John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom

With John Updike's reputation as a master novelist in mind, and having admired some critical pieces of his in the past, I recently undertook to read his Rabbit Angstrom novels. If you are unfamiliar with it, the series consists of four books, "Rabbit, Run", "Rabbit Redux", "Rabbit is Rich" and "Rabbit at Rest". I was perfectly happy to begin the project, knowing as I did that they would be the product of a basically conservative, if imaginative consciousness, and did not expect to see myself represented in the Angstrom cosmos at all. I'm postgay and post-ironic, raised in the 70's and a survivor of the great plague which ended the 20th century, as well as the lives of many friends and lovers. Mr. Updike was raised in the 50's, his consciousness of human frailty is more shaped by polio than by AIDS,and he reached adulthood having to either defend or surrender his topdog status as a heterosexual white male. So I was not expecting the Rabbit Angstrom books to be some triumph of enlightened liberalism over the narrow values of Mr. Updike's youth. I'm not sure what I expected. MaybeI just wanted to see how that conservative 50's consciousness battled and then bloomed in succeeding eras. something like that, I don't know. What I didn't expect to read was more than 2000 pages devoted to the selfishness, chauvinism and moral calcificationof the protagonist.

In the first book, it's all up for grabs, and I enjoy reading aboutlife from the standpoint of a consciousness radically differennt from my own. I don't expect a white protagonist, to say nothing of a white protagonist coming of age in the 50's to have heroic liberal attitudes about race and sexual identity. When, at the close of "Rabbit, Run", Angstrom once again flees his responsibilities to his wife, it reads like an amusing picaresque. Ah, that undependable Rabbit Angstrom! Just gotta love him, don't you?

And in the seconde book, Rabbit's narcissism and philandering are intercut with his efforts to understand Skeeter, the untrustworthy black revolutionary who takes up residence in Rabbit's house, and whom Rabbit both hates and wishes to satisfy.

But by the third book, "Rabbit is Rich", Angstrom's consciousness is still focused on gratifying Angstrom. His son, who is probably in the closet, has become hooked on cocaine and snorted away $200,000 of the small fortune left to Rabbit by his father in law. His wife Janis, numbed by Rabbit's constant betrayals, struggles to help their son and hold the family together. But all Rabbit can think of is using the wife of an acquaintance, a woman who --I can hardly figure out why-- is deeply in love with him.

I don't know why, after three books chronicling the basic depravity of Harry Angstrom, I expected the fourth to be any different. Probably, I have a deeply classicist streak that wants to hold out for some grand turnabout in the third act. But Mr. updike, I guess, is a Modern Novelist, and we can't expect anything so backward. Having suffered a massive coronary, Rabbit ignores his doctor's orders, wilfully feasts on the fatty foods his doctors have proscribed for him, and dies alone on a basketball court, having played his last game with a young African-American. One could see this as a hopeful political gesture on Mr. Updike's part, I suppose. Perhaps he's saying that Patriarchy, its arteries clogged with2000 years of moral plaque, is destined for an imminent death. But damn it, I spent hours on this series. I followed rabbit through his affair with the spiny Ruth, the accidental drowning of his daughter Becky and his innumerable trysts and evasions. What I was hoping for is not some facile political statement about the Death of Whitey, but something elegant --and Mr. updike was more than capable of elegance-- about transformation and transcendence. Couldn't he have learned to love his son? Couldn't he have learned to love his wife? Couldn't he have learned to love something or someone more than he loved Harold "Rabbit" Angstrom? No, and he had to die alone on an abandoned basketball court to prove it.

Now, I can see ending a series this way, the pressure an artist might feel to bring forth this kind of message. But if that's all there is --narcissism, depravity and death, why do you need 2000 pages to do it? I know these books are viewed in many mainstream literary circles as triumphs of the art. But to my own understanding they represent a complicated failure, and as I contemplate the second book of my own semiautobiographical series, a very clear primer on what not to do. Goodnight, Mr. Updike. I'm sure I'll see you in heaven, but the Rabbit Angstrom books are going straight to hell.