The American Century: Literature since 1945 585Long before this scene, which concludes Rabbit At Rest, at the end of the first book
in the Rabbit tetralogy, Rabbit, Run, the protagonist of all four novels, Harry
Angstrom, finds himself confronted with a “dense pack of impossible alternatives.”
Standing in the streets, he imagines a road leading back into the heart of the city, to
his responsibilities as a husband, father, and family provider. It will take him back to
both his wife and his mistress, to his job, to the pleasures and pressures of the sub-
urbs, and to a hometown where his nickname, Rabbit, reminds him of his days of
glory as a local basketball champion. “The other way,” he reflects, leads “to where the
city ends.” “He tries to picture how it will end, with an empty baseball field, a dark
factory, and then over a brook into a dirt road, he doesn’t know.” As he imagines
the end to this other road, this other pathway, as “a huge vacant field of cinders,”
“his heart,” we are told, “goes hollow.” The field of cinders or the suburban net: it
appears to him to be death either way. Searching around for a light to guide him in
the darkness, Harry can find none. There is no light in a nearby church window;
“unlit,” there is only “a dark circle in a stone facade.” “Funny,” Harry tells himself,
“how what makes you move is so simple and the field you must move in is so
crowded.” He cannot make a choice, as he stands poised between the two routes.
All he can do is maneuver, engage in simple motion. As the final words of the novel
put it, “he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.” Norman Mailer, never a great admirer of Updike,
complained “Updike does not know how to finish” when he reviewed Rabbit, Run.
But this is a little unfair. Indecision, evasion of this kind, after all, has a long history
in American writing. As the American hero or heroine lights out, it is often hard to
tell whether they are engaged in quest or vagrancy – or whether, indeed, there is a
fundamental difference. And it is perfectly clear that, by traditional standards, the
conclusion they offer concludes nothing at all. What is more, it is precisely running
of one kind or another that becomes the tactic of so many characters in recent
American fiction, as they find themselves poised between what Updike called two
roads, and Mailer himself the two rivers of American history. Dodging, weaving,
maneuvering, balancing: these are agencies of existential deferral, means of living
between the two roads or rivers. Weaving together, wavering between documentary
and dream, protean monologue and picaresque, public history and pastoral, the
demotic and the magical: these, in turn, are devices of stylistic deferral, means of
writing between, allowing the novel to inhabit a border territory. With his vacillating
heroes and variety of styles, Updike is closer to many of his contemporaries than
Mailer allows or than perhaps he himself knows. And, like them, he sees death as the
only conclusive moment. Before that, life is process, running, a series of beginnings.
Of the many other novelists who have attempted to navigate the two rivers of
American history, among the most accomplished is Don DeLillo (1936–). Although
not formally a postmodern novelist, DeLillo is fascinated by the condition of
postmodernity. White Noise (1984), for instance, is an ironic comedy about the
mass replication of images in modern America and the anxiety technology
engenders in its characters’ precarious sense of identity. With a paranoid professor
of Hitler studies at a Midwestern college as its central character, White Noise
addresses the media and, more subtly, the idea of mediation as it occurs in a wideGGray_c05.indd 585ray_c 05 .indd 585 8 8/1/2011 7:31:32 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 32 PM