In all the [Rabbit] novels, it is suggested—Updike is too canny to insist on it—that Harry, resolutely commonplace in most other ways, has a special spiritual gift, however poorly he understands or articulates it, a persistent sense of what William James in A Pluralistic Universe wittily called "a more": "the believer finds that the tenderest parts of his personal life are continuous with a more of the same quality which is operative in the universe outside of him and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself, when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck."

James's terms are helpful in making out Harry Angstrom. Though his "lower being," the part of him that ought to be more observant of what his wife, his lovers, his parents, his children, expect and need...