As I mentioned in my post about Upton Sinclair’s “Lanny Budd” series a few weeks ago, a few of the novels which have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction are part of a series: The Good Earth, Dragon’s Teeth, and The Town all part of a series. With these types of books, it’s difficult to get a good read of what story the author is telling because we’re not even getting the whole story—just one little part of a much longer story. Dragon’s Teeth was an especially little part of a much, MUCH longer story as it was only one of eleven books that comprise the Lanny Budd saga.
There are only two books left in my Pulitzer journey that are part of a series, and I’m going to read them back-to-back: John Updike’s Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, which are the two concluding novels of Updike’s four and a half part Rabbit Angstrom series (the fifth half is a novella entitled Rabbit, Remembered).
When we first met him in Rabbit, Run (1960), the book that established John Updike as a major novelist, Harry (“Rabbit”) Angstrom is playing basketball with some boys in an alley in Pennsylvania during the tail end of the Eisenhower era, reliving for a moment his past as a star high school athlete. Updike revisits his hero toward the end of each of the following decades and in each of the subsequent novels, as Rabbit, his wife, Janice, his son, Nelson, and the people around them grow, these characters take on the lineaments of our common existence.
In these books, Updike attempts to chronicle the American dream through his protagonist, Rabbit.
Since I’ll be detailing my thoughts of the last two novels of the series for this project here on the blog, I’m posting the plot summaries of the first two books to get myself and everybody else up to speed.
(plot summaries from Wikipedia)
I. “Rabbit, Run”
Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is 26, has a job selling a kitchen gadget named MagiPeeler, and is married to Janice, a former salesgirl at the store where he worked who is currently pregnant. They have a two-year-old son named Nelson, and live in Mount Judge, a suburb of Brewer, Pennsylvania. He believes that his marriage is corrupt and something is missing from his life: Having been a basketball star in high school, Harry finds his middle-class family life unsatisfying. On the spur of the moment, he decides to leave his family and drive south in an attempt to “escape”. However, after getting lost, he returns to his home town. Not wanting to return to his family, he instead visits his old basketball coach, Marty Tothero.
That night, Harry has dinner with Tothero and two girls, one of whom, Ruth Leonard, is a part-time prostitute. Harry and Ruth begin a two-month affair and he soon moves into her apartment. During this time, Janice moves back into her parents’ house and the local Episcopal priest, Jack Eccles, befriends Harry in a futile attempt to get him to reconcile with his wife. Nonetheless, Harry remains with Ruth until the night he learns that she had a fling with his high school nemesis, Ronnie Harrison. Enraged, Harry pressures Ruth into performing fellatio on him. The same night, Harry learns that Janice is in labor, and he leaves Ruth to visit his wife at the hospital.
Reunited with Janice, Harry returns home with her and their daughter, named Rebecca June. Harry attends church one morning and, after walking the minister’s wife Lucy home, interprets her invitation to come in for a coffee as a sexual invitation. When he declines the invitation for coffee, stating that he has a wife, she angrily slams the door on him. Harry returns to his apartment, and, happy about the birth of his daughter, tries to reconcile with Janice. He encourages her to have a whiskey, then, misreading her mood, pressures her to have sex despite her postnatal condition. When she refuses and accuses him of treating her like a prostitute, Harry leaves, yet again, in an attempt to resume his relationship with Ruth. Finding her apartment empty, he spends the night at a hotel.
The next morning, still distraught at Harry’s new departure, Janice gets drunk and accidentally drowns Rebecca June in the bath tub. The other main characters in the book except Harry soon learn of the accident and gather at Janice’s parents’ home. Later in the day, unaware of what has happened, Harry calls Reverend Eccles to see how his return home would be received. Reverend Eccles shares the news of his daughter’s death, and Harry returns home immediately, although in a somewhat aloof way. Tothero later visits Harry and suggests that the thing he is looking for probably does not exist. At Rebecca June’s funeral, Harry’s internal and external conflicts result in a sudden proclamation of his innocence in the baby’s death. He then runs from the graveyard, pursued by Jack Eccles, until he becomes lost.
Harry returns to Ruth and learns that she is pregnant by him. Though Harry is relieved to discover she has not had an abortion, he is unwilling to divorce Janice. Harry abandons Ruth, still missing the feeling he has attempted to grasp during the course of the novel; his fate is uncertain as the novel concludes.
II. “Rabbit, Redux”
Rabbit Redux finds the former high-school basketball star, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, working a dead-end job (as a Linotype operator at the local printing plant) and approaching middle age in the downtrodden and fictional city of Brewer, Pennsylvania, the place of his birth. When his wife leaves him for another man, Harry and his thirteen-year-old son are at a loss, and the chaotic state of the nation circa 1969 finds its way into Harry’s home.
Updike’s recurring themes of guilt, sex, and death are joined in Redux by racism when Harry plays host to an African-American named Skeeter, a cynical, drug-dealing Vietnam vet who engages Harry in debates about the war and race relations. Jill, a wealthy white teenager fleeing suburbanConnecticut, enthralls both Harry and his son, and the four of them make a scandalous household emblematic of the Summer of Love‘s most confusing implications, culminating in a house fire that kills Jill. Harry and his wife are reconciled at book’s end.
Andrew is a husband, father, dog lover, craft beverage enthusiast, content creator, and niche market Internet celebrity. Formerly of A Table in the Corner of the Cafe and The Pulitzer Project and contributor to Barista Magazine and Mental Floss, he’s been writing on the Internet for years.