Rabbit again

I don’t remember reading Rabbit Redux when I was young and there is no copy at home. My 2008 copy has an image of a hand holding a chipped mug of coffee on the cover. The fingers are stained with printer’s ink but they look too small to be the hands of a former successful basketballer, as Harry was. Maybe they are the hands of his father who is a small but important character in the book. The image is kind of at odds with the drama of the book; the comforting domesticity of this working class image gives nothing away in terms of a story about the massive changes happening in American socitey, the shifts in the tectonic plates embodied in Harry's drift into experiments with drugs, new sexual partners and black consciousness. All this in Penn Villas, a new housing development on the edge of Brewer, Pennsylvania. (For some alternative covers, go here, here and here. I particularly like the Hangman cover.)

I stopped half way through the novel for a while. Harry spends much of the middle part of the story in a kind of loose vacuum. Like the first novel he is strikingly without agency; he floats into things without making real conscious decisions. Or if he is decisive, it’s quite short–term; should he have sex with Peggy Fosnacht that night? Actually it's not even that far ahead - it's more like should he have sex with Peggy Fosnacht, she has just unzipped her dress? Anatole Broyard, writing in 1971 when the novel was published says:

“He went back to Rabbit because he knew that it was too easy to have an intellectual or an artist as a hero. There is always a temptation to talk or think things out -- but with a guy like Rabbit, you have to act them out all the way, show what's happening to him, nakedly, without off-stage intellection or interpretation. The thought must be made flesh; the flesh, as in sex, made metaphor; the man in the street tormented into irony. Where Rabbit once ran away, he's now standing his ground, letting the world flow over and around him while he tries to keep his head above water.”

This is a fabulous description of what Updike is about in working with Rabbit.

I think, for a while, I found the drifting hard to read about. And I got sick of the black guy Skeeter. I think Updike wanted this effect but maybe he doesn’t want people to stop reading. I decided to have a break from reading Rabbit then really enjoyed it when I went back to it. Broyard reckons that Harry is climbing out on a limb (any limb, every limb) and swinging – trying to find something in the shifting morass that America is in. and trying to find traction for his own 36 year old self, fast wilting into middle age.

The three defining descriptors of American life in this book are the Vietnam War, the rise of black consciousness and the successful Apollo mission. (Interesting comparison the Space War and the Vietnam War)Other aspects also prevail like the ways in which middle class kids went searching for something different than their parent’s lives. Broyard has a nice way of describing this aspect of the book – Harry hooks up with a barely adult girl for a while: “In Jill, Updike explores the incompleteness -- in them and in ourselves -- that, like a vacuum, draws us toward very young girls.” Aaarrgh so scarily accurate, I think, about men.

I want to include a paragraph about sex so will edit this entry later; he writes so well about this business. What he also does well is the domestic; the fraught ties between Harry and his parents, the guilt and love, the depiction of both his parents is really exquisite. Then at the end, Stage Left: Mim, the sister, living the life not lived. Vivid, in-your-face Updike…