Rabbit At Rest; John Updike, 1932 - 2009

I first discovered John Updike in the late 1990s, when my literary interests began moving decisively towards post-war American writers. I spent the week of midterms devouring Rabbit, Run when I should have been reviewing notes on John Locke. What captivated me about Updike's writing at the time was his prose style - flowing, gorgeous and elegant, he created passages that read like verse. His insistence on blending the sacred and the profane, the stars and the gutter, struck me as unique. His unapologetic blend of Christianity and carnality was intriguing. And once I began to investigate his other works, his output seemed remarkable.

Updike's voluminous publishing habits are well known, with over 50 books to his name, nearly one a year since the late 1950s, and a plethora of short stories, criticism, essays and articles. David Foster Wallace once wrote a gently dismissive article on some of Updike's qualities, and asked the question (or quoted somebody else asking the question), "has the man ever had an unpublished thought?" When reading an article for The New Yorker concerning his impressions on toilet paper or the like, one suspected the answer might be no.

But rather than overkill, Updike's prolific nature seemed a throwback to the Victorian "man of letters," in which intellectual figures were leaned upon for their thoughts and observations on wide varieties of topics, from the profound to the mundane. And while I own several volumes of Updike's collected reviews and criticisms, and am familiar with his short stories and poetry, his novels stand as his clearest contribution to American letters. His Rabbit series of four novels, each published a decade apart - Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981), Rabbit at Rest (1990) - follow the non-adventures of a thoroughly unremarkable individual named Harry Angstrom, nicknamed "Rabbit" by his former high-school basketball colleagues. As Rabbit progresses through the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, the reader winces at his callousness and poor choices while remaining transfixed and fascinated by his subtle changes and life experiences. By setting the novels in a specific and sympathetically-drawn milieu - middle class eastern Pennsylvania - Updike manages to explore and authentically capture a feel for American culture. The four books as a whole represent a high water mark in contemporary fiction (perhaps his most famous work, however, is 1984's The Witches of Eastwick, thanks to a not-entirely-successful 1987 film adaptation starring Jack Nicholson and Cher).

Updike was in a class of his own, and while some have found him to be too genteel, too misogynistic, too sex-obsessed and/or simply too prolific, I suspect his reputation will undergo some type of recalibration. Although I've only read bits and pieces of Updike's non-Rabbit output (Couples has been sitting on my shelf for almost ten years), I'm truly sorry that 2009 will not see the release of a new Updike book.