My first Updike. I'm kind of hooked now.

I had never read anything by Updike, never really even contemplated it, until his passing this year. Updike was a frequent contributor of short stories to the New Yorker and a few issues featured articles devoted to the literary giant and his work. I was especially moved by the series of poems that he wrote while sick and facing his own mortality. I picked up Rabbit at Rest in a sort of spur of the moment whirl around Half-Priced Books in March.

I was swallowed up by the first sentence of the book - always a good sign. "Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane. The sensation chills him, above and beyond the terminal air-conditioning. But, then, facing Nelson has made him feel uneasy for thirty years."

Unbeknownst to me at purchase, "Rabbit at Rest" is the final book in a four tome series spanning the life and death of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom from 1960-1990. The narrative style of the book is one that assumes, but doesn't require, that the reader has read the previous three Rabbit books (luckily for me). In the last book, Rabbit is in his mid-fifties, overweight, depressed and ornery. The book alludes to a life lived outside of perfection - affairs (both he and his wife are guilty), a tense and strained relationship between father and son (the aforementioned Nelson). Despite, or because of his failures and shortcomings, Rabbit is a likeable and relatable main character. He is struggling with heart problems and a failing body. "Sometimes Rabbit's spirit feels as if it might faint from lugging all this body around."

Rabbit is plodding around Florida in retirement, directionless and frustrated now that he has been replaced by his son Nelson in the family car sales business back in Pennsylvania. He is also consumed with thoughts of death, made even more strident by the recent real life tragedy of the bombing of the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland. I really enjoyed the way the news and occurrences of real life filtered it's way into the book. It was not distracting and I liked the sense of realism it brought to the text.

When Rabbit's son, Nelson, and family travel to Florida for a visit, Rabbit immediately notices that his son's nervous and frantic manner has become even more evident and unsettling. It is revealed that he is in the throes of a addiction to cocaine that has led to the devastation of his marriage, and the embezzlement of funds from the family company. While on a boat trip with his young granddaughter, Rabbit suffers a heart attack and ends up in the hospital.

Updike's narrative flows in an wonderful way- the story told in between the covers of this book was both simple and extraordinary. I was reminded of a quote I read in the New Yorker about Updike's attitude about his work. "A form of modesty that, given not just the quality but the heat and shimmer of what was enclosed, passed the edge of modesty to touch the edge of superstition." I loved his descriptions - of a woman's beauty as "limping" or Rabbit's sister as "himself transposed into quite another key, and yet the melody recognizable."


Wikipedia unfortunately spoiled the ending for me, revealing that Rabbit passed away in the end. However, this knowledge allowed me to concentrate on the words on the page before me, rather than worry about what would or would not happen to the main character. Sorry if I just ruined it for you too - although it is not shocking but seems inevitable with the way that Rabbit chooses to lead his life after the first heart attack.

Read For Yourself:

"And he has never forgot how, thirty years ago it will be this June, his baby daughter Rebecca June drowned and when he went back to the apartment alone there was still this tubful of tepid gray water that had killed her. God hadn't pulled the plug. It would have been so easy for Him, Who set the stars in place. To have it unhappen. Or to delete fom the universe whatever it was that exploded that Pan Am 747 over Scotland. Those bodies with hearts pumping tumbling down in the dark. How much did they know as they fell, through air dense like tepid water, tepid gray like this terminal where people blow through like dust in an air duct, to the airline we're all just numbers on the computer, one more or less, who cares? A blip on the screen, then no blip on the screen. Those bodies tumbling down like wet melon seeds."

"There is a lightness, a lightening, that comes along with misery: vast portions of the world are shorn off, suddenly ignorable. You become simply a piece of physical luggage to be delivered into the hands of others."