Back to Basics

I have been remiss; this blog has not received the love and attention it deserves. That will be rectified.

Transitioning from The Coup to Rabbit is Rich is an interesting slide. Updike returns to that familiar enclave that launched his career: the American suburb. Ellelou and his plight in an African nation did not hold my interest like the minutiae of Rabbit’s life does. I empathize with Ellelou, he is trying to move heaven and Earth, literally building his nation by hand, all to see it swept out from under him. He is a man who was doomed from the start yet kept trying. He was a Muslim at heart and a Marxist by default. His is a political tale of trial and despair. Updike really did a great job of writing and building the world of Kush.

But, the world of Brewer Pennsylvania, USA is one that is ready-made for the reader. Updike’s audience (me especially) can picture in the mind’s eye an image of suburban American more readily and with clearer definition than I can of a failing African state. Rabbit is more compelling that Ellelou, even though I empathize with Ellelou as a leader and a decision maker, because Rabbit is more approachable. While I am entering a conversation on race or religion, Rabbit is more visible to Updike’s general readership. He is a local car salesman with an adipose midsection and a taste for Schlitz beer and the Philadelphia Phillies. He is not a Black-African-Muslim-Dictator-Russian Ally who was college educated in the US and served in several armies as a sort of mercenary. No, Rabbit played basketball in high school and is the son of a union printer. He had no greater ambitions than to work and buy a house. While Ellelou tried and failed, Rabbit never tried and found a modicum of success.

And that is the key difference, Rabbit is an everyman. Updike wrote him ambiguously and shifty enough to hold no great ideology or dogma. He is a Republican, kinda. He does not trumpet his politics anymore but he does vote for Nixon. While he used to drive a Ford Falcon, with an American flag decal in the rear window no less, he now drives and peddles small, foreign made Toyotas. He plays golf badly enough to be approachable.  His wife left him, and then came back; but now he sleeps around and tries swapping partners on a bizarre vacation in the Caribbean. In summary: Rabbit is nothing. He is a shill, a stuffed shirt. Harold Angstrom, a man with no college degree and dubious Swedish heritage, is a specter of a man. In this we find the middle of America. Men who weren’t movers and shakers and certainly could never lead an African nation; but men who can hit jump shots and chip from the sand. Men who have unsatisfying love lives and children they can’t raise because they can’t speak to them. Rabbit is a stand in for the average man of the Baby Boomer generation. A group, who never really found themselves, but let interesting lives and in the end had a compelling story to tell. Rabbit’s is the story of millions of men: listen to me. I am a man who never wanted for anything and received more than I could handle.

And that is why Rabbit is so compelling.