Understanding who John Updike was will go a long way in helping you interpret his Novel Rabbit Redux, his sequel to Rabbit Run. Updike was an old-fashioned WASP, a middle of the road American man who advocated monogamy and a bland version of Protestantism. He believed in hard work, family values, and the status quo. He was no conservative though; he supported the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Liberation, and trade unionism so politically he was a traditional Liberal but certainly not a radical. When a man like John Updike writes about the social upheavals of the 1960s, you might expect a predictable Time or Life magazine type of analysis, a readymade script for a mediocre TV movie, concluding with a statement about how, with enough effort, the great country of America will pull together and get through these troubled times. But this middle of the road author subverts our expectations and gives us something entirely different.
This story starts ten years after the end of the previous book, Rabbit Run. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom has grown up a little, learned to be responsible, and has returned to his wife Janice and their son Nelson. He works as a linotype setter in a shop with his father and his family has moved to a two-story house in the suburbs to escape from the decay of the inner city of Brewer, Pennsylvania. Harry Angstrom has turned out to be an Archie Bunker-type conservative. His views are racist and he supports the war in Vietnam while everyone around him is against it. His thoughts on these matters are shallow, poorly reasoned, uninformed, and easy to oppose. As we see later in the novel, he is more tolerant of other views than one might expect but if his opinions are superficial, in the end his redemption is too.
In Rabbit Redux, Harry has to learn that what goes around comes around. As the story opens, his wife Janice abandons him to have an affair with a Greek womanizer, leaving him and their son Nelson alone in their house. He is on his own with Nelson and has to live with the realities of being a single parent. The significance of this might be lost in our time as single-parenthood is more common and more acceptable than it once was but during the 1960s the issue of husbands who leave their wives was one issue at the forefront of the Second Wave feminist movement. Through this role reversal, Updike is making a nod in the direction of women who feel they deserve fair treatment by the men in their lives.
While the novel begins by introducing a feminist theme in the first section, it continues on to take up the issues of race relations and the hippie counter-culture in the second section. An African-American colleague named Buchanan invites Harry out to a bar after learning that his wife has gone. Buchanan offers to help set him up with a woman. Rabbit obliges and, against his nature, ends up in a predominantly Black night club, drinking with Buchanan, a lounge singer named Babe, and a young Vietnam vet named Skeeter who continuously expresses rage and hatred towards the white establishment. Surprisingly, Harry starts to have feelings for Babe and becomes fascinated by Sketter even though he represents everything Harry dislikes about Black people. Skeeter shows up later in the story but everything gets interrupted with the entry of Jill, a runaway rich hippy girl from Connecticut whose father has just died. She hates her mother and ran away to be in a better place and then ended up living with Babe and getting hooked on drugs. Jill needs a new place to stay and goes home with Harry.
So Janice gets replaced by Jill. Harry uses her for sex in exchange for rent and of course they begin growing closer together. Jill, however, gets a lot closer to Nelson. At first she acts like a substitute mother to him but as the narrative progresses she becomes more of a sister. Things start to get a bit awkward when Harry suspects that Jill is trying to seduce Nelson and he begins to think of her as a daughter as much as a lover. Jill, at one point, starts calling Harry “Daddy” and this Freudian knotwork gets more confusing if we remember that Harry and Janice’s daughter died in Rabbit Run. Jill fills some empty spaces in Harry’s life but never quite fills the space for meaningful intimacy. That probably doesn’t matter because Harry is actually aloof, selfish, and uncaring; his interest in Jill is primarily about sex, his secondary interest is housework. Rabbit does, however, help out with some chores since in the absence of Janice, he is forced to take on some characteristics of a housewife. Again, this is Updike giving a nod to a feminist issue that was widely discussed in the 1960s and the meaning is probably lost on most people today.
When Jill movies in with Harry, she brings a lot of baggage. One major piece of this baggage is Skeeter, the African-American Vietnam vet that Harry met in the bar earlier in the story. The third section revolves around him and how he moves in with Jill, Nelson, and Harry. At first, Skeeter appears to be a representative of the Black Power movement. He rants against racism and the establishment in long, rambling monologues while smoking joints which he freely shares with Harry and Jill with Nelson present in the room to see it all. Although extremely impolite, Skeeter isn’t a bomb throwing revolutionary. He is delusional, though, and claims to be a messiah sent to them by God. It Is hard to tell how serious he is about this. He could be mentally ill or he could have distorted his thinking from all the drugs he does. He could also be making this up just to be provocative. Skeeter and Harry argue with each other but they also settle into a strange kind of friendship since Harry is especially interested in everything Skeeter has to say. One thing becomes clear: Skeeter’s bluster is a smokescreen for his fear and paranoia, the results of him being Black in America and having been in combat in Vietnam. This becomes most apparent when the four of them go out for a drive in Jill’s Porsche; when the sports car breaks down, Skeeter almost has a nervous breakdown out of fear the police will come or they will get attacked by white bigots.
In the absence of Janice, the four of them settle into a type of surrogate nuclear family.
Despite his obnoxious personality it might still be tempting to think of Skeeter as a sympathetic character, but Updike hits us with a further dilemma. Skeeter uses heroin to enslave Jill. When she goes into withdrawal, he forces her to have sex with him in exchange for the fix she needs. Skeeter gets his historical revenge because for once a white woman is a slave to an African-American man. Updike confronts us with the historical injustice of slavery and the racial problems that resulted in the long run but he also presents us with a deeper issue. Just because Skeeter is Black, should we accept everything he says and does? A lot of white people place African-Americans on a pedestal and think of them as angelic beings who can do no wrong. Any bad things African-Americans do is the result of white oppression and injustice. But this way of looking at Black people is inherently racist because it denies them their humanity just as much as degrading them and humiliating them does. Like all human beings, and like all the other characters in this novel, African-American people have flaws and sometimes do things that aren’t so good. Skeeter is not a stand-in for all African-American people; he is an individual that we can consider with both sympathy and disgust simultaneously. The same can be said for Harry, Jill, Nelson, Janice, and her Greek lover Stavros. Humans are combinations of good and evil, not one or the other and Updike successfully drives this point home in Rabbit Redux. He challenges us to judge Skeeter by the content of his character and not by the color of his skin as Martin Luther King Jr. would have said.
When Skeeter enters the story, Harry also begins to notice the racism that is all around him. He pays more attention when white people make derogatory comments about African-Americans and Nelson gets beat up by kids in his neighborhood because he has a Black man staying in his house. Harry also becomes aware of his own racism when he leaves the bar with Jill and two Black men chase after them; Harry thinks they are going to rob them but then learns their intention is to return Jill’s purse to her after she left it in the bar. Then, Harry is later forced to defend Skeeter when two white men confront him on the street and tell him if Skeeter doesn’t leave then something bad will happen. Harry doesn’t make Skeeter leave and something very bad does happen. Harry begins to see racism from an African-American point of view. His enlightenment to all this is not profound but it is a sign of hope that it happens at all.
The book ends in the fourth section with the arrival of Harry’s sister, Mim, who works out west as a high-class prostitute. She gets introduced as a representative of the Sexual Revolution but ultimately this is secondary to her literary purpose as the person who separates Stavros from Janice and makes her see the value of returning to her family.
There are some big problems with Rabbit Redux. The most significant one is that it is too stylized and contrived for its own good. The novel is too self-consciously structured around the idea of the family in crisis. The separation and reunion of Janice and Harry acts as a framing device for the treatment of the social issues concerning the late 1960s and Harry’s encounter with the dark side of the family. As well-rounded as the characters of Harry, Jill, and Skeeter are they still carry a heavy atmosphere of arbitrariness around them. Updike wanted to portray the issues of his day and simply wrote characters into the narrative to represent different facets of the times. But it does not make sense that Harry would accept these people into his home nor does it make sense that they could hold together, even temporarily as a surrogate family unit. Updike does not provide us with a plausible explanation of how this is possible other than Harry being a spineless pushover even though he does defend himself when he sees fit. Another improbability is the way that Mim returns home to her conventional blue collar family and talks freely with them about her sexual promiscuity. They do not react to this with any kind of anger or disagreement. They just accept it as it is, without controversy in a way that is hard to believe. There are times when this novel feels pretentious, fake, and too far fetched.
On the other hand, there are some real strengths. Just like in Rabbit Run, the dialogues are strong and effectively build the characters into well-drawn representations. There is a lot of strength in the fine details too. Updike addresses gender fluidity by describing Nelson as effeminate and Harry calls him by the girls’ nickname “Nellie”. When Harry’s father complains about war protesters, Harry defends them because he understands their point of view even though he is in favor of the war. Harry’s colleague Buchanan is portrayed as a pimp but there are subtle hints that he isn’t one; he simply introduces Harry to Babe and Jill and later corners Harry, hitting him up for money in exchange for his “services”, but there aren’t any other indications that he actually is their pimp. He is just being sneaky about taking advantage of Harry. There is also a subtle implication that Harry is sexually attracted to Skeeter since when he sees him naked he feels slightly aroused and after Skeeter has sex with Jill, Harry wipes the semen off her with a handkerchief which he secretly keeps and takes out from time to time because he likes the smell.
Rabbit Redux is a transgressive novel, sometimes bizarre, sometimes disturbing. Why would an advocate of the status quo like John Updike write something like this? The simple answer is that he just wanted to write the definitive novel of the 1960s. But the more complex answer is that he is making a Marxist critique of American society. “Marxism”, in this case, does not mean it is communist propaganda or that it is about social and class conflict, even though that latter element is present. “Marxist” in the mid-century literary sense means writing a critique that shows an opponent’s point of view. Marx’s most prominent work was Capital. That tome was not a polemical attack against capitalism; instead it was an analysis of capitalism from a capitalist perspective. This older meaning of Marxism has fallen out of use since, in our time, political debate has degenerated into nothing more than a head-butting contest between tribal affiliations, shrill monologues happening simultaneously without the possibility of communication or understanding. Updike is doing something different here. His characters are not opponents in the strict sense of the term but they do represent cultural problems that threaten the stability of the norm. In the form of this novel, these elements are being brought out, and brought together, for examination, analysis, and understanding. He draws our attention to social issues by showing us what they are, as they are.
Harry, Janice, Jill, and Skeeter are depicted as symptoms of underlying social problems. They are flawed individuals but all of them display a potential to become better people. In our society we have a tendency to attack individuals for their bad behavior, and in part this is justified, but Updike is showing us that these characters, even though they have deep problems, are trying to make sense of a confusing life and end up making bad decisions because they don’t always know what to do. Society is breaking down because it doesn’t provide any resources to help these kinds of people, so they turn to other lost and naive misfits for guidance and wind up in trouble as a result. Updike is humanizing these problematic people rather than demonizing them while reminding us that, in the end, they are still responsible for their choices.
Stylistically, Rabbit Redux is an easy book to read but emotionally it can be a brutal gut punch. Its explicit depictions of sexism and racism are offensive to the intellectual weaklings of the 21st century but any good doctor will tell you that a cancer needs to be observed in order to make a medical treatment possible. If you want to be certain of how the author felt about social issues, look at the negative portrayal he gives to Harry’s white neighbors and how they react when he chooses to allow an African-American man to stay in his house. John Updike may have been an advocate for the status quo but his critique tells us that the status quo has a lot of growing up to do when it comes to being civilized and responsible.
Updike, John. Rabbit Redux. Fawcett Crest Books, Greenwich, CT: 1972.
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