John Updike

 

I didn't think too much -- as I recall -- of Rabbit, Run, but now, having returned to Updike, and having finished Rabbit Redux, let me take that all back: at his prime, Updike packed a serious punch. Much, of course, has been written about Updike, but I'd like to focus, in this post, on the quotation from the Sunday Times on the back of the British edition of the novel. That quotation attempts to sell Updike's vision as one in which he "transfigures the commonplace" into something "beautiful." Let's stop there: I don't read Rabbit Redux in that way at all. In fact, I understand the novel as attempting to assert the opposite: namely that there's an unbearable banality to the commonplace, and that boredom and sexuality are what propel the suburban experience in America. Rabbit Redux is less a celebration of the average, the mediocre, and far more an evaluation of the ways they persist, of how they interact. There's lots of intercourse in Updike's world, but much of it is pained; rarely is it ecstatic -- as you might expect from a marketing quotation like the one on the Penguin edition. Rabbit Redux, despite the sales pitch, really is a triumph: a sorrowful, hip, urgent novel composed at the intersection of many worlds: those racial, those violent, those political. The book is a reminder that even the most common moments are subject to external factors, and that while sex may bring two people together, it is rarely enough for them to truly communicate.