Rabbit Is Rich
Murtaugh, Daniel M.
Books: AT HOME WITH OBSOLESCENCE HARRY "Rabbit" Angstrom has always had to deal, in one way or another, with obsolescence. In Rabbit Run (1960), the first of what is now a trilogy, he was a young...
...His obsolescence took on a distinctly political dimension...
...Updike and Rabbit have come to know each other better and trust each other more over the years since 1960...
...Think, for example, of Saul Bellow's Herzog or Charlie Citrine, or all those dreary English professors agonizing over liberated coeds...
...Or like Sisyphus, perhaps, as Camus saw him, but sharing the essential absurdity that they transmute into meaning...
...He reaches for smaller sorts of transcendence in this novel and, missing them, he rolls with his pratfalls...
...In the new book, however, the plot is diffuse, its movements multiple, its catastrophes promised and then mockingly withdrawn...
...It cushions every fall...
...In Rabbit Run (1960), the first of what is now a trilogy, he was a young husband and father, selling vegetable slicer-dicers in a department store in Brewer, Pennsylvania, and trying to fend off the realization that his recent past as a high school basketball star was going to remain the high point of his life...
...Each novel leaves him dangling over a precipice...
...The irony is manifold and humane in' this novel...
...Rabbit meanwhile, thinks he has discovered his own illegitimate daughter, but he hasn't...
...Harry Angstrom's weaknesses turn out to be his strengths, and Updike never quite allows us to feel superior to him or to them...
...The Rabbit novels seem now to be a remarkable exercise of the imagination...
...The Krugerrands and cartwheels bring us back to the theme of obsolescence...
...Here, in this arriviste nobility Rabbit finds himself oddly at home, and Updike crystallizes a moment of our economic and moral history...
...His marriage, for example, proves to be remarkably stable...
...Each sequel finds that the intervening ten years have contrived some inglorious rescue...
...Years after closing it, Rabbit Redux still seems to me one of the most painful books I have read...
...The latest announces his ironic triumph in its title, a triumph conferred upon him by his foxy father-in-law who brought him into his Toyota dealership and then died, leaving him with a showroom full of economy cars in a nation running out of gas...
...It seems to me, too, that Updike's imaginative bridge-building has gotten better...
...Daniel M. Murtaugh whom he has "knocked up" and whom he forlornly proceeds to marry...
...America's manufacturing industries are in ruins, a scar on the landscape of Brewer...
...They are closer now to seeing with the same eyes, and their collaboration gives us a wonderfully sharp vision of America at this moment, or just the day before yesterday...
...And as the Kruger-rand is to the dollar, the Toyota is to the Chevy and the Ford...
...This theme recurs variously in the novel...
...They struggle together from the commodity dealer to the bank weighed down with seventy-four pounds of silver dollars, and Harry imagines suddenly how they must look to God: like "two ants trying to make it up the sides of a bathroom basin...
...But amid these ruins arises Rabbit's new country club, the Flying Eagle, and Rabbit's new class, "a class of the young middle-aged that had arisen in the retail businesses and service industries and software end of the new technology and that did not expect liveried barmen and secluded cardrooms, that did not mind the pre-fab clubhouse and sweep-it-yourself tennis courts of the Flying Eagle...
...His son Nelson turns up suddenly from Kent State, by way of Colorado, with a girl named Melanie, who turns out to be a baby-sitter keeping an eye on him for his real girl RABBIT IS RICH John Updike Knopf, $13.95, 467 pp...
...to them the polyester wall-to-wall carpeting of the locker rooms seemed a luxury, and a Coke machine in a cement corridor a friendly sight...
...Its special quality has grown steadily from its sources in Rabbit Run...
...Money helps...
...Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux each moved with a sharp clarity of purpose to a truly harrowing catastrophe...
...Part of what holds them together is Harry's and Janice's shared comfortable awareness that without the Toyota dealership that is her dowry, Harry would be nowhere...
...Here, of course, it is the obsolescence of the dollar that Rabbit has now learned to live with and exploit...
...Need I add that he takes up jogging, then lets it drop...
...Harry and Janice make love in a nest of Krugerrands (the sex, as before, is pitilessly explicit...
...I had not the sense in Rabbit Is Rich that I had in the earlier novels that Updike's sensibility was obtrusively sharpening Rabbit's perceptions...
...He invests in gold, makes a bundle, then switches to silver just as the Hunts are getting ready to unload it...
...Rabbit is merely baffled, tricked, not drawn on the wheel as he was before...
...Just how much it helps is, perhaps, the most humorous and unfriendly revelation of middle age...
...Here again money helps...
...Updike, formerly of Harvard's Lampoon and Hasty Pudding, has set himself the problem of imagining the growth of a man exactly his age and almost exactly his opposite, a man separated from him by a cultural chasm...
...This is all the more remarkable in a time when so many authors create heroes who seem their (sometimes Siamese) twins...
...As a result, Rabbit Is Rich is a more consistently comic novel, looser and easier and more cynical than its predecessors...
...He lusts after an older friend's younger wife, but in a magical six-handed swap in the sanctioned Caribbean night he winds up with the wrong partner...
...In Rabbit Redux (1971), he had what looked like steady work, a cracker-box house in a new development, and a set of comfortable prejudices, but the Vietnam war, the sexual revolution, the computer, and a druggy, jivey counterculture sought him out, invaded his home, and nearly shredded his identity...
...It makes me think of that other wonderfully sharp vision of Dublin that arose from the collaboration of James Joyce and Leopold Bloom.eopold Bloom...
Vol. 108 • November 1981 • No. 20
