Rabbit at Rest
Updike, John
arring the appearance, at the 17 millennium, of Rabbit Risen this will be the last appearance of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Thirty years have passed since he ran from his wife Janice after she...
...Qty...
...Harry's cardiologist tells Janice: "It's tired and stiff and full of crud...
...His sentences always verge on the overstuffed because he, like Harry, is blessed with the tendency to think everything is remarkable: "He holds up a single finger to convey the wonder of it...
...You become simply a piece of physical luggage to be delivered into the hands of others...
...The second epigraph to the novel is from Frederick Douglass: "Food to the indolent is poison, not sustenance...
...Toyota agency must be a prace of disciprine, a prace of order," says Mr...
...Reisman presented expert testimony for the prosecution in the Mapplethorpe photo exhibit case...
...Eccles late in the fifties, "God or whoever" has flashed on and off before him like the green beyond a wooded trap...
...DR...
...On the cultural Richter scale, the impact of this book could be close to a 10,1 fps, authors raise serious and disturbing questions about the accuracy, reliability and perhaps, truthfulness of the figures given in Kinsey's 1948 book and the methods by which these data were obtained...
...Because of the Obvious importance of Kinsey's work, these questions need to be thoroughly and openly debated by the scientific community', Walter W. Stewart Research Scientist, National Institutes of Health AVAILABLE AT BOOKSTORES EVERYWHERE A CON JOB ON SOCIETY ABOUT HUMAN SEXUALITY Dr...
...In a last moment of grace, the thin high-school Rabbit leaps out of the fat one...
...Updike adds: "When God hadn't a friend in the world, back there in the Sixties, Rabbit couldn't let go of him, and now when the preachers are all praying through bullhorns he can't get it up for Him...
...With this new one you know he knows something, but it seems a small something...
...It's a typical American heart, for his age and economic status et cetera...
...But Nelson has been cooking the books and putting the profits up his nose...
...Those crazy molecules...
...This time it's sleeping with Pru, his son's wife...
...It would seem that in his diminished universe food has utterly displaced his former (and frequently oral) preoccupation, sex...
...Ever since he went to the links with Rev...
...He loves the salty ghost of Indian corn and the way each thick flake, an inch or so square, solider than a potato chip and flatter than a Frito and less burny to the tongue than a triangular red-peppered Dorito, sits edgy in his mouth and then shatters and dissolves between his teeth...
...Reagan and Nancy had their dignity, their computer-blur, even when their bowel polyps and breasts were being snipped off in view of billions...
...Updike's best similes always arise from the stuff and gadgetry of his characters' lives...
...Faced with this son, whom rehab makes only more obnoxious, not to mention the death from lupus of Thelma, his occasional mistress back in Pennsylvania, Harry ignores his doctors' warnings and keeps noshing, popping munchies and nitroglycerine tablets in nervous alternation...
...Rabbit at Rest is one long junk-food blowout...
...A kind of late-middle-aged garrulousness has set in...
...Patrick Buchanan Nationally Syndicated Columnist Host CNN "Crossfire" K Two years , when I previewed material from this book, I said it was*al dynamite.' Looking at the final version . I think my former assessment may havesb°eecl been an understatement...
...He has aged Rabbit and Janice and their surly son Nelson with an uncanny, almost creepy credibility, like those computer-aged photographs that are supposed to show what kidnapped children look like years after they've disappeared...
...Indeed, her occasional withdrawals make him anxious...
...Tiventy are gone since the summer of the moon landing, when Harry and Janice were once again sundered and he was living with a runaway named Jill and a black militant named Skeeter (Rabbit Redux...
...Rabbit mints most of his own metaphors, though every so often Updike can't resist taking over: "His son seems to him strangely precise and indignant and agitated, like a nicely made watch with one tooth off a cogwheel or a gummy spot in the lubrication...
...Still, the sun feels good, springing sweat from his pores like calling so many seeds into life...
...The Rabbit books, when held against the fiction of their author's contemporaries, show that by loving his country more than they, Updike is understood better...
...The survey was carried out on a non-representative group of Americans including many hundreds of sex offenders, prosti tutes, prison inmates and exhibitionists...
...Moreover, her research under a Justice Department grant and her investigation into child pornography has been used in United States Supreme Court cases and helped to convict Hustler magazine's Dwaine Tinsley...
...21.95 Thomas Mallon 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1990 Updike has never indulged a fashionable writerly hatred for America, not "back there in the Sixties," and not now, when Harry worries: "If there's no Cold War, what's the point of being an American...
...Updike leaves himself a very small loophole of narrative ambiguity, but I think we're meant to see Rabbitslip away...
...He's even done some crack...
...Box 53788, Lafayette, LA 70505 Phone Orders Toll Free 1-800-749-4009 AS/1190 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1990 43...
...The walls of Harry's limestone house in Pennsylvania "are as thin as diet crackers," and the banyan trees in Florida "look to him like enormous chewing gum on your shoe...
...It must be religious, their tie, it made so littleother sense...
...He has saved one child from the element that claimed another thirty years ago, and in the process has had a good sighting of the enemy, Death: "There is a lightness, a lightening, that comes along with misery: vast portions of the world are shorn off, suddenly ignorable...
...He is already going bald, and like many members of his generation has turned out somewhat dumber than his parents...
...Updike has cherished it...
...Kinsey's unchallenged conclusions are taught at every level of our educational institutions—elementary, highschool and college—and are quoted in textbooks as undisputed truth...
...Life as it was just recently lived, or heard on the TV news, is almost pedantically crammed into these 512 pages...
...He's running the Toyota dealership now, running it into the ground...
...There's a further reason for a reviewer not to feel guilty about giving it away, and that is the posthumous feeling every one of these novels has had, a sense that the present can really be defined as that which is one moment too late, something that is just past something else...
...Add: Shipping & Handling Charge Account • 2.00 for the first copy, additional copies $1.00 Exp Date TOTAL Signature Huntington House Publishers, P.O...
...One noticeable feature of this book: everyone has a dirty mouth...
...He suffers his first heart attack while rescuing his granddaughter Judy when their Sunfish capsizes not far from the Florida condo he and Janice live in half the year now...
...The Angstroms are married with children...
...Along with Harry's coronary has come a feeling of redemption: "Her face makes a blurred clotted impression upon him but she is writhingly alive...
...And then his left ventricle rips irreparably...
...EDWARD W. EICHEL Edward Eichel currently is a psychotherapist in private practice in New York City...
...One of Updike's favorite words is "amazing," and he has never failed to find Masonite as glorious as marble, or "channel-surfing" with the remote control any less thrilling than white-water rafting...
...If I am giving away the ending here, I would argue that every life has the same ending, and that Updike's great achievement has been to create in Harry Angstrom a man who has come to seem less like a literary character than a human being...
...The authors demonstrate that Kinsey's research in volved illegal sexual experimentation on several hundred chil dren...
...Updike's genius is to take certain cliches that would be the first to occur to a committee of TV-movie-of-theweek writers ("Let's give him a hippie girlfriend Yeah, and let's throw in a black militant . . . ') and carve so many brilliant edges onto them that they become not the counterfeit of a counterfeit that the tube-writer produces, but the very mirror that artists have falteringly held up to nature from Aristotle through Thackeray and beyond...
...Updike is one of the few modern American novelists interested in Him, though the interest is intermittent...
...Her testimony was vital to the prosecution...
...The Angstrom family is, in contemporary parlance, as "dysfunctional" as ever...
...And a decade has intervened between our present and the Carter years, a brief period that Rabbit was one of a few Americans to enjoy, having found new prosperity by running his father-in-law's Toyota dealership (Rabbit Is Rich...
...JUDITH A. REISMAN In August of 1990, Dr...
...the powerful thing about him as President was that you never knew how much he knew, nothing or everything, he was like God that way, you had to do a lot of it yourself...
...The resulting familial explosion sends him back out on the road, running away along the same path he chose in 1959: "The trick is to bear west until 83, which didn't exist in those days, and then drive south right into the maw of that two-headed monster, Baltimore-Washington...
...Monstrous, she said...
...or less retired, and even fatter than he was ten years ago...
...Ted Bundy, Hirohito, Pan Am 103—there is something compulsive about Updike's electronic version of Dos Passos's headlines this time out...
...To Rabbit, and to the creator of this last grand book about him, one can say the same thing—what a way to go...
...Faddish in her speech and her enthusiasms, still an illogical "mutt" to Harry, she has been coming into a confused sort of strength for twenty years now...
...Harry has always been a mixture of shame and transcendence, a middle-class metaphysician who has had two true religious experiences, "the sound of the rain in the great beech" outside the house of Janice's parents, and "hitting a pure golf shot...
...THIS BOOK REVEALS • How the most famous sex research project in history was fraudulent • How official sex education doctrine in the United States is based on that research • How Kinsey's data came from pedophiles and sex offenders stimulating children (as young as 2 months) orally and manually for up to 24 hours at a time...
...W hat he's still looking for, in his sporadic way, is God...
...One of the things Rabbit liked about Ronald Reagan was the spooky deity he had, something Rabbit starts to miss in the months after Bush takes over: At least [Reagan] was dignified, and had that dream distance...
...As I read it, Harry dies at the end...
...It is arguable that in the presence of something immensely important—be it one's country, one's beloved, one's God—skepticism is a positive detriment to comprehension...
...How ugly and strange a single finger is—its knuckle-wrinkles, its whorly print, its pretty useless nail...
...Reisman and Edward Eichel's new book describes the "scientific research" of Alfred Kinsey, which shaped western society's beliefs and understanding of the nature of human sexuality...
...Nelson tells little Judy, in her grandparents' presence, not to be "such a smart-ass," and no one objects...
...Shimada, the honcho from California...
...Well, in a way, you could say, being alive is monstrous...
...This rivals the Nazi medical experiments described at Nuremberg...
...Thirty years have passed since he ran from his wife Janice after she accidentally drowned their baby daughter in Rabbit, Run...
...So long has Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom been around, and so secure is his place in literature, that his creator, John Updike, can confidently choose one of the epigraphs for this last book of the Rabbit series from its penultimate volume Rabbit Is Rich, and make a joke about the word that entered common American usage with the publication of the second volume, Rabbit Redux, back in 1971: "Circus Redux...
...It was to Eccles that Rabbit once declared: "Somewhere behind all this there's something that wants me to find it...
...RABBIT AT REST John Updike/Alfred A. Knopf/512 pp...
...you don't read the book so much as nibble it, paragraph by paragraph, Sky-Bar by Sky-Bar, slice of pecan pie by bag of corn chips: "KEEP ON KRUNCHIN," the crinkly pumpkin-colored bag advises him...
...He received his Master's degree in the Human Sexuality, Marriage and Family Life Program at New York University...
...He hates that word, you see it everywhere, and he doesn't know how to pronounce it...
...But the novel's final crisis is provoked by his doing what he's so often done in the past: committing an act that just about everyone but he finds unspeakable...
...Harry and Janice still live in "a world of mostly missed signals...
...Nelson, who was three when readers first met him, has always frightened Harry with his "white around the gills" look...
...enclosed Charge to 0 Visa 0 M.C...
...Rabbit will always be susceptible to the feeling that "all in all this is the happiest f country this world has ever seen...
...Harry is appalled by his own size and "for one flash sees his life as a silly thing it will be a relief to discard...
...In late 1988, Harry is fifty-five, more Thomas Mallon's new novel Aurora 7, will be published in January by Ticknor & Fields...
...The heavens engage him, but never for very long or with much mental profit...
...Title Kinsey, Sex and Fraud Louisiana residents add 7 1/2% sales tax Price Send to: Name $19.95 Address City/State/Zip Payment Method ^ Check/M.O...
...Harry feels "life's constant depreciation" in this book, and he has his second, massive heart attack while playing an impromptu game of basketball—his old game, the one that made him a local star forty years ago—with a kid named Tiger...
...Rabbit doesn't want to have to picture the President and middle-aged wife taking showers naked with their dog...
...Their marriage is a kind of tired miracle: "What was there about Janice...
...He "kicks himself up a notch, feeling his breath come harder, through a narrower passage...
...I don't not believe," Harry tells Thelma...
...Like arbitrageur and perestroika...
Vol. 23 • November 1990 • No. 11
