A Crisis of Confidence

By Paul Gray

RABBIT IS RICH by John Updike; Knopf; 467pages; $13.95

Compared with Rabbit, Run (1960) and Rabbit Redux (1971), this third novel about the life and times of Harold C. ("Rabbit") Angstrom seems, at first, uneventful. No infants drown in bathtubs, no houses burn down, leaving innocent dead behind. The year is 1979. Skylab is falling, gas prices are rising, and Rabbit, 46, sells Toyotas for Springer Motors, the firm founded by his late father-in-law. His on-and-off marriage to Janice is on again, glumly and apparently for good. They live with her mother and sock away money. Rabbit thinks less and less about his days as a high school basketball star and the B-league scoring record he set in 1951. Even his formidable libido has begun to show signs of acting its age: "Somewhere early in the Carter Administration his interest, that had been pretty faithful, began to wobble and by now there is a real crisis of confidence."

Rabbit may be stuck in the midlife doldrums, but Rabbit Is Rich positively hums with vitality. As a novelist, John Updike has never seemed more confidently in control of his material: in this case, an eerily representative American soul undergoing a summer and winter of discontent. Catastrophe no longer dogs Rabbit's heels. He is afflicted instead with dented fenders, with enough money to know that it will not buy him what he wants, whatever that may be. He is in the process of forgetting his dream, just as his city of Brewer in southeastern Pennsylvania has paved over its past with highways that, thanks to oil prices, may lead nowhere. He peddles Japanese cars to Americans; something has gone wrong in his native land. He thinks: "The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started."

Out of such statements Updike constructs a poignant comedy of diminished expectations. Some of the laughter arises from the nagging ordinariness of Rabbit's life. His biggest problem is his son Nelson, 23, who comes home with a pregnant fiancee, announces that he does not want to finish his senior year at Kent State and begins angling for a sales job at Springer Motors. Rabbit dislikes Nelson: "I think one of the troubles between me and the kid is every time I had a little, you know, slipup, he was there to see it." Dodging his son as much as he can. Rabbit quixotically pursues an imagined daughter; he suspects that a young woman who comes to his car lot is the product of his affair, some 20 years and two novels ago, with a woman named Ruth.

The bulk of the action takes place inside Rabbit's mind, a locale that has become increasingly entertaining. Updike has mastered a supple stream of consciousness that perfectly conveys Rabbit's darting curiosity. This former high school jock may lack all but the rudiments of an education, but he is one of those, in line with Henry James' advice, on whom nothing is lost. Driving around Brewer, he registers what is playing at the four-theater movie complex (ALIEN MOONRAKER MAIN EVENT ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ); he listens to disco on the car radio and muses on the accomplishment of the Bee Gees, "white men who have done this wonderful thing of making themselves sound like black women."

Rabbit still runs, not to escape Janice and responsibility but to try to shrink his 42-in. waist. Jogging stimulates him into philosophy: "Life tries to get a grip anywhere, on earth that is, not on the moon, that's another thing he doesn't like about the thought of climbing through the stars." Thought has become Rabbit's refuge and strength. He and Janice and two other couples take a Caribbean vacation.

Some genteel mate swapping is suggested, and Rabbit finds himself in a cabin with a woman he does not desire. He stalls in the bathroom, examining the contents of the medicine chest: "He wonders whatever happened to Ipana and what was it Consumer Reports had to say about toothpastes a few issues back ..."

Updike's prose, which has sometimes drawn criticism for its sprays of filigree, remains faithful to the concrete forms of Rabbit's imagination. Images take root in the here and now: Rabbit's merchandise ("Like a little sea of melting candy his cars bake in the sun"); a swimming pool ("lit from underneath at night as if it has swallowed the moon"); a moment in January ("It is cold, a day that might bring snow, a day that feels hollow"). These moments, and many others like them, shed radiance on Rabbit and his surroundings, the very glow of transcendence that this overweight car salesman still, stubbornly, thinks of as his birthright. He does not always see it, but Updike's readers are granted this vision and something more: a superlative comic novel that is also an American romance. --By Paul Gray --While he was writing Rabbit, Run, more than 20 years ago, John Updike discovered that "I enjoyed being inside this guy's skin." The feeling revived a decade later, when he began Rabbit Redux: "It all seemed to be there, he seemed to be ready, waiting for me, and I didn't have much trouble fitting back into a Rabbit sort of rhythm." By then, Updike realized that still another sequel might occur to him: "I left some dangling threads in that book, possibly to be picked up later. But the real shape of Rabbit Is Rich didn't occur to me until the gas crunch of June 1979."

Updike's continuing interest in Harry Angstrom has led some to suspect that Rabbit is an alter ego, the author's version of what he himself could have become had he not left Shillington, Pa., for Harvard and a glittering literary career. "Well," Updike laughs, "I'm a good deal shorter than he is" (Rabbit is 6 ft. 3 in.; his creator 6 ft.). They differ in other ways too; the attraction seems to be one of opposites:

"Rabbit does not read books; for me, who reads and writes maybe too many, it's sort of a relief to deal with a character who is quite innocent of all that." Furthermore, the young Updike never seriously considered remaining in his native state: "Had I stayed a Pennsylvanian, I would have been a much tamer one than Harry Angstrom; I'm not sure by any stretch that I could have lived his disorderly life."

Updike's life has bounced back nicely after a painful separation and divorce in the mid-'70s. He and his second wife Martha are approaching their fourth anniversary. They live in an eleven-room farmhouse, circa 1880, in Georgetown, Mass., a small town about 30 miles north of Boston.

The youngest of Martha's three sons from a former marriage lives with them; Updike's four children "are all grown up and living more or less on their own." David Updike, 24, seems to have inherited his father's precocity; he has already had three short stories published in The New Yorker.

Updike works at home in a semi-attached room that once housed an antiques store. He settles in there each morning by 9, usually writes in pencil on the backs of old manuscripts, then acts as his own typist. He tries to complete three pages a day: "I set that quota for myself many years ago, and it seems to be about right. It's not so much that you're overwhelmed by it, and it's not so little that you don't begin to accumulate a manuscript." After a late lunch around 1:30, he reads proofs, sees to the mail, and tries to get in some golf. Although he sometimes breaks 80, he remains unimpressed by his game: "Mediocre would be a kind way of describing it."

At 49, Updike looks lean and fit. He claims an excess of 5 Ibs., but has visibly avoided Rabbit's paunch. He was jogging while writing Rabbit Is Rich but has stopped, at least for a while. He retains an interest in skiing, although he finds "it gets increasingly scary, the stiffer I feel and the more fragile." Social life consists of a round of dinner parties and frequent trips to Boston to see friends, ballet and the Red Sox.

Will Rabbit reappear in ten years or so down the line? Updike's answer is both conditional and firm: "Barring the unforeseen, yes. I don't know what the decade will bring me. I hope to be alive and writing still, and if I am, I expect Rabbit will be alive too, in his corner of Pennsylvania."

Excerpt

"Running. Harry has continued the running he began up in the Poconos, as a way of getting his body back from those sodden years he never thought about it, just ate and did what he wanted, restaurant lunches downtown in Brewer plus the Rotary every Thursday, it begins to pack on. The town is dark he runs through, full of slanty alleys and sidewalks cracked and tipped from underneath, whole cement slabs lifted up by roots like crypt lids in a horror movie, the dead reach up, they catch athis heels."

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