E-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #90: John Updike’s Rabbit Books
by Ernie on 28/01/08 at 12:00 pm
Number 90: Rabbit, Run (1960); Rabbit Redux (1971); Rabbit is Rich (1981); Rabbit at Rest (1990), John Updike. This is my second quaternary, and it might seem like I’m cheating, but as with the Ford, these are four unified novels of comparable length (and increasingly sophisticated prose style) covering the tragicomic lives of characters over three generations. Set in the imaginary eastern Pennsylvania town of Brewster, the novels chronicle the endless dreary shortcomings of lower- and eventually upper-middle class families. The central character, Rabbit Angstrom, is the perfect WASP antihero: self-centered, lazy, impulsive, irresponsible, but ultimately irresistible to the women in his life. As much as he may try, he is unable to ruin his life, as he is repeatedly saved by family, friends, and well wishers. Suburban, unimaginative, anti-intellectual, un-self-conscious, and utterly unambitious, Rabbit emerges as the antithesis of Updike’s other great creation, Henry Bech, the striving urban, Jewish novelist more famous for his writer’s block, dwindling royalties checks, and disastrous sexual obsessions than his writing. Each novel in the Rabbit quaternary traces the contours of an American decade’s achievements, passions, and fixations, from the 1950s through the end of the 1980s, providing a strangely satisfying history of larger trends in American life as they trickle out to the suburbs, from wife swapping to cocaine parties. Particularly noxious to several generations of feminists, the Rabbit books offer a rare, authentic glimpse into the sometimes off-putting thoughts and desires of the “average” white suburban male. The four books should be read in order, altogether, and as soon as possible.
