Thursday, September 07, 2006

Rabbit at Rest

A friend of mine once told me she thought John Updike’s Rabbit series a very “male” work of fiction. I can’t say that I saw her point, unless by her comment she was referring to the copious amounts of misogynistic asides, phallic references and dirty language strewn throughout the books. Alright, I give up: they are very male. But how could they not be, with their intense concentration on the thoughts of one particular male, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, who happens to be slightly androcentric, priapic and foul-mouthed? So it is with a bit of crass and flippant zeal that Updike tackles what many regard to be his magnum opus (indeed, two of these books won Pulitzer prizes).

Rabbit at Rest was published in 1990 and is the last in the series, save for the novella Rabbit Remembered, published six years ago. The plot can be boiled down to a simple statement: Harry is fifty-five years old and feels that he is dying. Everything else is a set piece for this central intuition, which returns to the forefront almost every few pages as Harry reflects on his age, his heart condition, his slide into irrelevance and the phenomena of life moving busily in spite of him. We last saw him aged forty-five in Rabbit is Rich, where he finally came into his own with a small fortune from his wife’s Toyota dealership and some well-placed investments in gold and silver. In that installment, the author explored the ups and downs of middle-aged life in twentieth century America. Harry was old enough to see the depreciation of his youthful ideals, especially as compared to his son’s generation, but still young enough to be consumed with fornication – and that in experimental ways (described graphically, of course). In Rabbit at Rest his body has begun to slacken and his sexual impulses weaken. He still thinks about sex, and has one exciting encounter, but much of his physical drive has become cerebral; his primary outlet is now reminiscing on past carnalities. This estrangement from his more energetic self, and the era of his youth, embodies the tone of the novel, and provides Updike with some rich material for his own exploration of death and dying.

This is not a book where the plot affords respite from introspection, people undergo dramatic life-changing ordeals or pat solutions are forced down our throats. The characters do not betray their personalities, which are often annoyingly stubborn and selfish. Updike aims to mimic stone-cold reality. However, a subtle undercurrent throughout reveals a shift in Harry’s mentality that approaches magnanimity – or if not that, perhaps perspective. This, plus his depth of observation and synthesis, saves him from damnation in the eye of the reader (which, as a rule, flouts hypocrisy as it makes its moral judgments).

Despite the author’s irritating public image – the self-styled doyen of fine arts, cocooned in the adoration of the highbrow media – which somehow permits him to denigrate those threatening to steal his thunder (i.e. Tom Wolfe), and the run-on quality of his prose, designed to unload on the reader the minutiae of modern life, he does write quite beautifully. He has a knack for describing the details, and for stretching an action or a thought into something that the reader can actually feel. And this is really the essence of the book: we can feel the end approaching because it’s tangible in every thought, every place described, every color and object lingered upon. Updike can’t take us beyond death, as he himself has not yet traveled there, but he portrays the journey towards it with remarkable skill. Skill. In short. Daedel.

- Roger Dixon