Why Rabbit?

Why Rabbit? Why pick a seemingly insignificant man to write a tetralogy about America from the late 1950s to the end of the 80s? Why not pick another one of your characters, Updike? Why not the novelist Bech or the builder Hanema? Harold “Rabbit” Angstrom, US Army veteran of Mt. Judge, Pennsylvaina, former basketball star and father to Nelson and the deceased Rebecca was a man of no great courage. He was not the man to become anything. His glory began and ended before he ever got married or earned a paycheck. In Rabbit Redux he is a union linotyper working alongside his father until he is laid off. He lives at first with his wife Janice and son Nelson in a new development outside of Brewer at Penn Villas, your typical middle-class-ranch-home-Ford-in-the-driveway-conservative-roast-beef-eating subdivision. This home ends in fire, which will be discussed more later. But, the fact is this; Rabbit Angstrom was the ideal candidate on which to write not one but multiple novels.

Page 4, “The small nose and slightly lifted upper lip that once made the nickname Rabbit fit now seem, along with the thick waist and cautious stoop bred into him by a decade of the Linotyper’s trade, clues to weakness, a weakness verging on anonymity… years have pass since anyone has called him Rabbit.” Rabbit was for the time a shape shifter. Any one reading this novel set in 1969 could form Rabbit to be themselves or anyone they knew. A weak, former athlete listing sluggishly and slovenly into an overweight middle age was almost the calling card of the White, blue collar American male of the day. Everyone was Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite. These men wore blue pants, drank beer from a can, toiled in rough union jobs, drove a Ford and would pay dearly for the privilege to live such a life. Updike chose Rabbit and made him who he was because of his malleability. When you read this novel, you can think of someone like Rabbit. A man who can stand on his own feet, but financially barely so; and physically hasn’t seen his feet since he was feeling up girls in his dad’s car on Friday nights after playing fullback for his high school.

Rabbit is like this. He has no future that we can see, and this is the second book that he is featured in. His marriage is in tatters within 50 pages of the start; Janice, having decided she liked the company of lecherous old Charlie Stavros, a salesman at her father’s dealership, moves out. She leaves Rabbit and Nelson alone in their split level eating TV dinners and watching Laugh In. To add insult to injury, and though she works at her father’s Toyota dealership, she takes Rabbit’s trusty Ford Falcon with her. Rabbit is forced to ride the bus across town, sitting with old ladies and black kids that he despises.

The point is this: everything that happens to Rabbit just happens. Because of his attitude it is largely outside of his control. These events, the death of a child, the breakup of a family and a house burning down can happen to anyone. Updike wrapped all of this up and made it happen to the one, the only, the Everyman, Harry ”Rabbit” Angstrom.