John Updike

It is always important to know the enemy, and on this occasion the enemy is me.  Let’s be clear, I am an old, white, middle-class male, culturally Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual, from a relatively privileged background, having had my childhood and education in the UK, moving to Australia for work when I was 30 years old.  Got the picture?  We are about to read my thoughts about John Updike, and you just need to understand my many limitations before I get going.  Oh, one more warning:  I am not going to comment on The Witches of Eastwick, Updike’s populist attempt to satisfy his feminist critics, and the basis of a very successful film starring Jack Nicholson as he confronts Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer.  The John Updike I am interested in is the unrepentant author of four books charting the life of Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, a less than perfect, even unattractive hero, but a compelling example of the character of many white American males from the 1960s to the 1980s.

As usual, Wikipedia provides some helpful background.  Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and the entry reports on how his mother’s attempts to become a published writer impressed the young Updike. “One of my earliest memories”, he later recalled, “is of seeing her at her desk … I admired the writer’s equipment, the typewriter, eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in – and come back in.”  Winning a scholarship to Harvard College, his roommate for his first year was Christopher Lasch, (about whom I’ve written recently).  Updike started thinking he might become a cartoonist, but ended up in New York, working for two years at The New Yorker.  From then on, he was a professional writer, and moved to Massachusetts in the late 1950s, having undergone some kind of spiritual crisis which led to a lifelong Christian faith.

It was there he wrote the first of the Rabbit books, while on a Guggenheim Fellowship.   He described his work as focussed on “the American small town, Protestant middle class”, examining characters who “frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity”.  As I read about him, I saw many commentators suggested his fiction was distinguished by its attention to the concerns, passions, and suffering of average Americans, with an emphasis on Christian themes and issues, especially its preoccupation with sexuality and sensual detail. I liked reading that he described his style as an attempt “to give the mundane its beautiful due”.

Now we face a dilemma.  I can’t write about Updike and the Rabbit books without disclosing quite a lot of the content.  If you want to read these four books without knowing too much about them, stop now.  If you have read them (I hope you have), or don’t care, well, you’ve been warned and read on!

The first of the four books, Rabbit, Run, appeared in 1960 and covers three months in the life of Harry Angstrom, a 26-year-old former high school basketball player trapped in a loveless marriage, whose job is selling a kitchen gadget named MagiPeeler!  He lives in Pennsylvania with his son, two-year-old Nelson, and wife Janice, a former salesgirl at the store where he once worked, and who’s pregnant again.  On the spur of the moment, Harry decides to leave his family, gets lost, and then returns to his hometown, where he ends up living with Ruth Leonard, a prostitute.  Then Harry learns Janice is in hospital, about to deliver a child, and they reconcile.  Harry continues to bungle along, and in the middle of a series of bizarre episodes, Janice gets drunk and accidentally drowns their baby in the bathtub!  By the end of the this first novel we are left with a confused Harry, unwilling to divorce Janice, but equally unclear about what he’s seeking in life, just like most of us (in terms of what we hope for!).

It’s hard to capture in this description of the rather picaresque adventures of Harry Angstrom and how compelling the book is.  Harry is shallow, self-centred, irresolute, and yet somehow fascinating and engaging.  We’re left hanging, wondering what will happen next.  Updike’s readers had to wait 11 years, for the publication of the second ‘Rabbit’ book, Rabbit Redux.

At the beginning of this second book, Harry is now a linotype operator, a system to cast metal type for use in printing.  Thirty-six years old, he’s worried about middle age (at thirty-six!!), his worries amplified by the economic decline of his town.  Then Janice decides to leave him, and he is left with Nelson.  Confused Harry starts a mini commune, adding Skeeter, an African American Vietnam vet and Jill, a wealthy, white, teenage runaway.  The three adults celebrate the ‘Summer of Love’, that mixture of hippie music, hallucinogenic drugs, anti-war protests, and free love that began in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury.  They indulge in drugs, enjoy sex, and debate religion, race relations, and the other political issues of the 1960s, while Harry’s son Nelson tries to get Jill interested in him!  Quite a challenge, it seems.  As all this is happening, the neighbours are upset with Harry and his commune, and the house is burnt down, killing Jill.  Janice faces challenges  of her own, and eventually returns to Harry.  By the end of the book, the Angstroms are exhausted, about to face the new decade, with Harry remaining as confused as he was before his experiences in that Summer of Love.

We wait another ten years, to 1981, for the third novel of Updike’s Rabbit series to appear, Rabbit is Rich.  If it wasn’t obvious before, now we can’t ignore that Harry is Updike’s avatar for the baby boomer generation, messily exemplifying the self-centredness, increasing wealth, promiscuousness and ignorance of the lives of others that appeared to characterise many in that generation.  Harry Angstrom is rich; he and Janice are living comfortably.  This is the result of their inheriting Janice’s late father’s Toyota dealership.  They’re leading a comfortable middle-class life which Harry seems determined to upset in one way or another!  Janice has a serious drinking problem, while Nelson keeps coming up with new schemes and creating new disasters!  In the meantime Harry to continue to seek new lovers, and he becomes obsessed with the young wife of a country club friend.  While he is relatively wealthy, he remains as unsatisfied as ever, always thinking that there is something, just beyond what he can easily identify, something that he wants yet can’t quite grasp.

Updike’s commentary on Rabbit’s generation is unsparing.  He portrays people like Harry as amoral, rootless, driven by money, sex and alcohol, as if they are unprincipled searchers , unable to find any meaningful direction.  A lost generation?  Certainly, a generation that Updike sees as failing to bring up their children well, as lacking in any sense of overarching values, driven by chance rather than purpose.  Yet it is hard not to like Harry, even to feel some empathy for him as he worries about his wife, his son, his past loves and his life’s journey.  It’s possible he appeals to people like me, my generation, as he embodies both the hopes and fears we have experienced, especially that feeling of dissatisfaction, always hoping, searching for something more.  Rabbit is Rich won a Pulitzer Prize for Updike.

I was caught out when the fourth book appeared in 1990, nine years after Rabbit is Rich.  I guess I hadn’t registered that this was a tetralogy.   If the first three books portrayed a generation, it seemed, with the appearance of Rabbit at Rest, that John Updike wanted closure, for Harry, and for the saga.  Harry’s adventures had left several incomplete adventures, and the baby boomers were getting fatter, lazier and possibly less interesting!  Harry had to be slowing down.

Set at the end of the 1980s, nearly 30 years after the time of the first book when Harry was working as a salesman, he has retired, spending the winter months in Florida with Janice.  They’ve been married for 33 years.  Harry is badly overweight, eating junk food all day, and he’s depressed.  In addition to his own worried thoughts as to whether there was anything to look forward to in his own life, he has to deal with Nelson, to whom Janice has given ownership of the Toyota dealership.  Nelson is a drug addict, stealing from the business to the point it goes broke and has to be wound up.  The one positive in Harry’s life is his granddaughter Judy, but not his grandson Roy, who doesn’t seem to like him.

Judy sits at the centre of this fourth novel.  Harry  nearly dies after a heart attack while sunfishing with his nine-year-old granddaughter.  Saving Judy from drowning during their sunfishing afternoon seems a kind of redemption for the drowning death of his own daughter years before.  Recovering from his heart surgery, he sees a nurse in the hospital, Annabelle Byer, who he recognises as his illegitimate daughter with Ruth.  He spends time with her without admitting he’s her likely father.  A long-term mistress dies, and he manages a curious reconciliation with her husband, then, true to form, has a one-night stand with Pru, Nelson’s wife, the night he’s released from the hospital.  Harry runs away when Janice finds out, going back down to Florida.  Another heart attack, and Nelson and Janice rush down to see him while he is still alive.  Janice forgives him for his infidelities, and he reconciles with his son.  Rabbit finally is at rest.

This summary of the four Rabbit books does them a terrible disservice.  Like any compelling fiction, they have many layers.  If the events are a description of the life of middle-class America, they are also an account of the decline of faith, of living a life without purpose or meaning.  As Harry lurches from one choice to another, I found him an increasingly sad figure, an essentially rootless man in a society that offered him sex, money, and little else.  Updike is telling us a story about the decline of middle America, an illustration of what happens when faith disappears, and all that is left is ‘things’ and unsatisfactory relationships, sex for the sake of it, and an underlying fear of failure and the inevitability of death.

Is he the Charles Dickens of the late 20th Century, using the form of the adventure novel as a means to show us how America was collapsing.  Updike draws us into Harry’s life, and at each stage we both laugh and simultaneously reflect on what’s happening with horror.  Is he going to mess this up, too?  The novels read like a biography, with a central character whose education ended in high school, and whose views evidence a series of prejudices combined with a kind of determined, even stubborn and combative approach to life.  Through Harry’s life we are being offered a perspective on the nature of post-war America, and the anxieties, failures and prosperity of the Baby Boomers.

When I first read Rabbit, Run, I enjoyed it, taking it a face value.  In part it is funny, in part rather scary, and, as is often the case, to begin with I rather missed the point.  Focussed on the events, I didn’t pay enough attention to the setting.  I hardly noticed that this was about the decline of religion, of meaning, where what was happening was almost serendipitous.  Now, I realise that was because I already knew much of what Updike was describing, and I hadn’t known a different world.  For older readers, the arc of Rabbit’s life must have been more than simply disconcerting:  Rabbit’s life epitomised the progress of a generation, and it wasn’t pretty, a life driven by addictions, and a vague sense of wanting to have the American Dream, hopefully achieved without too much effort.  He was writing about ‘Everyman’.

Today, I can see there is another layer.  This is about the life of small-town America.  Other novelists took on the glitz of New York, and later San Francisco and Los Angeles, the rich, the stars and sharks of film business, and the modestly clever, often inadequate, managers and investors making money out of manufacturing.  Harry didn’t survive by selling brushes or encyclopedias, but was only one step up, working in a car sales franchise.  Updike decided Harry’s wife should inherit of the business, leaving Harry lost, frequently finding himself distracted, with his equally unfocussed son not far behind.  I wonder how many people read the four books today and note how well Updike captured the decline of the manufacturing base of America and its consequences, especially for the men trying to hang on to some kind of chauvinistic view of the way society should run.  No wonder many feminists weren’t happy about his novels.  It remains an open question if the misogynistic views were merely descriptive, an account of what he saw, or were his personal values, how he viewed the world

John Updike wrote many novels, short stories, as well as poetry, books about art and literary criticism and books for children.  However, the Rabbit series stands out from the others.  We need writers who examine situations over time, several novels in a series built around one or two key figures.  Given my predilection for detective novels, I am always fascinated by those writers who take their characters through times of change, the murders to be solved set in shifting lives and situations.  As an example, I always refer to Karin Slaughter, whose series has been outstanding.  Perhaps I should admit my other, perhaps less well-known example is Julia Spencer-Fleming who really caught the character of small-town America, exploring the challenges faced by an ex-army helicopter pilot who becomes a woman priest, and the pressured married police chief who falls in love with her.

Perhaps there is more to it than that.  Harry Angstrom Rabbit lived a life and lived in a world completely unlike my own.  What John Updike did, in a way that few other authors do so well, was to make his life and world completely accessible to me.  All good writers establish a setting and characters when they write.  Many do it so well that we feel we are ‘in’ that world when we read, that those people are real to us.  We can experience the events, feel the reactions, and worry about consequences:  slightly nervously, we are kept on tenterhooks – what’s next?  Updike’s novels fall within an even smaller group that offers more than that, that uses people and place to construct situations that illuminate as well as entertain by going ‘deeper’.  Harry is an inadequate, careless, promiscuous and rather poorly educated man who, by chance and good luck, has several adventures, facing and surviving various disasters.  He embodies the hapless middle-class male of late 20th Century America.  As an overview in Wikipedia put it: “Updike is extremely well regarded as a writer who mastered many genres, wrote with intellectual vigour and a powerful prose style, with ‘shrewd insight into the sorrows, frustrations, and banality of American life’.”

Finally, Updike shows another kind of mastery.  He doesn’t just write well, but he also fluidly shifts vantage point and perspective.  We can be watching Harry as he wanders into yet another catastrophic relationship, observing from outside.  Then, a few pages later, we can be inside Janice’s head, sympathising with her as she contemplates the latest behaviour of her husband or her son.  He isn’t so much a ‘realist’ writer, a Steinbeck if you like, but a commentator.  As he charts the hopes and failures of post-war America, he happily gives his characters language and insights far wider than their characters would otherwise allow.  We can forget that Harry isn’t well educated as we hear his comments and musings. This is a kind of faction, sliding between fictional escapades and non-fiction observations, creating and illuminating what life in the Midwest was like.  I know what I think:  John Updike was a social anthropologist, who wrote up his fieldwork in the form of fiction!

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