Angst Up to the End
SEARLES, GEORGE J.
Angst Up to the End Rabbit at Rest By John Updike Knopf. 512 pp. $21.95. Reviewed by George J. Searles Associate Professor of Humanities, Mohawk Valley Community College; author, "The...
...Perhaps the novel's trickiest feature, however, is the extreme improbability of two crucial scenes...
...But what really makes Harry interesting is the extent to which he is different, his refusal to grudgingly accept the leveling effects of day-to-day existence...
...They are more apt, too, to recognize the injokes...
...Although we may not like Harry, in some respects we are akin to him...
...As if to emphasize the dishonesty of his characters' interactions, Updike relentlessly evokes the tacky, cheesy quality of American reality in the Reagan/ Bush years...
...Repeatedly he functions as the symbol of a lost America...
...Thus we are made privy to the jumpy, often comical course of Harry's thoughts as he attempts to understand his own life, to make sense of the "atomic decay whereby the precious glowing present turns, with each tick of the clock, into the leaden slag of history...
...The narrating voice in Rabbit at Rest is a mix of Harry's and Updike's, speaking always in the historical present...
...what's important is that he will not go gently...
...The minister wears a brown suit and necktie and shirt with an ordinary collar, and looks rather mussed, and breathless, like the plump young manager of an appliance store who sometimes has to help out handling heavy cartons...
...In Rabbit Redux (1971) Harry is 10 years older and still floundering, caught up in the tumult of the '60s...
...In Rabbit Is Rich (1981) Harry has inherited a Toyota dealership and achieved financial success, yet genuine happiness continues to elude him...
...It is likely to dismay and entertain in nearly every measure...
...True to the Zeitgeist, he has fallen into cocaine and crack addiction and has virtually bankrupted the Toyota agency to feed his habit...
...Now, in Rabbitat Rest, he is semiretired, killing time on the golf course while battling not only his perennial psychological demons, but also the double bogy of cardiac illness and looming death...
...The memories packed/in the rapid-access file...
...But all readers will be struck by the book's poignant, elegiac tone, by its arresting topicality, and by the undiminished brilliance of Updike's masterly prose style...
...Nelson's depredations, though, are merely part of the whole depressing picture...
...At one point, forinstance, Harry says, "redux...
...Even more so than the previous installments, Rabbit at Rest is a virtual directory of actual catastrophes: the AIDS epidemic, the Pan Am Flight 103 explosion, and the Challenger disaster, to name only a few...
...Implausibility, though, is also part of Updike's subject here...
...Rabbit at Rest is a long, often troubling, yet provocative novel...
...His real interest is the mystery of the human consciousness, that swarming riot of impressions, recollections and impulses...
...But even in the more accustomed environs of Harry's fictional hometown of Brewer, Pennsylvania, Updike is ruthless in his mustering of negative details...
...Each of the books portrays Harry at a different stage of his troubled, unfulfilled life...
...Since his 1958 debut he has given us a play, four children's books, five collections of poetry, another five of essays —and, of course, the 24 volumes of superior fiction that have established his reputation as a major American author...
...The whole act...
...Inside, the walls are cinder-block, and the light through the tall clear windows bald and merciless...
...The following passage, in which Harry and his wife attend the funeral of Harry's former lover, Thelma, is typical: "The funeral service is in a sort of nobrand-name church...
...Updike's latest novel completes a tetralogy about ex-basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, sometimes described as the Harvard-educated author's proletarian alter ego...
...author, "The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike" For sheer output and versatility, few writers can touch John Updike...
...The initiated will wink, knowing that it was Updike who resurrected the term from diction's boneyard...
...Readers who have followed the "Rabbit" chronicle from the start will be less surprised by Harry Angstrom's more philistine pronouncements, and will experience the satisfying sense of having come full-circle...
...Rabbit at Rest is a documentary of a society sinking in its own vulgar excesses, just as Harry himself nearly drowns earlyin the book...
...The first—involving a most unlikely sexual alliance —seems far-fetched immediately...
...But whole sentences and paragraphs must be read as Harry's, despite the purposeful omission of quotation marks and attributing phrases...
...He has always been at odds with the social contract, and now he is tilting against Mortality itself...
...Everywhere one turns in this book promises are broken, contracts violated, relationships betrayed...
...We all feel hemmed in sometimes, vaguely threatened, subject to the whims of fortune and of our own quite fickle bodies...
...His treatment of television, especially, reinforces the idea that almost anything is possible today, no matter how preposterous...
...Technically, the story is told from the author's all-knowing point of view...
...Followers of the saga will remember Harry's rather unappealing son, Nelson, one of many characters reprised here from the earlier books...
...Disturbing as this may be, it is quite comical as well in a sardonic sort of way: "...The commercials revolt him, all that friendly jawing among these folksy crackerbarrel types about rectal itching and burning, and the one of the young / old beautiful woman in soft focus stretching so luxuriously in her white bathrobe because she's just taken a shit and all those people in the Ex-Lax ad saying 'Good morning' one after the other so you can't help picturing the world filling up with our smiling American excrement, we'll have to pay poor thirdworld countries to dump it pretty soon, like toxic waste...
...After several hundred pages, this becomes a bit hard to take...
...The one drawback is that Harry's value judgments begin to take on the feel of sanctioned utterance...
...This is a problem because, to put the matter gently, Harry is not a politically correct person...
...His handling of the ironically-named Deleon, Florida, and of Harry's retirement community there, is a tour de force of scornful mockery...
...Such brash irreverence, coupled with a strong current of nostalgia, is partly what enables Harry to hold our attention for all of his obvious personal shortcomings...
...The private events are the main thing," he stressed in a recent New York Times Book Review articleaboutthenewnovel...
...When finally, hot, embarrassed, and furious at each other's incompetence, the Angstroms arrive, the church is just a plain raw building, a warehouse with windows and a stump of an anodized aluminum steeple, set in a treeless acre of red soil sown skimpily with grass and crisscrossed by car ruts...
...When the costumed Harry arrives at a July Fourth celebration, for example, "people with puzzled Eighties faces keep asking directions, because he is dressed as Uncle Sam and should know...
...Maybe Updike was anticipating such objections, for along the way he has Harry say of America, "God's country...
...Death is there defined as "the ceasing of your own brand of magic...
...And we all yearn for certain cherished people, places and rhythms from our past, now forever gone...
...It has often been suggested that Harry's thwarted strivings are on one level simply metaphors for the larger social problems of his era...
...No wonder Harry Angstrom and his family are experiencing difficulties, Updikeseems to be saying, things are tough all over...
...His knee-jerk conservatism, his patronizing attitudes toward those of color, and his Cro-Magnon view of women are offered to us in a rather too forgiving light...
...Folding chairs do instead of pews, and childish felt banners hang from the metal beams...
...The lazy girl in the booth [of a six-theater cineplex] didn't know where the church might be, nor did the pimply usher inside, in the big empty scarlet lobby smelling of buttered popcorn and melted M&Ms...
...What a dumb word...
...He could have made it smaller and still made the same point...
...The other—drawing upon Harry's distant past as an athlete—is unrealistic only when you stop to think about it...
...He has to keep telling them he doesn't know anything...
...That he's doomed to failure is irrelevant...
...But Updike's primary purpose is not to make a political statement...
...Again and again, he presents us with blatant absurdities that are routinely tolerated as part of "normal" life...
...We're all sick of shlock...
...you see it everywhere suddenly...
...Updike's subtle blending of voices enables him to maintain a strong sense of immediacy and realism without sacrificing the advantages of authorial omniscience...
...The new work leaves no doubt...
...Looking for it, Harry and Janice got lost and wound up at the mall in Maiden Springs...
...He remains centrally concerned with Harry Angstrom as a person...
...Rabbit, Run (1960) introduces the young Harry: adulterous, confused, adrift...
...This idea has preoccupied Updike throughout his career, and in fact provides the basis for his excellent recent New Yorker poem "Perfection Wasted...
Vol. 73 • October 1990 • No. 13
