Rabbit Redux
Critique • Quotes
First editionFirst publication
1971
Literature form
Novel
Genre
Literary
Writing language
English
Author's country
United States
Length
Approx. 131,000 words
Down another rabbit hole
Writers are commonly asked by editors to cut their introductory passages and start their narratives in the midst of the action—in media res for the learned among us.
For John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom series I might have been tempted to advise scrapping the entire first novel, Rabbit, Run and start with the more interestingly written second book. Rabbit Redux is where Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom's story really gets down to the nitty-gritty of lower middle-class survival during times of social upheaval.
This suggestion is tongue-in-cheek, of course. Rabbit, Run has its attractions. The story of the randy man-child making a disastrous transition into adulthood has struck a chord and many readers continue to respond to it. Rabbit's fleeing of family and responsibility and his descent into sordid relationships could feel pass in some quarters as a flight toward freedom. When his unthinking rebellion is brought to heel, prospects for everything eventually working out seem possible.
A decade later Rabbit Redux puts all that behind. Rabbit has matured. Somewhat. That should be good news. Things have worked out all right but not in any satisfying way. The annoying overgrown kid who lived in dreams of his high school exploits, that product of the nineteen fifties, is now a disillusioned inhabitant of the swinging sixties. And after his wife leaves him he embraces some of the worst excesses of that psychotropic era. Not with any conscious insight. As a rebel he's as unthinkingly libido-driven as ever.
Misogynist or misanthrope
The new crowd around him aren't any more help than in his earlier life. The social world Updike draws is basically a swamp. The author has been charges as being misogynistic—and you can find lot to support this view in the depiction of women in both of the first two Rabbit books—but really he casts his critical net wider. People are all pretty well disgustingly self-serving, even if they don't know what serves them. There's no one among these shallow souls to root for, no one capable of getting it together, sorting out things
Updike's view of America, at least at this time, is of a quagmire with no way out for the working or middle classes except to distract themselves with unrelenting sociopathic sex.
What makes Rabbit Redux superior though is the writing. It's as if in the eleven years since the last Rabbit instalment, Updike has noted the changes in novelistic styles practised by other contemporary American writers and determined to get with them.
The passages are more creatively and less densely constructed, while appearing free flowing. The unnamed narrator's expression is more colloquial and personal. As in the previous novel, the tense is always present but now the characters and story lines come more quickly into view—they're more present.
As ever, appealing style can make up for multitudinous sins of content.
— Eric
Critique • Quotes
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