Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
(2008) was less well received than its predecessor. Updike’s later novels are seen
as more experimental than the earlier ones; for an example of this view, see John
N. Duvall’s “U(pdike) & P(ostmodernism)” in The Cambridge Companion to John
Updike (2006).
Although preceded by a short-story collection, a poetry collection, and the
novel The Poorhouse Fair (1959), Rabbit, Run (1960) was the work that established
Updike as a major literary figure. He followed it over the years with three sequels:
Rabbit Redux (1971); Rabbit Is Rich (1981), which received the American Book
Award, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and
the Pulitzer Prize; and Rabbit at Rest (1990), which received the National Book
Critics Circle Award and another Pulitzer Prize (Updike is one of only three
writers to date to receive the Pulitzer for fiction twice; the others are William
Faulkner and Booth Tarkington). In 1995 Everyman’s Library published revised
versions of the four novels in one volume, titled Rabbit Angstrom. The first edition
of Rabbit, Run had been censored because of the concerns of the publisher and
the advice of a lawyer, but the original explicit language was restored in the later
editions. In 2001 Updike included the novella “Rabbit Remembered” in the col-
lection Licks of Love; it revisits the family Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom left behind,
including the illegitimate daughter he was never sure existed.
Rabbit, Run is set in 1959. Rabbit was a basketball star in high school; he
is now twenty-six, working at a meaningless job, unhappily married to Janice
Springer Angstrom, and the father of a two-year-old son, Nelson. He runs away
from home and moves in with a prostitute, Ruth Leonard, for a couple of months.
He begins playing golf with a minister enlisted by Janice’s family to reunite the
couple. Rabbit returns home when Janice gives birth to their daughter, Rebecca
June, but runs away again one evening when she refuses to have sex with him.
Janice, who has a recurring drinking problem, accidentally drowns the baby while
bathing her; the novel ends with Rabbit running from the funeral. These events
set the stage for themes and motifs that critics have noted throughout the rest of
the tetralogy: infidelity, lost daughters, faith and grace, father-son relationships,
sports culture, and the conflict between social responsibility and individual desires
and fulfillment. The novels are written in the present tense, a technique that was
new when the first one was published but is now quite common. Updike believed
that the sense of immediacy produced by the present-tense narration matched
Rabbit’s impulsiveness. (Rabbit, Run is discussed in detail in RGAL, volume 6:
Postwar Literature, 1945–1970 .)
Rabbit Redux takes place in 1969; characters watch the Apollo 11 moon
landing on television and discuss its significance. Critics have noted that Rab-
bit Redux engages social history more pointedly than does its predecessor, with
racial issues and debates about the Vietnam War playing a major role. Janice
leaves Rabbit to live with a Greek man who works at her father’s car dealership.
Rabbit allows a runaway teenager, Jill, to move in with him and Nelson; later, an
African American male friend of Jill’s, Skeeter, also moves in. Racists burn the
Angstroms’ home; Jill dies in the fire, becoming the symbolic “lost daughter” of
the novel—albeit one with whom Rabbit has had sex. In Rabbit Is Rich, which
opens with the gasoline shortage of the late 1970s, the Angstroms have become