Poetry
Oberg, Robert J.
the author's part to reach down out of his bourgeois decadence and shake hands with Rabbit's blue-collar, conservative toughness. An unseemly air of savage satisfaction surrounds Rabbit's most...
...On the golf course Harry is plunged into depression at the thought that "every blade of grass at his feet is an individual life that will die, that has flourished to no purpose...
...This is a comedy of fetishism, the visible standing in for the invisible, gold as love...
...The wisdom of middle age has turned his energies to real things, things that can not only be seen but, better, bought and sold...
...His running quarrel with Nelson, his wish to deny the boy a job at the car lot, turns out to be more than a wish to get his son out on his own...
...But the ultimate violence of Redux is directed at the reader, who, along with Rabbit, is subjected to endless ideological tirades that pour in vast volumes of tedium from the mouths of Jill and Skeeter...
...Nowadays, however, he no longer hits these miraculous shots, and the game has become "more like work...a matter of approximations in the realm of the imperfect...
...now, when he takes up jogging, they worry about his heart...
...With annoyance we begin to suspect that our sense of being trapped is exactly the point--that the author, who writes in his memoirs of feeling angered by the sixties' refusal to let him ignore politics, intends to browbeat us with politics until we, too, share his furious discomfort...
...I abbitls Rich (1981), a persuasive return to the D themes of Harry Angstrom's inner life, presented a Rabbit grown fat and happy with such cess...
...Rabbit, too, experiences a kind of"inner dwindling," his spiritual desires waning as his waistline has grown...
...Anchoring Rabbit's spiritual life snugly in harbor, the novel--alone among the four Rabbit books--secures itself for sustained comedy...
...When his son, now a college drop-out, smashes up Rabbit's car and then whines, "Dad, it's just a thing...
...Beneath this playful comedy of getting and spending, however, lies an accumulating bleakness...
...That golf has lost its metaphysical function is a sign of how grave things soon will become in Harry's world...
...Now _ _ in his midf0rties, he has taken over his fatherin-law's Toyota dealership...
...he and Janice, again reconciled, vacation in the Poconos and the Caribbean, and spend their ample leisure time at the country club...
...The 1970s have been kind to Harry...
...you're looking like you lost your best friend," we sympathize with Rabbit's intuition that "things" are far more helpful friends than the boy imagines...
...Presentiments of his mortality swirl through the latter half of Rabbit Is Rich (the family used to worry about him running away...
...It is a struggle for dynastic succession...
...This is a novel of a medium-rich man whose favorite hobby--literally--is counting his gold...
...For a reader it is satisfying to hear this echo, cast forth over two decades and three novels, and posing, in the devolution of a metaphor, something like a life change...
...When he was younger and just taking up the game," Updike has him reflect, "...there were shots that seemed like a miracle, straight as an edge of glass and longer than any power purely his could have produced, and it was for the sake of collaboration with this angel that he kept playing...
...in a particularly devilish passage, the two of them put several shiny new Krugerrands Harry has bought to a highly unusual use...
...No such solace is afforded Harry, however, who finds that not even a game of golf can rouse him from his existential gloom...
...Rabbit's gold arouses him, and his wife too...
...Far from being disturbed by this, Rabbit is comforted...
...Notable is a scene in which Harry and Janice carry seventy-five pounds' worth of freshly purchased gold coins from the coin store to the bank, clutching their sacks of treasure in apprehension as they pass 318: Commonweal assorted down-and-outers...
...An unseemly air of savage satisfaction surrounds Rabbit's most vile behavior...
...The passage recalls the young Rabbit's naive belief in the tree and the stone and in God's gift of "special talents...
...in Rabbit's peevish anxieties Updike successfully explores the paradox of heredity, by which one is both perpetuated and replaced, the success of the son proving 17May 1991:319...
...In its best moments, Rabbit Is Rich is a fond and spirited satire of the nouveau riche...
...Where the key metaphors of Redux were poison and rot, Rich addresses the inflation and scarcity of the Carter years and the midseventies' fear that the world, as the novel's opening line asserts, is running out of gas...
...God [has] shrunk in Harry's middle years," Updike writes, "to the size of a raisin lost under the car seat...
Vol. 118 • May 1991 • No. 10
