Harry’s wife, Janice, having just given birth to their son Nelson – a son who in the Oedipal tradition will nudge his father into increasing obsolescence and eventually into the grave – is described thusly: “She touches his face as he bends to inhale her ether again her mouth is a warm cloud that suddenly splits and her teeth pinch his lower lip…” Updike doesn’t require undulating hills, vast stretches of highway, or any of those sprawling, unmolested pastoral landscapes to capture the glum irony of mid-century American life he’s right at home in the torture chamber that is the middle class living room. He protests Kerouac’s pathological sentimentality by slowly and expertly peeling back the veneer of suburban domesticity, revealing the terror inherent in the quotidian aspects of daily life, the grim reaper perched atop the Formica countertop, if you will. Updike conceived Rabbit, Run as a response to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, but he does more than provide a rural conservative analogue to Kerouac’s urban liberal protagonist. Then…we become, first inside, and then outside, junk.” What began as a sense of being “crowded up” by the next generation becomes an acute obsession with the reality that his existence is self-negating the fulfillment of his carnal desires initiates his inexorable decline – Updike’s vicious circle of life. No flight would reach it…The fullness ends when we give nature her ransom, when we make children for her. The thing that has left his life has left irrevocably no search would recover it.

Towards the end of the first novel, Rabbit, Run, when 26-year-old Harry returns home to his wife after fleeing the responsibilities of domestic life and shacking up with a prostitute for a few months, he comes face-to-face with his mortality for the first time: “He feels the truth. Death is his prophecy, his unwanted companion, and he realizes it very early on. Who was I kidding? As sure as I must read about it, Rabbit must die. For as long as the final volume was left unread, Rabbit and I could remain together, suspended in a state of sort-of-grace, existing somewhere between the invulnerability of childhood and the decrepitude of old age.

So close I had become to the character, the most recognizable and universally reviled of Updike’s creations, that he served as a barometer for me, a funhouse mirror for my cynicism and impulsiveness, and the closest thing I’ve ever had to a living, breathing affirmation of my existential anxiety. It wasn’t for lack of curiosity about how Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom’s life would end rather it was because for a period of time I couldn’t imagine living without him. Rabbit at Rest, the final novel in the Rabbit Tetralogy, arguably the defining work of John Updike’s career, sat on my bookshelf for months before I opened it.

Updike novel rabbit