Witness to America (National Post January 28, 2009)

Barbara Kay, National Post 

Published: Wednesday, January 28, 2009

I can't say I've read every word John Updike ever wrote, but not for want of trying. There's a special poignancy when a writer who dazzled you in your formative years of literary appreciation, and whose world you feel you know as intimately as your own, passes on. I feel that even though in recent years my great love affair with Updike's work cooled somewhat -- my fault or his, I'm not sure -- a great light has gone out in my literary universe.

From his astonishing oeuvre of novels, short stories, poetry, art and literary criticism, it is the four Rabbit novels -- Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest -- for which John Updike will be best remembered. They were for so many of his readers cultural talismans, a once-a-decade signpost along the temporal highway to sum up what was happening to the consciousness of middle America.

The central character, Harry Angstrom, only ever known as Rabbit, is a failure in life. Neither particularly good nor particularly bad, this complicated slob somehow endears himself to the reader over the course of his adventures in domestic irresponsibility, infidelity, struggling fatherhood and erratic application to his career in car salesmanship. His death comes as a shock.

The stories are all set in Brewer, Pa., a "tough railroad town." In Rabbit, Run (1960) divorce was a scandal, Rabbit's wife Janice typically stayed home with their two children (she accidentally drowns their daughter when Rabbit runs away, overwhelmed by domestic responsibility), and everyone smoked their heads off. Communism was pure evil and America was a great country.

In Rabbit Redux (1971) the country is torn apart by Vietnam, college riots erupt and everyone is rethinking America's greatness. The recurrent metaphors invoke rottenness at America's social core. In Rabbit is Rich (1981), a complacently materialistic, domestically settled Rabbit runs a Toyota dealership and tells customers that American cars are junk, while gas is selling for the (then) astounding price of 99.9¢ a gallon. But while Rabbit's girth expands, spiritually he experiences an "inner dwindling."

By Rabbit at Rest (1990), a "depressed book about a depressed man, written by a depressed man," in Updike's words, Rabbit is in his mid-50s but seems old. The defining scene, a chronicle of disempowerment, has Rabbit playing the part of Uncle Sam in a Fourth of July parade. It's a hot day. His stuck-on goatee comes off. He is drenched with sweat and his top hat gives him a headache. America is unwell.

And yet the people along the route seem cheerful. When he hears a scratchy version of God Bless America over the loudspeakers, Rabbit's eyes well up "and the impression giddily -- as if he has been lifted to survey all human history -- grows upon him, making his heart thump worse and worse, that all in all this is the happiest f---ing country the world has ever seen." Like his rather square alter ego, Updike accepted America for what it was, more in a Republican than a Democratic spirit, for he was in all important respects a bourgeois, a fan of Ronald Reagan.

In fact, alone in his circle of suburban liberals in the '60s, Updike supported the Vietnam war. In an essay called On Not Being a Dove, Updike expressed contempt for the "genteel bohemian" lifestyle of people he socialized with, "privileged members of a privileged nation [who] believed that their enviable position could be maintained without anything visibly ugly happening in the world." Rabbit became his conduit for this essentially puritan resistance to the easy way out.

Known as a "chronicler of suburban adultery," Updike did write a lot about sex. But he wasn't prurient. Mere sex was not the point, it was always associated with a search for religious transcendence. Rabbit/Updike was "bothered by God," restlessly looking for "something," an outlet to devotional urges that yearned for the divine but settled for earthly couplings and a passion for golf, or, as one critic put it, a kind of "faith through sensibility."

What I particularly admired about Updike was that he did not fall for the alleged blandishments of postmodern writing, where the writer's romance with his partial and solipsistic view of the world dominates the writing. Society was his subject. He chronicled an objective world in which, as he describes the writer's task, he was "a rapt witness to the world ... an instrument, whereby a time and place make their mark." In his memoir, Self-Consciousness, he wrote, "description expresses love."

Some say Updike wrote beautifully about nothing and that Rabbit was an unworthy subject for his brilliance. I disagree. I think Rabbit is Everyman. In his striving to be a better man than he is capable of being, in his panic over his approaching death (where, he wonders, "all but suffocated by terror," does the soul go when separated from "this pond of bodily fluids and their slippery conduits?") he represents the human condition.

bkay@videotron.ca