Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Michelle Kinsey Bruns
As I reflect on books which have influenced me, a few come to mind. If you’ll allow me, I’ve decided to write about a series of books. In the Rabbit series, the twentieth century American novelist, John Updike, charts the life of Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom.
Nicknamed ‘Rabbit’ because of his prominent front teeth, Harry ‘Rabbit’ lives in leafy Middle America. A former high school basketball star, he spends a great deal of his life trying – and failing – to live up to his adolescent glory. The first novel, Rabbit, Run, introduces us to Rabbit in 1960 when he is 26, trapped in a loveless marriage to Janice, and working in a suffocatingly dull job as a sales assistant. The next novels, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and finally, Rabbit at Rest, are set at ten-year intervals and chart Rabbit’s life.
The novels deal with a period of great change in American society. We see America change from the Eisenhower era, through the ‘Summer of Love’, then Watergate, the Vietnam War, Reaganomics, and the Cold War. However, the focus of the novels is not on the great sweeping canvas of history and certainly not on an influential figure. Rather, Updike presents us with history and politics as they affect a real person, someone totally ordinary with little claim to fame other than the provincial sporting prowess of his youth. The canvas of current affairs becomes the conversations had in the car en route to the ball game, opinions discussed curtly over the dinner table. Put simply, Updike shows how the ‘ordinary Joe’ reacts to these events.
Updike was a cartoonist by trade – he trained at the Ruskin School of Fine Art in Oxford in fact – and this is evident in his writing. He draws his characters, rather than simply describing them. He makes them authentic and believable, imbued with nuance. Well-drawn female characters in the series can prove to be somewhat sparse, for which Updike has faced criticism. Yet, I wonder whether this is an issue. Updike could not relate to the female experience in the context of his novels, but he could relate to a male experience of sorts, so that is what he writes about. That said, how can Updike, the great American man of letters that he was, relate to the experience of the painfully ordinary Rabbit?
Rabbit is not a likeable character by any stretch of the imagination. He commits adultery, is an absentee father, and is unreliable. Yet the power of Updike’s writing is to be found in the fact that Rabbit is treated seriously and with dignity. Updike does not shy away from his problematic character. Rather, he shows Rabbit to be intensely human. He has many foibles, yet Updike makes him accessible – makes him understandable. He allows us to see aspects of Rabbit in each one of us because they are fundamental human traits.
Updike once described his aim as an author as: “to give the mundane its beautiful due”. Rabbit’s mundanity and Updike’s decision that such mundanity is a worthy subject of literature invites the reader to reconsider. What is the point of literature and what is a worthy subject of it? What makes something beautiful or otherwise? Perhaps then, we can understand Updike’s role as one of a mediator. He invites his reader to see the beauty in the ordinary.
“The American small town, Protestant middle class” was how Updike described his stock character. He shows how the characters interact with their location and its mindset. Faith is a current which runs throughout the Rabbit series. Rabbit’s relationship with faith is deeply complex. It ebbs and flows with time and place, with memory and experience. Faith features in the obvious moments, such as talking to an Episcopalian minister and dealing with grief. Yet it also features after Rabbit commits adultery for the first time or is bored at work. Updike explores how faith affects every element of Rabbit’s life in a brutally honest way. Rabbit struggles with faith and the idea of it; it is a lifelong struggle rather than a damascene moment which makes the rest of his life simple. Updike shows how faith seeps into the cracks of our lives and strengthens us, even when we are at our lowest and our relationship to faith is most strained.
Rabbit is a character in need of redemption. He struggles with many things over the forty years the novels cover. In many ways, the novels chart the various avenues he pursues to try and find redemption. He tries to run away from his problems, to find fulfilment in his job, in sex, in consumerism, yet finds them all to be wanting. There is a void in his life, something which has appeared with the onset of adulthood, after the sporting glory of adolescence has faded. Yet he never quite seems to fill this void, to find redemption, but he does come close thanks to faith, despite the problems he has with it.
Updike explores ordinary life, giving it “its beautiful due”. He makes the subject of his novel thoroughly normal, inviting us to reassess our own lives and the lives of those around us, not so as to cast judgement, but rather to look with a more appreciative eye. He encourages us to think about the beauty around us before it is too late. Updike presents life as beautiful not in spite of, but rather because of its turmoil, and both Rabbit’s life and Updike’s depiction of it help us to understand this paradox.
Updike’s treatment of life is one of the main reasons why I chose this series. Updike shows us that life and humans are much the same; they are both flawed and mundane, yet this is where we find the beauty in them. I often find myself coming back to the ideas expressed here. Updike’s writing never fails to impress me, and the way he depicts Rabbit with compassion is something I hope to learn from. Yes, the series is long, but I would heartily recommend taking the time to appreciate the small beauties of the mundane and the wonderful way in which Updike writes about them.