Rabbit At Rest
By John Updike
Knopf, 512 pages, $21.95
John Updike first set Harry ”Rabbit” Angstrom loose upon the world in 1960. ”Rabbit, Run” followed the basketball star of Brewer, Penn., through the ups and downs of marriage and work, and saw him through the defining tragedy of his young adulthood, the death by drowning of his infant daughter. Since then, almost with the steadiness of a chronometer clicking off decades, Updike has given us ”Rabbit Redux” (1971), ”Rabbit Is Rich”
(1981), and now, right on the dime, ”Rabbit At Rest.” But this is the end of the saga, really. As the author himself wrote, in a recently published reflection: ”We`ve all heard of tetralogies, but after that there`s no word for it.” Anything further, he remarked, if only for technical reasons, would become ”very messy.”
Possibly ghoulish, too. For as the final title intimates, Rabbit is quite literally ”laid to rest” at the close of this fourth installment. His battered heart at last gives out, thus bringing to completion what has to be seen as one of the big fictional projects of our period. But I am getting slightly ahead of myself.
The Harry we meet in the first sentence of ”Rabbit At Rest” is in his late 50s, and is in failing health. He carries around his waist the evidence of his tireless munching of salty foods, and in his memory cells the rich deposits of a man who has lived to capacity the life of his times. Readers of ”Rabbit Redux” and ”Rabbit Is Rich” will recall with what passionate confusion Harry navigated the Aquarian `60s and the belt-tightening rigors of the Jimmy Carter years. He took his knocks and his pleasures-more than once jeopardizing his marriage. But if he was not always faithful, he did, in his way, stay true to his wife and first love, Janice.
She now stands at his side at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, waiting to greet their son, Nelson, his wife, Pru, and their two children. Harry and Janice are now semi-retired; they divide their time between their Florida condo and their house back in Brewer.
The possibilities for narrative excitement appear somewhat slim. True, we get flickers of the father-son animosity that flared so wildly in the earlier novels. Within minutes of their greeting Harry and Nelson are flinging barbs just like in the worst of the old days-only now Harry must suffer for his satisfactions: ”A cold arrow of pain suddenly heads downs his left arm, through the armpit.” Still, feuds and bodily tremors are hardly the frame to build a novel of such heft. Or are they?
The reader of this longest of the Rabbit books is hereby asked to put any Stephen King or Tom Clancy-inspired expectations to the side. The plot structure of ”Rabbit At Rest” could be diagramed on a paper towel. Nelson and family visit; Nelson is discovered to have a serious cocaine habit; Harry has a massive heart attack but bounces back; Harry and Janice return to Brewer, where Harry fills in at the family Toyota dealership while Nelson enters a rehab program. . . . There are a few more turns, but those are best left for the prospective reader.
But plot is not the sine qua non of the novelist`s art. There are other ways to hold a reader. And one such way is through the sheer accuracy and intensity of delivery-this is Updike`s way. A masterly, if often precious, stylist at the outset of his career, Updike has in late writings learned to bring the whole gritty mass of inner and outer reality into the sentence. He is entirely persuasive. We walk along a wire made of words for 500-plus pages and hardly ever look down to see that there is no net below.
”Rabbit At Rest” is far and away the most interior of the Rabbit books, for the very good reason that the substance of life itself becomes increasingly interior with the passing of years. Rabbit had to live hard in the earlier novels so that he could have memories in this last one. We grasp the full fascination of the fictional artifice time and again as we realize that this is a created character experiencing as memories events that were created for him decades ago: ”Think of playing basketball, that little country gym, the backboards flush against the walls, before all the high schools merged into big colorless regionals and shopping malls began eating up the farmland. Think of sledding with Mim in her furry hood, in Mt. Judge behind the hat factory, on a winter`s day so short the streetlights come on an hour before suppertime calls you home.”
I do not mean to suggest that Rabbit lives only in the past, or that the other characters do not push forward to claim their meed of attention, or that the vast and complex public world is not sharply etched-in all about. To the contrary, here, as in the earlier books, the variegated hard walls of reality are everywhere to be knocked against. And Rabbit remains an inveterate sniffer and noticer-of places, atmospheres, things great and small (”The elevator has a different color inspection card in the slip-in frame, the peach-colored corridor smells of a different air freshener, with a faint lemony tang like lemonade”), and events. Like any good citizen, moreover, he is haunted to the point of distraction by newsbits (the Bush campaign, the Lockerbie explosion, Jim and Tammy . . .).
But Rabbit is never so much aware of process and materiality as when he turns his attention to his own flesh and blood:
”So the idea of a catheter being inserted at the top of his right leg, and being pushed along steered with a little flexible tip like some eyeless worm you find wriggling out of an apple where you just bit, is deeply repugnant to him, though not as much so as being frozen half to death and sawed open and your blood run through some complicated machine while they sew a slippery warm piece of your leg vein to the surface of your trembling poor cowering heart.”
Suffice it to say, ”Rabbit At Rest” is not the cheeriest of books. Subject matter aside, the prose is suffused with a particularly autumnal longing. We come to sense, as Updike clearly does, what it means for a human life to run its course. In spite of this-because of this-the last pages carry a surge that is very nearly exalting. As Rabbit crashes deathward, the far-flung threads of memory and association are gathered in, and we come as close as we ever do in fiction to an intimation of what privacies of meaning another life holds concealed. We feel, at last, a brotherly bond with Rabbit, a bond that runs deeper than our moment-to-moment responses to his not always likable personality (Rabbit is, it must be said, entangled in racial and sexual prejudices). Indeed, this is a central paradox, and an indicator of Updike`s achievement: that on one level Rabbit is but a shallow and reactionary male of his class and era, but that on another he is a sweet and watchful soul, as deep in his affectionate perceptiveness as the man who made his world:
”Rabbit feels betrayed. He was reared in a world where war was not strange but change was: The world stood still so you could grow up in it. He knows when the bottom fell out. When they closed down Kroll`s, Kroll`s that had stood in the center of Brewer all those years . . . with every Christmas those fantastic displays of circling trains and nodding dolls and twinkling stars in the corner windows as if God himself had put them there to light up this darkest time of the year. As a little kid he couldn`t tell what God did from what people did; it all came from above somehow.”
