"Rabbit Redux" by John Updike

Ranked 88 in the Guardian's 100 best novels.  

In this sequel to Rabbit, Run, Updike's 'Everyman', Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is ten years older and still trying to cope, like the USA, with the difference between life and reality. 

As the novel starts, Apollo 11 is launched in its historic mission to land the first man on the moon. But back on Earth the Vietnam War is still in full swing, there are antiwar protests and race riots, and the values that conservative America took for granted are under attack. Harry's home town of Brewer is in economic decline, dying from the inside, leaving the suburbs. His mum is dying of Parkinson's, his wife is having an affair, and his son is about to become. 

It's a challenging novel, with racism and misogyny, including multiple uses of the n-word and the c-word. Some of the worst racist prejudices are articulated. There are scenes of physical domestic abuse. At the outset, Harry is rabidly conservative, staunchly defending American values on Vietnam and fearful of blacks. His wife says he is "silent majority ... but he keeps making noise." whereas Charlie Stavros calls him "a typical good-hearted imperialist racist." (Ch 1) But deep down he has no solid core and one wonders whether he believes in anything; this makes it easy for others to push him around and take advantage of his fundamental good nature.

Harry, from the lower middle-class, represents an America that has lost its way. It can land a man on the moon but it is fighting an unjustifiable war abroad and it is fighting itself at home. Horrid things are said, horrid things happen, but this is a realist's portrait of an ugly world, 'warts and all'. Harry Angstrom is no hero and there are things that he thinks and says and does that are awful, but he is capable of learning, of improvement, of redemption.

The characters are about as real as any I have met on the page. There are some extraordinarily vivid descriptions. This masterpiece must be a contender for the title of the Great American Novel.

Selected quotes:

• “A world where inches matter. Putts. Fucks. Orbits.” (Ch 1)
• “The minds gone dry as haystacks rats slither through.” (Ch 1)
• “Rabbit turns from the window and everywhere in his own house sees a slippery disposable gloss. It glints back at him from the synthetic fabric of the living room sofa and a chair, the synthetic artiness of a lamp Janet brought that has a piece of driftwood weighted and wired as its base, the unnatural-looking natural wood of the shelves empty but for a few ashtrays with the sheen of fairground souvenirs; it glints back at him from the steel sink, the kitchen with its whorls as of madness, oil in water, things don't mix. The window above the sink is black and opaque as the orange that paints the asylum windows.” (Ch 1)
• “Fat-fried food and a diet of dough that would give a pig pimples.” (Ch 1) Noy only is it funny, it has a three alliterations in fourteen words!
• “All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.” (Ch 1)
• “From this low chair the view is flung out of sight and becomes all sky. A thin bright wash, stripes like fat in bacon.” (Ch 2)
• “In a room obliquely off the main room, a pool table: colored boys all arms and legs spidering around the idyllic green felt.” (Ch 2) Spidering!
• “Her eyes are green. The dry tired green, yet one of his favorite colors, of August grass.” (Ch 2)
• “Usually I try to rise above eating ... it's one of the uglier things we do.” (Ch 2)
• “Billy is gruesome, with his father's skinny neck and big ears and his mother's mooncalf eyes and the livid festerings of adolescence speckling his cheeks and chin.” (Ch 3)
• “Put enough rats in a cage the fat ones get more frantic than the skinny ones ‘cause they feel more squeezed.” (Ch 3)
• “Coloured fragments pour down toward him through the hole in the ceiling. Green machines, an ugly green, eating ugly green bushes. red mud pressed in patterns to an ooze by Amtrac treads. The emerald of rice paddies, each plant set there with its reflection in the water pure as a monogram.” (Ch 3)
• “When one of them unfriendly mortar shells hits near your hole it is as if a wall were there that was big and solid, twenty feet thick of noise, and you is just a gushy bug.” (Ch 3)
• “Gangsters are puritans. They're narrow and hard because of the straight path you don't live.” (Ch 4)
• “Pay for what you get because anything free has a rattlesnake under it.” (Ch 4)

September 2024; 233 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God