The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 22 October 2012
by John Updike
This book is the fourth in Updike's tetralogy of novels that relates the tale of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a flawed suburban Pennsylvanian, who encounters life with a placid sense of purpose, and with a growing sense of the limits of his own existence. It is the end of 1989, after Christmas and the bombing of the Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, a tragedy which haunts Harry in the early pages of the book. But the whole book is overarched with the passage of time and the sense of impending death. From page one, Harry is experiencing discomfort deep in his chest, the kind of discomfort a man might just ignore, lest he admit to a basic fragility and the knowledge that a flawed heart is a time bomb just waiting its chance to go off. This is fairly grim territory. Given the book's title, we know where this is going. By now, though, after three brilliant previous novels, we've come to know Rabbit Angstrom, and how he might view his predicament. He is in denial that is barely conscious. He is retired, now, and spending his winters in the Florida retirement community of Deleon. His wife, Janice is looking for something new in her life, and her youthfulness mocks Harry's sense of uselessness and age (though he is only 55). His son, who now runs the car dealership Janice inherited from her father, has an addiction that is squandering their resources. There are grandkids, too, and they whinge at the mediocre entertainment opportunities in their winter trip to Florida. It is all, like the previous novels, an almost brutal, but witty and incredibly sharp, critique of late 20th century American life. Harry is bitter and lonely. His feeling of uselessness is enhanced by his wife's growing independence and the competence she wields in solving some crippling financial problems. Harry's friends and old lovers are dying off, and he reflects more and more on his past, much of which we've seen in the previous novels, as well. The past has haunted Harry all along. He had big dreams that have been lost in a sea of responsibility, vice and just the basic reality of one average man's limitations in this culture. Updike's book, like the earlier ones, is a brilliant portrait of the American cultural milieu, its obsessions with entertainment and disaster, its evident cheapening and its sense of decay. Perhaps every generation has its version of this. Still, this book feels dated only by its immediate cultural references. In the end, it is as true a tale today as it ever was. Through these four novels (and one subsequent novella, Rabbit Remembered, first published in The New Yorker), Updike has given us the arc of a man's life. The book is full of references, some of them wry and self-referential, to the previous novels. There are parallels in the tale, and the end rhymes with its beginning. Powerful stuff. Not always pretty. Often quite explicit. But true at its heart.
(For this novel, Updike was awarded the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.)
Also by Updike:
[Rabbit, Run]
[Rabbit Redux]
[Rabbit is Rich]
[Licks of Love]
[The Poorhouse Fair]
[The Centaur]
[S.]
[Toward the End of Time]
[The Witches of Eastwick]
[Of the Farm]
[Just Looking]
[Still Looking]
See also: [Updike, by Adam Begley]