I, who seemed to myself full of things to say, who had all of Shillington to say, Shillington and Pennsylvania and the whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America to say . . . some terrible pressure of American disappointment, that would take a lifetime to sort out, particularize, and extol with the proper dark beauty.
—John Updike, in his memoir Self-Consciousness
Rabbit at Rest is one of the very few modern novels in English…that one can set beside the work of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Joyce and not feel the draft.
—reviewer Jonathan Raban
John Updike was born eighty-five years ago this week (March 18, 1932) in Reading, Pennsylvania — model for the city of Brewer, capital of Updike’s fictional universe and battle zone for his theme:
My subject is the American Protestant small-town middle class. I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules. Something quite intricate and fierce occurs in homes, and it seems to me without doubt worthwhile to examine what it is.
Updike made that comment in a 1966 Life magazine interview, the author just a few years into his half-century, sixty-book career. The most celebrated of his two dozen novels feature Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the Brewer High School basketball star who, as his city and region decline, finds prosperity as a car dealer. Published at ten-year intervals from 1960 to 1990, the four-book series tolls a bell for the Middle America that Rabbit, in an often frantic zigzag path, both pursues and flees.
At the opening of Rabbit Is Rich, third book in the series, Harry stands gazing out of the showroom window of his Toyota dealership, convinced that “the great American ride is ending.” At the end of the fourth book, Rabbit at Rest — like the third book, winner of the Pulitzer Prize — Harry consents to dress up as Uncle Sam for a hometown parade; as he mingles with the crowd at his old high school, the “glory days” past competes with the uncertain future:
He expects to come across his old girlfriend, Mary Ann, as she had been then, in saddle shoes and white socks and a short pleated cheerleader’s skirt, her calves straight and smooth and round-muscled . . . springing into joyful recognition at the sight of him. Instead, strange people with puzzled Eighties faces keep asking directions, because he is dressed as Uncle Sam and should know. He has to keep telling them he doesn’t know anything.
Rabbit’s prolonged decline ends in Florida, “death’s favorite state.” Updike’s own death in 2009 was sudden, coming just a few months after his annual checkup revealed stage 4 lung cancer. After hanging on as long as possible in his Massachusetts home, he was moved to a local hospice — described by Adam Begley in his biography Updike as “a mildly pretentious, tastefully landscaped example of suburban-sprawl architecture, a place he would have skewered in exact and loving detail” in the Rabbit books.
Updike’s death is one of six discussed in Katie Roiphe’s The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End. Roiphe describes Updike’s “Creeper,” one of a number of poems he worked on over his last weeks (collected in Endpoint: And Other Poems), as perhaps the most graceful expression of a peaceful death that I can think of”:
With what stoic delicacy does Virginia creeper let go: the
feeblest tug brings down a sheaf of leaves kite-high, as if to
say, To live is good but not to live — to be pulled down with
scarce a ripping sound,still flourishing, still stretching
toward the sun — is good also, all
photosynthesis abandoned, quite quits. Next spring the
hairy rootlets left unpulled snake out a leafy afterlife up
that same smooth-barked oak.
Whatever Updike’s own politics — biographer Begley notes that Updike on his deathbed rejoiced at President Obama’s inauguration — some commentators say that Updike lives on as spokesman for embattled Middle Americans, whose current angst and anger he saw coming: “Revisiting Updike’s Rabbit novels is a rendezvous with prescience, for no collection of postwar fiction could help us better understand how working-class populism — in the form of Donald Trump — prevailed on Election Day 2016″ (Charles McElwee, The American Conservative magazine).
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2nOfnvN
Sig Nordal 