cleary was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
I have no doubt that the late twentieth century literary community would have considered it a stain on the legacy of the Pulitzer Prizes if John Updike had not won a Pulitzer, but in my view his novels have aged like milk in the sun. Despite being an undeniable master of English prose, Updike’s novels are nevertheless filled with jarring proportions of filth, racism, misogyny, and scenes that have seemingly been crafted simply to shock readers. Unfortunately, I really fail to see much depth or beauty in these novels and so if I happened to be serving on the Pulitzer jury in 1982, I surely would have insisted on granting the prize to Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping instead (despite technically being published a year earlier in 1980, Housekeeping was still eligible for the prize). With that being said, I’d like to think my tastes are ever-evolving, and so if ever a John Updike scholar happens upon this humble corner of the internet, I would be more than willing to have them show me the light. Until then I will continue to scratch my head over Updike’s esteemed reputation.
Updike, John. Rabbit Is Rich. Random House Trade Paperback Edition, New York, NY, 2021 (originally published in 1981).