Rabbit Redux (Rabbit Angstrom #2)

Robin

Rating: really liked it
DISCLAIMER: Rabbit, Run made me a John Updike fan-girl.

If Rabbit, Run was Updike's anti-1950's-American-suburbia book, then Rabbit Redux is definitely his rage against the 60's. Set in 1969 around the time of the moon landing, we find Rabbit, a little over a decade older, and he's not running. You could say that karma has caught up to him. Rumour has it that Janice (who has sobered up and is working at one of her father's car dealerships) is giving Rabbit a little taste of his own medicine, and has a lover on the sly. Though, not too sly, since everyone seems to know about it, including Rabbit's sickly mother who never leaves the house.

There are some pretty kick-ass scenes leading up to a big confrontation between Rabbit and Janice that confirmed to me how ingenious John Updike is. Then, Rabbit's life disintegrates into nothing less than a psychedelic shitstorm. The guy creates his own kooky commune when he takes home a teenage runaway and an unstable, kinda shifty black man who escaped probation from a recent drug charge. Don't ask me why he does this. The whole entire book, Rabbit is SO PASSIVE. Shit just happens to him, he allows it, with a truly laissez faire attitude, and of course, disastrous consequences.

What takes place during the time of supposed love and peace and grooviness is anything but. Updike shows the ugliest possible view of the 1960's: rotten and shallow relationships, selfish, unlikable people, racism, violence, almost constant drug use, and tons of unappealing sex. Or, should I say, nasty sex. It was so icky to be a fly on the wall for pretty much each and every copulation (failed or otherwise) that takes place in this book. It's so dark, and each participant is really so alone, it's beyond disturbing.

And while there was still much prose to swoon over...........

We contains chords someone else must strike.

The woman is old and wrinkled and smokes a yellow cigarette that requires much sucking in and holding down and closing of the eyes and sighing.

The universe is unsleeping, neither ants nor stars sleep, to die will be to be forever wide awake.

...........this book spiralled down to a level where even this fan-girl was appalled, I was ready for the book to END already. I couldn't stand a single soul. I was sick of the political ranting. I was sick of the nymphomaniacal activity. I didn't care who was cheating on who. It was so down in the gutter.

I was also completely bewildered at and frankly sick to death with the constant use of the word 'cunt' throughout the book. I should have started a count, because it must be at least a hundred or more times. Does it have some meaning, like the repetition of the phrase "So it goes" in Slaughterhouse-Five? I doubt it. It feels like another type of violence that is hard to take, a misogyny that gets real old, real quick. It highlights the utter disdain the male characters have towards women - and the moral reprehensibility of pretty much all the women in this book. They are all 'slutty', or are prostitutes, including Mim, Rabbit's own sister.

I was warned that this is the nadir of the Rabbit series and I concur with that assessment. Despite my misgivings with this instalment, I fully intend to read the rest. Because, John Updike.

Matt

Rating: really liked it
“‘That may be your mistake, Harry. You’ve taken Janice for granted ever since – the time.’ The time he left her. The time the baby died. The time she took him back. ‘Ten years ago,’ his father needlessly adds. Harry is beginning, here in this cold bar with cactuses in plastic pots on the shelves beneath the mirrors and the little Schlitz spinner doing its polychrome parabola over and over, to feel the world turn. A hopeful coldness inside him grows, grips his wrists inside his cuffs. The news isn’t all in, a new combination might break it open, this stale peace… ‘Harry, the malice of people surpasses human understanding in my book, and the poor soul has no defenses against it, there she lies and has to listen. Ten years ago, wouldn’t she have laid them out? Wouldn’t her tongue have cut them down? They’ve told [your mother] that Janice is running around. With one certain man, Harry. Nobody claims she’s playing the field…’”
- John Updike, Rabbit Redux

When last we met Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, faded high school basketball star turned aimless young adult, he was doing what he did best: run from his problems. In Rabbit, Run, set during the twilight of the Eisenhower administration, author John Updike closed with a bit of a cliffhanger, leaving us uncertain whether Rabbit would ever stop running, whether he would return to his wife and child and home and responsibilities, and whether she would take him back if he did.

In Updike’s sequel, Rabbit Redux, those questions are answered casually, in the first few pages. Instead of picking up where the first book left off, Updike instead skips ahead a decade, leaping over John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to plop us right into the upheavals of the late 1960s. Up in space, Neil Armstrong is setting foot on the Moon, while down on earth, Rabbit is a Linotype operator, a thirty-six year-old man in a dying profession that he’s not really good at, growing fat and irrelevant as the universe changes drastically around him. In the larger world, America is fighting a controversial war in Vietnam, there are riots in the streets, and the underpinnings of his country are being challenged. At home, Rabbit’s mother is suffering from a progressive, dementia-like illness, his father is nagging him constantly to visit, and his son doesn’t like sports.

Also, Janice – Rabbit’s wife – has just left him for a car salesman.

With Janice suddenly absent, Rabbit gradually gathers around him an ad hoc family of sorts, comprised of Nelson, his son; Jill, a young white runaway from a rich family; and Skeeter, a black Vietnam vet who introduces Rabbit to drugs and a wider perspective.

To say more would be to give away too much, and would also serve little purpose. Like its predecessor, Rabbit Redux is not overly concerned with plot points. For much of its 350 pages, it just sort of drifts along, a series of conversations between Rabbit and various people. These talks are interspersed with a hefty helping of Updike’s famed (or infamous) sex scenes.

Instead of summarizing, it’s perhaps more worthwhile to mention a few observations.

The first has to do with Updike’s treatment of race. Mostly kept to the background in Rabbit, Run – which made sense for the time period and the character – race is at the forefront of Rabbit Redux.

At first, Updike handles the issue relatively well, keenly highlighting Rabbit’s racial panic as something outdated and buffoonish. The farther along we get in the book, however, the more problematic things become. After finishing Rabbit Redux, I read about an interview Updike once gave, in which he said that he did not write historical fiction because he had never “used a spittoon.” The point he was making, of course, is that he was most comfortable writing what he knew. The limits of Updike’s personal knowledge are on display here.

The issue arises from the character of Skeeter, who is not really a character at all. He is a mouthpiece, mostly dedicated to delivering long harangues to Rabbit. While what he says is not necessarily offensive, this particular trope – leading an ignorant white man to enlightenment – is outdated, to say the least. Moreover, Skeeter’s message is impossibly overwhelmed by his utter outrageousness, including a sequence in such glorious bad taste that I had to recheck to make sure I had read it correctly. Indeed, Skeeter is such a preposterous addition to Rabbit Redux that he might have worked, if only Updike had made a fractional attempt to give him human dimensions.

The second point worth mentioning is the sex. During his lifetime, Updike “won” many awards for delivering bad sex in fiction, and this aspect of his writing has almost subsumed his reputation. Rabbit Redux is chock full of bawdy scenes and minutely detailed bedtime bits.

I will be honest. In the past, I have gently mocked the graphic couplings narrated by authors such as Ken Follett. Now, I’m at the point where I’m a bit exhausted by the snark – my own included – mainly because there are so few examples of “good sex” in fiction. That is, any author who attempts a sex scene, whether it’s D.H. Lawrence or Updike, is going to get roasted by somebody, since there is no remotely objective framework for judging these things. The upshot is that sex – one of the fundamental aspects of humanity – is often left out of fiction altogether.

This is all a long way of saying that I respect Updike for his effort. At least he does not pretend that once the bedroom door closes, there is a bright light, angels singing, and a harmonious union too perfect for words. Simply labeling something a “bad sex scene” may say as much about the reader’s own discomfort as about what has been written.

That doesn’t mean that Updike is good at writing women, though. Here, I thought that Janice – in the rare times he focuses on her – is the most sympathetic character in Rabbit Redux. Of all the inexplicable actions taken in this book, hers are the most based in reason. Updike’s treatment of the other female characters, however, is marked by delusional male fantasies. I’m thinking especially of young Jill, who inexplicably decides to worship at the altar of the out-of-shape, early middle-aged Rabbit Angstrom.

The final point to be made is that Rabbit Redux, for all its literary qualities – and it is extremely well written, with marvelous prose and beautiful details – is nothing more than a reflection of Rabbit Run. The two are almost the same, with a few inversions. In terms of action, pacing, and structure, the sequel hits the exact same beats as the first entry. There is a marital conflict that ruptures the nuclear family, followed by the creation of a new, informal family, and then a late third act plot twist that has become predictably unpredictable. The additions that Updike made – his musing on race in America during the time of Nixon; his views on Vietnam and the counterculture; a lot more sexual activity – might make this a more ambitious novel, but not a better one.

Rabbit Redux is the second of four novels concerning its eponymous everyman. At the time the books were released, they were hailed as classics. Based on what I’ve read so far, I have some doubts that they will retain their prevalence or status into the future, though they may survive as markers of a specific type of person at a specific time in history.

Nevertheless, even though Rabbit Redux was the opposite of seamless, it kept me turning the pages, from first to last, without any thought of quitting. It may be a small sign of Updike’s true genius that he got me to care about an unexceptional, unattractive, narrow-minded schlub like Rabbit Angstrom, to the point where I cannot imagine not seeing his story through to the end

Alex

Rating: really liked it
Or Rabbit Gets Woke, in which Rabbit is turned on to and back off of the hippie movement with the convenient help of a barely legal teenager who shows up like "I love blowjobs, can I live with you?" and a crazy black guy who will not shut up. Rabbit Redux is Updike's Go Ask Alice, a bizarre, racist rant about Vietnam and the dangers of marijuana that culminates with the black guy jerking off as Rabbit reads Frederick Douglass out loud to him.

In Rabbit, Run, the plot moved forward largely in sex scenes, enormous chunks of the book that described and deepened the characters as they tried to connect with each other. Many of the pages in Rabbit Redux are also about sex, but now Updike's just spanking to fantasies of pulling interracial Eiffel Towers. It's weird and it's bad.

At least the sex scenes are just bad and not boring, like much of the rest of the book. Speech after speech about Vietnam and the Merovingians and the nature of the universe, delivered by what Updike, who is neither, imagines a pot-addled black guy might sound like. It's so weird that I wonder whether anyone else has ever read this book at all, because shouldn't this be mentioned whenever anyone talks about Updike? "Remember Rabbit Redux, where he reads Frederick Douglass while a guy jerks off in front of him? That was a weird fuckin' disaster, huh?" When Updike died in 2009 there was all this debate over whether he was the greatest writer of the 20th century (David Baddiel) or a penis with a thesaurus (David Foster Wallace). I feel like every article should have led with "John Updike, who once wrote a scene where a dude reads Frederick Douglass while another guy whacks off..."

That was a weird fuckin' disaster, huh?

Michael Finocchiaro

Rating: really liked it
I felt this was the weakest of the Rabbit books. It covers the 60s and has a particularly reprehensible co-star. There is lots of violence and hate in this book - the hideous underside to the sexual revolution. Obviously, Updike was not taken in by all the peace, love and happiness rhetoric and instead looked at the damage that unbridled sexuality and drug use could have on society - here focusing on how it affects Rabbit and his family. Still a great read and a must before finishing the cycle with Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest.

It was very full of violence and hate and is a turn off to many readers. Like I said, it is kind of the violent hangover after free love and drugs. A conservative and pitiless view of American society. No wonder most of his books focus on the later 70s in more idyllic New England or Pennsylvania settings - this one is literally a barn-burner and it is truly hard to root for Rabbit all the way through. Fortunately, Updike wrote Rich and At Rest to redeem Rabbit to some extent.

Ben

Rating: really liked it
A year ago I vowed to myself (and you, if you had read my review of Rabbit, Run) that I’d read a Rabbit novel annually until I’m done with the four-novel series; the idea being that I could look back and see how I’d changed in the past year, comparing the changes in my life with those incurred by Rabbit. But it’s the same shit different day for me over here, ya hear? And I’m not turning this into some kind of self centered review about me-me-me. Instead, I’m going to (eventually) talk about the me-me-me mindset that we’re all guilty of. All of us.

So it’s the 60s, man, and Rabbit’s crazy ass isn’t any smarter; he still goes through life taking things as they come with little self reflection. And if he’s wiser, it ain’t by much; but the people around him have actually grown. His wife, Jancie, tired of not-getting-the-peter from her husband the past decade, finds some Greek douche bag to sleep with. But despite this -- or at times it even seems because of it – Janice is actually growing and starting to enjoy and appreciate life. And since it’s been 10 years since Rabbit, Run, Rabbit’s son, Nelson, is no longer a bebe – he’s now 12, and kind of thinks and acts like a little hippie -- which of course the Vietnam-War-supporting and ex-jock, Rabbit, can’t stand.

So, yes, it’s indeed the 60s: there’s the Pill, lots of good (and bad) drugs; and there’s threats of getting blown up by the Russians; and there’s the Vietnam war where kids are dying for no fucking reason, and everyone knows someone that’s had to go, or is in fear of going himself; and with all the civil rights stuff going on, there’s still blatant, despicable racism. So things are pretty fucked up.

And this novel is well-written -- Updike is someone everyone should read at least once. Aspects of the writing are remarkable, and the novel manages to have heart without delving into kitschy notions of love. But at times the book is ridiculous and silly. Updike swung for the fences; he wanted to represent the 60s in one novel; but it was like he didn’t really immerse himself in it; like he was trying to write about it from the outside, as an observer. Novels written by the “observer writer” can work, of course; but typically, I think, this needs to be from a time-scope many years later, when the vision can be clear.

So the result is that the novel often feels forced. We end up with lots of sex, drug use, a ridiculous black character, fights about Vietnam, racial angst, and a young hippie chick, who of course, sleeps with Rabbit. Totally forced, because it was clear he was trying to capture the era. But like I said, when you try to force that kind of thing too early, as an outside observer, it’s never going to work -- even if you’re John Updike.

Now let’s get back to the issue of selfishness. I used to think it was worse with the baby boomers. My thinking was that the generations before them won wars, and worked hard, and focused on their kids and family, and basically focused on “doing the right thing.” And then I thought that all these hippies basically showed up and that all they wanted to do was party and act like children, never taking responsibility and only thinking about themselves. Utter selfishness. And then, to make it worse, this whole generation (the Baby Boomers) pulled a 180 from some of their few admirable qualities -- those of spurning materialism and having an open mind and loving heart -- to buying a bunch of crap they didn’t need, going into debt, divorcing like crazy, and acting like they could live that way for the rest of their lives. All this while – think financial crisis -- the following generations foot the bill. So you see, I thought, “they’re still as completely selfish as they were in the 60s, just in a different way; a way that just happens to be better suited to their current stage in life.”

”What a shitty generation!” I used to say to friends.

But in recent months I’ve changed my thinking about the Boomers. Just look at the kids these days -- talk about self-obsessed, with their facebook and video games, and constant text messaging. But they do –- thank goodness –- show signs of idealism. And idealism was something that the young generation of the 60s had plenty of. We need youthful idealism -- because let’s face it – if it weren’t for the idealism of the Baby Boomers, we would never have gotten out of Vietnam, or improved race relations as we did, or improved women’s rights as we did. Really, without the Boomers, we probably wouldn’t have escaped the general close-mindedness that had previously pervaded so much of American society.

No, the Boomers didn’t keep their idealism; or, if they did, they turned it inside out, fucking it all up, turning it into something nasty – the culmination of which was the financial crisis. But we’re going to dig out of that hole. In fact, I think the young people, in their own “selfish ways,” have already started to help us progress – maybe not so differently from the way the Boomers did in the 60s. But I wouldn’t know for sure -– it’s too early to tell these things as an outside observer.

; )

Fabian

Rating: really liked it
Like the decade of the 60s, “Rabbit Redux” is a bit tricky. Wee complications arise in so liberal a landscape, especially if the everyman in the novel is absurdly conservative. Add then a haze proliferated by drugs (weed and alcohol and pills) in the mix, and what you have left over is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, older but none the wiser. This time around, ten years after the first Rabbit novel, Janice, Harry’s sad, insipid wife runs away, leaving Rabbit with the kid. Add then too the elements that made the first book so harsh (affairs, racism and a wholelotta mysogeny) to the national and personal events in that aforementioned decade… and RR is sick, hilarious and very real (employing streamofconsciousness & the third person present-tense).

Basically another tragedy befalls Rabbit as he gives shelter to a young hippie-ish ho and her black escort, a modern revolutionary (who's way into drugs). Confusion in the middle portion of the book basically mirrors the trio’s stupid, selfish drug trance. They all do these drugs with the twelve year old kid present… an American tragedy.

Are all women-- in Updike-- simply stupid? They (Janice, Jill, Peggy, Mrs. Angstrom, Mim) are quite forgiving, ever tolerant of their other-sexed counterparts’ many mistakes. The Man’s World is glorified ...thoroughly.

And--Gosh! Americans are soooooo selfish!!!

The FOUR NOVELS in the tetralogy seem intent on validating this pervasive misogyny and this hybrid form of macho entitlement. Like Fellini in Dolce Vita, one practically expects a woman (any one) to be exhibited and made to perform in front of a drunken crowd, all the while being violently humiliated and feathered. All in good fun!

Updike readers will forgive the complicated themes and enjoy the truly great writing.

MJ Nicholls

Rating: really liked it
This book is where the Angstroms became the Osbournes, without the cracking heavy metal catalogue. Or, as other reviewers have pointed out, it’s where Updike tackles Big Questions of American politics and culture within his sexy literary soap opera framework. I also see I was wrong in attempting to empathise with Angstrom—he’s clearly being set up as a Great White Dope, where racist and sexist poison accumulates and infects those unfortunate enough to fall under his sway. So we open with Rabbit’s domestic downfall: Janice has started an affair with a tachycardic Greek and his son Nelson has come to despise pop’s casual racism. Then the book veers into political and social territory as Rabbit picks up teenage prostitute Jill and installs her in his home as a live-in whore. A hippie child spurned by her parents, she is the only likeable character in the whole shebang. And this makes the ‘Skeeter’ section infuriating to read. Skeeter is a Vietnam vet and drug pusher who tries to educate Rabbit in black history over a series of after-dinner talks (Rabbit lets Skeeter stay in his front room), who shoots Jill up on mescaline when Harry’s not looking and spits out the vilest misogynist trash in front of the kid. So we’re sucked into this 150-page spiral, knowing Jill is going to perish at the hands of these imbeciles, screaming at the book GET THIS POOR JUNKIE TO HER MOTHER, but alas, she meets the grizzliest end Updike can imagine, leaving me frazzled with indignation and confusion. Is this scabrous social comment, or a piece of callous authorship? Veering towards the latter. Rabbit’s utter indifference to Jill’s death is also completely ludicrous—his character withers a great deal in this book, which is compelling but oh-so-deeply flawed. I could say more. I’ll spare you. Moira has some good analysis here.

Lea

Rating: really liked it
I think the biggest crime this book commits is how silly it seems at times when it tries to say something profound about the state of humanity or the 60s. I've never lived in the 60s, obviously, but if you told me this was written by someone who's only skimmed the wikipedia page of the decade I wouldn't bat an eyelid - it reads like a list was ticked off: race relations, drugs, new ideas about sex, landing on the moon, Vietnam war. But they're all handled really weirdly (sometimes in a "edgy" way that just makes you roll your eyes), and the story itself made me feel kind of queasy.

Ten years after the amazing first volume, Rabbit's wife Janice leaves him for a Greek guy whose main talent seems to be that he's great at sex. So far, so good, the book was shaping up to be great, the writing was engaging and stylistically, as always, really slick. Then Rabbit takes in a 19 year old in obvious need of help and unknowingly "buys" her from a group of black radicals (???). The sex between them is pretty uncomfortable, both to read and for the two of them, and Rabbit's son isn't the greatest fan either because she feels like a big sister to him (but he also wants to sleep with or... or did, this is left a little ambigious). Then he also takes in a crazy black man, a veteran who thinks he's the new jesus and argues with Rabbit about the war and gives drugs to the girl to make her pliable and rape her. The racism and misogyny portrayed in this book occasionally felt like it was the point, but a lot of times it seemed accidental and even like Updike was trying to say something completely opposite to what he was trying to say. Or rather: what WAS he trying to say? Just show how Rabbit passively floats through the 60s - but then why make the story line so crazy and over the top?

It feels weird giving 3 stars when the story annoys me so but the writing on a scene by scene and word by word level is still great. Just know that this is a weak installment of the Rabbit series. I fully understand people giving this 1 star because as far enjoyment vs being irritated went, it really fluctuated wildly for me.

Xandra (StarrySkyBooks)

Rating: really liked it
You know those “This is how men write!” jokes we make about how sexist and objectifying the narration is by some male writers?

That’s what this book is like.

Rating: 2 stars. Was I supposed to be blown away by this book, since it is considered one of the best of all time? Because... no thank you.

Anthony

Rating: really liked it
I reread the first Rabbit book — Rabbit, Run — last year, and loved it; I found its clear-eyed depiction of a pathetically frightened embodiment of toxic masculinity to be incisive and propulsively written. Decades ago, I only ever made it through this, the second, Rabbit book, and I was eager to reread it and finally make it through the rest. I think I still may read the final two novels in this tetralogy, but I found this one to be a wearying disappointment the further I got into it.

Rabbit remains a problematic character, which isn’t a problem in and of itself for me; I think there’s real value in such characters being brought to life and examined, as authors hold a mirror up to the human condition. But in this case, it feels like Updike was also getting a little soft on him, and Updike’s efforts to address Rabbit’s — and the community’s — racism, which I imagine were unusually bold at the time, feel forced and inauthentic.

There are still many moments throughout that feel alive and troubling and darkly funny, and some of the poetic writing sings; but too much of the time this novel spins its wheels.

☮Karen

Rating: really liked it
As part of the PopSugar Challenge, I opted to listen to #2 in Updike's Rabbit series, which takes place in 1969 while Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is a supposedly responsible adult enjoying the fact that America is fighting the Viet Cong, and lamenting the fact that his wife Janice is leaving him for a guy she works with (and is opposed to the war). Harry is the Everyman in his opinions and lifestyle. It was like a walk down memory lane to hear his arguments about politics and race, and he is very opinionated. Although this grew tiresome, eventually I think even Harry begins to see the error in some of his thinking and allows himself to be influenced by a young woman and black militant he takes into his home because they have no where else to turn. Some of the spouting off held tremendous shock value, and with that plus the very weird middle sections of the book, I thought about abandoning it. But I seldom do that, so I decided instead to finish this and then not to read any more of the Rabbit books...although I hear they get better and better. 3 stars.

Moira

Rating: really liked it
This is actually cut and pasted from a long comment on someone else's review! It focuses primarily on this book, altho there are some sentiments in it I'd apply to all the Rabbit stories.

***

warning! terribly tl;dr

Ben said:
Updike swung for the fences; he wanted to represent the 60s in one novel; but it was like he didn’t really immerse himself in it; like he was trying to write about it from the outside, as an observer. Novels written by the “observer writer” can work, of course; but typically, I think, this needs to be from a time-scope many years later, when the vision can be clear.

I think this is a really important point - I also think sadly this side of Updike is typical, and maybe was brought to the forefront by his 'working up' essay-reviews on books and other topics for various newspapers and magazines. The idea is you have a smart mind + lots of books + ton of research = You Are There, but it winds up looking like one of those cheezy network television retrospective specials. His forays into historical writing - that awful play about Buchanan, the dreadful In The Beauty of the Lilies, the tepid Seek My Face - are usually bad, because he lacks both the analytic and philosophical skills necessary to draw broad social networks, and the intense psychological absorption necessary to portray another human consciousness convincingly. His writing is at once deeply personal (it's all about himself) and impersonal - the patterns of language are almost abstract (in this I think he served himself ill by taking Nabokov for a master, but anyway).

The characters of Jill and Skeeter in this book are disastrous - worse than inept, I'd argue, they are fundamentally dishonest. I don't think an author necessarily has to personally empirically experience everything they write about (hello, Wuthering Heights and so on), but Updike's later cringe-inducing absolute misfires, all the way from The Coup to the dreadful, dreadful Terrorist (in the acknowledgements he thanks 'Islam for Dummies,' IIRC) indicate not a failure of experience but empathy. That bad-sex passage everyone quotes with a kind of cringing grin - something in the Widows of Eastwick about how the woman just loves giving herself a facial with fresh ejaculate - isn't just badly written, it's badly _imagined._ Who could think an actual woman might actually react like that? Does he actually _know_ any women? Yes, his writing rushes to assure us, oh yes, yes he does. Oh yes. Most intimately. And thoroughly. From the outside. (The portrayal of Janice through all the Rabbit books and stories is really a triumph of unconscious misogyny. The sad thing is Updike apparently thinks he's presenting her sympathetically....)

When Updike is on, his typical oh-my-god-the-revelation-in-these-pigeon-feathers-that-golf-stroke-those-women's-asses-over-there minute observations can make you feel indeed that he is giving the reader the gift not of seeing something for the first time but of _re_-seeing it freshly, which is really rare, especially in popular fiction. But the technique also reminds me of Pre-Raphaelite landscapes -- every blade of grass, every veined leaf, is luminously, maddeningly outlined, and as a result the slavish depiction of reality becomes almost surreal.

So I personally think Updike is actually at his worst in his 'naturalist Americana' writing like the Rabbit books, and it boggles me why they were awarded prizes and are frequently the most-assigned and most-read of his novels. I think judging him by them does him a real disservice. When he writes about his own swingin' seventies (going barefoot, eating lobster, Martha's Vineyard, fucking the neighbours, &c &c) it's at least halfway interesting and well-done. When he tries to project his own personal visions of liberation and loss onto AMERICA IN GENERAL as THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL, I just wind up irritated and confused.


(from yet another comment)

-- I should add I found the central eponymous figure of Rabbit himself a failure as a character: Rabbit is Updike's _idea_ of what a Big Dumb Jock type might be, so he is simultaneously patronizing (has Rabbit ever read a book? No, right?) and way too articulate/observant (the book is limited 3P but there are lovely lyrical bits, like 'Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes,' which are so totally Updike-Not-Rabbit they throw me right out of the book).

(BUT, I think Ruth is an amazingly well-developed female character. I really did like her. She might be one of my favourite Updike characters.)

Amanda

Rating: really liked it
DNF @49%

Sorry Rabbit, you just aren't interesting enough for me to continue.

L.S. Popovich

Rating: really liked it
So different from Rabbit, Run. Whereas, I gave the first novel full marks, I have to grade this one down on the enjoyment scale. Updike does not write a simple sentence. He challenges the reader with idea-rich contexts for his melodramatic characters. There was a lot of fun to be had in the first segment. Less so here.

Jumping right into the second part, we are confronted with an entirely different beast. It retreads some tried and true themes: the corruption of youth, interracial relations, godlessness, faith, sex, marriage, sin, greed, hypocrisy, our responsibilities as citizens, and how we can forget our humanity as a result. It does it in a harrowing, up-front, disturbing way.

Rabbit embodies an odd brand of patriotism, takes on the weight of history - or is invested with such by Updike to elevate his otherwise deadened character. Inheriting the sins of our fathers might be another way to distract from our own. Capitalism - easy to make fun of, but why are we still buying so many televisions and happy meals if we hate it so much? The death of the American dream, or the myth, or the lie, combined with the material things that weigh us down, the intangible points of pride in our lives established through toil, and how relationships and lives remain fragile things, destructible through the smallest impulses - this is Rabbit's accustomed territory. The Hell on earth he carefully constructs for himself and his child is perilous in the extreme.

A distasteful novel, at bottom, flying in the face of propriety. Rants, long needling quotations, the death of innocence of every intricately described flower petal. The death of pride, the small death of living in a tenuous lie. So much death.

In a way it is an even braver novel, more daring, another emotional journey but one pickled in hate, irreverent in its choices, and disdainful in its perspective, exploring a hundred permutations of griping, sniping, snapping, grilling, whining, accusing, and belittling. Bitter resentment seethes, people acting out of pure, unadulterated selfishness. We got a dose of that in the first, but Updike outdoes himself. In fact, he doesn't do himself justice. Amid the traumatic remains of his demented decisions, Rabbit's second book is still somehow good, absorbing, put together, catered to incite, but affording that immersive ingredient so salient in Updike's output. That doesn't redeem it, I'm afraid.

The first problem is: the author seems to underestimate his audience. Does he actually believe we need so much graphic detail to put the picture of two rutting human animals together? It's so forced it's brutal. A vacuous bumper car game of bodies against bodies. What happened to subtlety, or a well-chosen tryst after much, meaningful foreplay? Where is the excitement in 450 pages of the same song and dance?

Untethered idealism is replaced by unfettered cynicism. Rabbit's inner dream of freedom takes new shape and form, forces him onto the brink of multiple precipices, leaving many husks of destroyed futures in his wake. He is at war with himself and the world. Nothing is sacred, everything is profane. Death is foreshadowed by his parents, who have settled in to a boring existence, wherein their only function is to marvel at Rabbit's reckless abandon.

Happiness is the most elusive thing on the planet, he would have us believe. It is a chimera of imagination and braggadocio.

The lyric style is more entrenched in ordinary detail, an accumulation of facets of lives struggled through and nearing twilight, wandering through hopelessness and despair.

Stuck in the same town. Rabbit is always on the lamb, whether it's his country, history, friends, lovers, politics, the mere presence of other people is an exasperation.

Powerlessness, stemming from deep-seated shame goads him toward the abyss. He is infuriating, intolerable. An abject human insect.

This is all communicated through free association rants, mingling racial tension, pure prejudice, sexual fixation, the past and present, new forms of dense soliloquy. A lot of repetitive spite. Dense layers of period detail - all Updike branded indulgence.

A new kind of claustrophobia emerges. Resigned, encumbered by the years Rabbit's banal ramblings are drained of vivacity, bloated, infected by his body's withering stink. He is gripping at the margin of insanity, makes of his own life an imitation, remaining empty inside, somehow becoming emptier.

Nonetheless, Updike will still surprise you with a phrase, a subtle image and a stray brilliance on every other page. Through his main character, he takes up arms against the opinions of the time, shielding himself in this wish fulfilling madness. Bitterness, righteous bigotry, and much pompous assery erupts into vile volcanoes of spite, swallowing Rabbit's loved ones.

An expert in the vain art of making people uncomfortable, our Don Juan protagonist takes it as a challenge to unseat everyone from their high horse. Incessantly crude, obnoxious and pathetic, against the backdrop of the moon landing and race riots, his paltry charades grow tiresome quickly, stretch out into agonizing paroxysms of grueling sufferance.

Babe's piano playing is one of the novel's best scenes. The onslaught of Skeeter is a glorious train wreck, too verbose for it's own good. The final chapter devoted partially to Mim was beyond refreshing, as hard to swallow or credit as the rest of the tripe Updike fed us for 400 pages. It drops all pretense of innocence, wonder and elegiac naivete. It's a monstrous depiction of dissolution. A competition. A phallic measurement. Walking penumbral ghosts of ideas instead of characters. Tests our patience, to push every envelope and see how much he can get away with. It's revolting.
80% dialogue - perhaps a tad padded.

Does this ruin my opinion of Updike canon? No. There's a lot in there. It isn't all so inflated, mean or sad. I'm hopeful.

Jemppu

Rating: really liked it
Not as strong or striking as the first encounter with Rabbit, but certain familiarly pitiable obtuseness and brazenness about its conduct still - if less compelling, that's quite befitting with the narrative of Rabbit's current point in life. I remain intrigued for the continuation of the series.

3 to 4 stars.

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