The Rabbit is finally at rest.
Author John Updike, who died Tuesday of lung cancer at age 76, frequently referred to his most indelible character, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, as his alter-ego.
In four novels - Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest - Updike chronicled his blue-collar protagonist adrift and disillusioned in mid-20th-century America. The books begin respectively in 1959, 1969, 1979 and 1988, and encapsulate the conflicts of their previous decades: the disenchantment with the American dream of the '50s, the Vietnam War and the hippie movement in the '60s, the conspicuous consumption and hedonism of the '70s, and the rise of drugs and AIDS in the '80s.
In many ways, Updike couldn't have seemed less like Rabbit Angstrom. The former was a much-lauded author who won the Pulitzer Price twice, for the final two novels in the Rabbit cycle. The latter's life peaked in high school, when he was a star on the basketball team; he failed at two subsequent careers, as a Linotype operator and Toyota dealer.
But Rabbit's preoccupations were Updike's, from Rabbit's love of golf to his inchoate spiritual yearnings. Most of all, author and character were voluptuaries, who relished not just food and sex but also the sights, sounds, smells and textures of everyday life.
Updike was perhaps the contemporary author best able to make his readers taste a macadamia nut furred with salt, or bring into focus a car parked the wrong way on a street, "its grid grinning at him."
Or here is Updike, in a Christmas sketch, describing fashionable footwear:
"This year's high heels do not jounce the face but wobble the ankles, so that women walking have the tremulous radiance of burning candles as, step by step, they quiver in and out of balance."
The tremulous radiance of burning candles. Has anyone, ever, seen that motion more clearly?
It was precisely this vividness that provoked some critics, wrongly, to dub Updike's writing "feminine." The argument went that Updike was primarily concerned with the body and not the mind. Such a literary eminence grise as the critic Harold Bloom dismissed Updike as "a minor novelist with a major style."
Such indictments outraged Updike's legions of fans.
"John Updike was the best prose stylist in the American language since Henry James - and they called James a sissy, too," says Jerome Klinkowitz, a literature professor at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, Iowa, who has written extensively on Updike.
