Rabbit Redux
It is the 1960s in a provincial American town. The Vietnam War and profound changes—cultural, social, and sexual—serve as the backdrop to the novel, whose central thread is aptly summarized by what the protagonist says at the end of the narrative: > confusion is just a local view of things working out in general . Can one remain oneself, as if nothing were wrong, in a “terrible period, of profound confusion,” such as the one America was going through in the 1960s? Henry works as a typesetter and leads a seemingly peaceful life with his wife Janice and Nelson, their only child. Their marital relationship has been deeply shattered by the death of their other daughter, raising a wall between the two spouses that inevitably affects their sex life as well. Henry can be defined as a conservative: he believes in American values, the righteousness of the Vietnam War, and the idea that Blacks should stay in their place. This precarious balance is overturned by Janice’s affair with a colleague, a Greek man, with whom Henry has a furious argument specifically over the Vietnam War. Janice abandons the family to move in with her lover, leaving Henry to shoulder the burden of the house and their son. On the surface, he appears to be a solid man; in reality, beneath an apparent observance of the roles and conventions imposed by a respectable society, Henry is deeply restless. One evening, he is invited to dinner by a female friend who has just been left by her husband, and everything suggests the evening ought to end in bed, as tradition would have it. Instead, Henry ignores the woman’s overt signals and finishes the evening in a bar frequented primarily by Blacks. Here he meets Jill, an eccentric runaway girl, and Skeeter, a sort of visionary Black man. He takes them into his home and begins a relationship with Jill. A long portion of the novel, rendered verbose and tedious by its heavy ideological imprint, chronicles the life of the four (Henry, Jill, Skeeter, and Nelson) and the increasingly complex and ambiguous entanglement among them. From joints, they move on to hard drugs. Jill also sleeps with Skeeter and perhaps with Nelson, but what dominates above all is the figure of Skeeter and the reading of Black revolution texts. Somehow, Henry reconstructs his cognitive world to the point of defending Skeeter to his neighbors. Then, a terrible fire, perhaps set by the neighbors themselves, destroys the house and kills Jill. Henry, who helps Skeeter—the police’s prime suspect—flee, loses everything, including his job. The novel draws to a weary close: Janice wants to get back together with Henry and persuades him to stay at a hotel. Yet too many things have happened, and the burden of guilt weighs heavily on Henry in particular: “I feel so guilty.” “About what?”, Janice replies. “About everything.” “Relax, not everything is your fault.” “I can't accept that.” “He lets her breasts drop, lets them float away, lovely debris.” Updike’s chief virtue is his narrative style and, above all, his ability to bring characters and events to life through a rich and skillful use of adjectives. This novel lacks precisely that touch, dominated instead by the author’s urge to voice his own perspective—conservative and nostalgic for 1950s America—on the monumental events that convulsed the United States. The character of Skeeter, the glorification of revolutionary principles, and the political arguments are banal and predictable. They make the novel long-winded and, above all, overshadow Henry’s complex transformation and his fundamentally existential suffering. Why not read it? It is verbose and deeply dated.