Rabbit Redux is the second instalment in John Updike’s quartet of novels centred on Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. It is ten years after the close of the first, Rabbit, Run, and Rabbit’s patched up marriage is again in trouble. His wife has left him for a slick (and rather clichéd) car salesman, and Rabbit’s life reaches another crisis point.
Rabbit Redux is a much less restrained book than its predecessor, as Updike tries to infuse it with the spirit of the times, of Vietnam protests, of drug culture, of an emboldened African-American culture and of sexual liberation.
But Updike’s own patrician rectitude makes it all somewhat uncomfortable. Again, he seems to be hovering over the narrative with a disapproving, detached superciliousness (I can’t avoid that word with Updike, and it seems to be literally true; all the pictures of him seem to have him raising one or other of his eyebrows).
This time Updike’s got himself into bigger trouble by trying to imagine his way into the various counter-cultures of the late 60s. His approach to race issues is teeth-gratingly excruciating to modern eyes, and I suspect contemporary ones too, and the plot feels particularly forced. Harry is a poor frame on which to hang these issues. He starts off a natural Nixon supporter, and his contact with various elements of the left leads to disaster in his personal life, and a gradual mellowing of his politics. I think there was possibly a far more powerful story to tell about extremism in America, but Updike clearly didn’t want to take it in that direction.
As with Rabbit, Run, the writing is superb, and feels forced or overwritten only occasionally. But Updike is clearly on show here, as though worried by the judgement of posterity now that he has found his defining character and, as a result, the book feels much less natural. I’ve not read the remaining two novels in the sequence, and while I haven’t enjoyed either of the first two unreservedly, I’ll certainly be reading them soon. It’ll be interesting to see if my basic criticisms also hold for the remaining novels.
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