Rabbit, Run, that heart-stopping epiphany of 21 years ago, should never have had a sequel, and now it's got two. John Updike's privilege, I suppose; one must bend with the facts, if not forgive. Rabbit Redux still seems a rude trespass on what had become, after all, the property of my imagination; yet without it there could be no [Rabbit Is Rich] …, no renewal of affection, no return of grace. The alter ego stuff aside, there's a juicy bravado to Updike's long loyalty to Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom that I can't help liking. The desperate, fleeing angel of Rabbit, Run is now, surprisingly, "family," and we're all growing older together. There's caring in this, and even some dignity—Rabbit still ruts as a rabbit will (his literally saving grace), but now he's most often called Harry, and jogs rather than runs. There's abrasiveness, too: Updike's mixed feelings, sense of challenge, volatile remnants of envy and anger, his flippancy. But in the main Rabbit Is Rich is an act of accommodation; it warms the rut we discover ourselves in together, and lubricates astonishment….
It's hard to imagine the effect on readers new to Rabbit. Of course, Rabbit Is Rich is technically discrete; in little bursts of efficiency it recapitulates what's gone before—e.g., Rabbit's desertion of his wife Janice and the pregnant Ruth, and the horrifying bathtub drowning of Rabbit and Janice's infant daughter in Rabbit, Run; Rabbit's guilt in his son Nelson's eyes for the death of the hippie Jill in the awful fire in Rabbit Redux ("undo, undo," pleads Rabbit's brain). And so on, the "essential" plot details. But the essence of Rabbit as he was cannot be synopsized: the degree of desperation (and release) at the end of Rabbit, Run, the angst in Angstrom, his love of basketball and yearning to remain a high school star ("the kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up," he thinks on the very first page of Rabbit, Run), his not knowing where to put his hand when Ruth fellates him (it flutters, then he rests it on his shoulder), the crucially intimate physics of his reconciliation with Janice at the end of Rabbit Redux—all this is, though acknowledged and told about or hinted at, missing….
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