584 The American Century: Literature since 1945resonance to what might seem to be the fleeting contingencies of his suburban
settings. One way he alerts the reader to this extra dimension is through sly allusion
to myth, folktale, and fairy tale. The myth of Chiron lurks beneath the surface of
The Centaur, for example, to give the story what Updike called a “counterpoint of
identity.” The magic of the story of Peter Rabbit underlies the Rabbit series. And the
tale of Tristan and Iseult informs and enriches Updike’s 1994 novel about love and
criminality, Brazil. Another way is through a playful mixing of genres or temporal
planes. In The Witches of Eastwick (1984) and The Widows of Eastwick (2009) three
mischievous suburban divorcees enjoy sexual adventures with Satan. In Memories of
the Ford Administration (1992) parallel narratives invite us into the times of
twentieth-century President Gerald Ford and nineteenth-century President James
Buchanan (1791–1868). But the most productive way of all, for Updike, is through
the severe elegance of his prose, which weaves a sinuous path between the demotic
and the exalted, the documentary and the magical, as it details the dense tissue of
appearances that make up the contemporary American suburb while also intimat-
ing the existence of another world, to be perceived dimly through this tissue, that is
a world not only of death but also of mystery, a saving salvation.
“I like middles,” Updike once admitted. “It is in middles that extremes clash,
where ambiguity restlessly rules.” Updike’s own restless mixing of the mundane and
the magical certainly alerts us to this liking. So does what is probably his greatest
creation, Harry Angstrom: a suburban businessman and former athlete who is
ordinary but with the potential for grace. Harry dreams dreams of success, personal
fulfillment, that are never quite realized; he longs for another, better life but learns
just to get along. “The character of Harry Angstrom,” Updike explained, “was for me
a way in – a ticket to the America all around me.” And the present tense in which
Harry’s life is rehearsed throughout the Rabbit tetralogy was, the author felt, a means
of achieving “a nonjudgmental immersion” in the life of his own creation. As Harry’s
life unfolds before us (“in the way a motion picture occurs before us,” Updike
suggested, “immersingly”), what is registered above all is Harry’s duality: a duality
measured by the tension between the ordinariness of his forename and a surname
that plays punningly on the Kierkegaardian notion of “a stream of Angst,” the fear
and trembling of a creature caught in the boundary between heaven and earth.
The four Rabbit novels – each of them composed at the end of one decade and
published at the beginning of the next – offer “a kind of running report,” as Updike
put it, “on the state of my hero and the nation.” This report tells us of a man and a
nation inhabiting a border territory between desire and disappointment,
transcendent hope and tangible fact. But, although Harry is frequently disappointed,
he is never defeated; his belief in himself and America, his conviction that “all in all
this is the happiest fucking country the world has ever seen,” survives despite all the
evidence to the contrary – and despite his suspicion that his body and the nation
are deteriorating, steadily running down. Even at the end, his determination not to
be cowed by his failures, and those of his nation, is undiminished. “Well, Nelson,”
he tells his son as he lies dying, “all I can tell you is that it isn’t so bad.” “Rabbit thinks
he should say more,” we are told, “... but enough. Maybe. Enough.”GGray_c05.indd 584ray_c 05 .indd 584 8 8/1/2011 7:31:32 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 32 PM