Rabbit Gets Old

I'm in California at the moment, preparing to leave for a family reunion in Reno, NV this weekend. I flew in from Washington, D.C. on Tuesday so I could spend a couple of days with my old pal Jim Provenza and his wife Donna. They're "empty nesters" now, which I guess is the comfortable euphemism we Baby Boomers have finally managed to come up with for "senior citizen."

For reading on the plane and in those quiet pre-dawn moments that east-to-west jet lag always gives me, I have brought along, and am re-reading John Updike's Rabbit Is Rich, the third installment in his 40-year tetralogy project chronicling the fate of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom which began with Rabbit, Run in 1960, continued through three more full-length novels published between 1971 and 1990, and then rounded off with a fifth installment, the epiloque-ish Rabbit Remembered (2000).

I've read the entire Rabbit series, some of them more than once. But I have an especially personal relationship with this third installment, published in 1981. I was enjoying a brief tenure in the fall of that year as Sunday book reviewer for the Vacaville Reporter, a newspaper in Solano County, California on which I was a staff writer in those days, covering education mostly. Book reviewing was a side thing I did primarily for kicks. But the Sunday features editor was a good friend and she was glad to have my contributions. I reviewed Rabbit Is Rich
when it was first published. I also turned 26 that fall, the exact same age as Harry Angstrom in the first installment of the series, Rabbit, Run.

That review no longer exists. I lost almost all of my book review clippings in the many moves I've made since then. But it doesn't matter; at 26 I remember being most impressed with Updike's chops, as most of his readers are. He was one of the most dazzlingly gifted writers of his generation. But I had a few critical things to say about this novel even when I was 26, and now that the novel is a year older than I was when I first read it, I have a few more. By the way, at the time I reviewed Rabbit Is Rich for the Reporter I was sinking into a clinical depression, one strand of which was that very fact that I had just turned 26. As Truman Capote once said, "Here I am 26, and I wanted always to be 25." Suddenly turning 26 gave me a nauseating sensation of no longer being in my early twenties. I felt encroaching old age rapping on the door, or at least lurking over the next hill. Now I'm re-reading the novel, and I'm exactly twice the age I was when I read it for the first time.

I like to think that I'm aging well, (I recently took up oil painting with a vengeance) but I have to say that this novel has not. It has some features that seem built-in to sabotage any eventual status as a classic, although who knows? Perhaps the tetralogy as a whole will gain "classic" status among the 4,500 people in America who will still be reading novels in 2060 as a cultural artifact of the century before. But I suspect that Rabbit Is Rich will not stand on its own for very many years.

For one thing, Updike was a member of that generation of American writers who suddenly found themselves liberated in the early 1960s by such events as the lifting of the ban on Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer to write just as frankly and candidly about sex as they wanted, using any and all words they wanted. "Fuck" no longer had to be rendered as F***. Understandably, they swam like dolphins in this new freedom, and the watchword of the 1960s in the literary game was sexual freedom. No holds were barred.

By the time Erica Jong published Fear of Flying in 1974, it had been a full five years since Philip Roth had created what might be called bookchat's last sexual scandal when he published the riotous Portnoy's Complaint, an ode to sexual neurosis with a steady ground bass of masturbation. By then sex had just about shot its wad as far as the potential to shock anybody. Fear of Flying's novelty lay in being the first Tropic of Cancer clone written by a woman. When I was paring down the manuscript of my own novel Tower-102 in 1994, assisted by Al Lefcowiz of the Writer's Center in Bethesda, MD, he was particularly insistent that I carve out nearly all descriptions of characters having sex. "We needed this in 1960," Al said. "We don't really need it anymore."

In 1981 that memo had apparently not reached Updike's desk. Harry Angstrom in the novel, who carries the nickname "Rabbit" from his days as a high school basketball star, is by the time this story opens a 48 year-old man, a Toyota dealer with a troubled past, a drunken wife and a more-than-a-little annoying, whiny, nearly grown-up son. But Harry at 48 is as wildly obsessed with sex as any American teenager. This betrays his origins as a 1960s character. By 1981 he seems somehow out of his time. I failed to note that in my 1981 review; we were still too close in time to the novel's origins (the story takes place in 1979) and I didn't quite have the perspective to notice that, although I do remember writing that the author seemed fixated upon the world's genitalia, a quality which, as I pointed out, Updike shared with his contemporary Norman Mailer. The wife-swapping episode in the Caribbean near the end of the novel is so pre-AIDS as to be quaint beyond quaint in 2008.

But the sex-rich sauce that's ladled over Angstrom's tale is only one of the book's flaws. From the long view, it seems to me a little too obvious that by the time Updike wrote Rabbit Is Rich, he was rich enough himself to be able to afford a team of researchers to do his legwork for him. And it shows like a too-loud necktie. The novel wears its research on its sleeve: the snappy to-and-fro between Harry and his employee Charlie Stavros, who handles the used cars while Harry sells the new ones, is just a bit too facile, as if Updike were showing off his recently-gained insider's knowledge of how a Toyota dealership is run.

Also, in each entry of the Rabbit series, Updike becomes increasingly hellbent upon creating a realistic stage for his story and giving the novel contemporary verisimilitude. By the third volume he's throwing around cultural trivia like Jackson Pollock throwing paint. Does anyone really care anymore, outside of Rams and Steelers fans, who won the 1980 Super Bowl game? And his characters spend endless amounts of restaurant and dinner-table chitchat pontificating about what's wrong with the world in 1979. It's like you're constantly being preached at, and the theme of the sermon comes from today's headlines. Only they're not today's headlines, they're the headlines of the late Carter Administration. If Updike had used a conventional first-or-third person narrative in the past tense, this might have been a formula for a period classic as surefire as The Great Gatsby. But this novel, and in fact the entire Rabbit series, is written entirely in the present tense. That's a fine device for making the reader feel that he or she is right in the middle of an unfolding story -- it really keeps the action moving along. The problem arises when Updike's characters begin talking in the present tense about things like Jimmy Carter, standing in gas lines, Three Mile Island and how the Japanese automakers are kicking Detroit's butt. 1979 was a long time ago, and while all of this gave the novel a bracingly "now" feel in 1981, today it gives it the look of a postcard turning yellow.

Imagine if Scott Fitzgerald had written The Great Gatsby in the present tense. I wince to think of it: "Gatsby gets up from his chair and walks across the yard near the pool. He's thinking that this Prohibition business really brings out the contours in the American soul. But what the hell, he decides. It's making him rich, and as for the contours in the American soul, well, someone's always doing something to bring those out, aren't they? Like this new dance everyone's doing, the Charleston. Gatsby actually thinks people dancing the Charleston look fairly idiotic, but then reminds himself that the country is living through times that might be thought idiotic by the same standards with which he's judging the Charleston, what with the flagpole-sitting and raccoon coats and all that. The world is always ending, but new people keep showing up too dumb to know it and thinking that the fun's just getting started."

I doubt whether Gatsby would have become a classic written like that. Rather, it would have become an instant relic-of-an-era, noteworthy today only as a distant mirror on the 1920s. The kind of a book that writers like Updike would be re-assessing 60 years later in think pieces written for The New Yorker and deciding that that it was better than they originally thought when they read it in college for History 432, a survey of the American cultural and social scene between the two world wars.

If I'm still around in another 10 years, I'll be back to see how the next volume, Rabbit At Rest, is holding up. I'm not real optimistic, though. From my last re-reading I remember that he mentions things like Garry Larson's Far Side cartoons and the reruns on the Nickelodeon network, and both of those things seem awfully "'90s" even now.