Energy Futures: John Updike's Petrofictions

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.

John Updike, Rabbit is Rich¹

On the night of April 18, 1977, Jimmy Carter addressed the American public. "Good evening," he began, "tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem that is unprecedented in our history."² Carter's "unpleasant" talk, titled "The Energy Problem," was about the present, past, and future use of fossil fuels. This speech was intended not only to set a national agenda of energy and environmental reform, but to shore up the mission of Carter's presidency: to restore trust in American institutions after the national crises of confidence caused by the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the 1973–4 oil crisis. For Carter, oil was not just a problem of history but a problem for history—in other words, a projected shortage of non-renewable energy resources signaled a crisis in modern institutions, serving as evidence that liberal democracy and capitalism were incapable of imagining and producing a desirable future. "To stay even," Carter claimed, "we need the production of a new Texas every year, an Alaskan North Slope every nine months, or a new Saudi Arabia every three years." In other words, to maintain itself in history, the United States would need to produce new spaces of oil development. Only this would prove capable of filling the "metabolic rift" between the material energy that the United States consumed and the oil it produced.³ "Staying even" with 1977 levels of consumption would mean expanding oil extraction in the United States; it would also entail some loss of national sovereignty, because increasing amounts of the precious resource lay outside the immediate territorial boundaries of the United States, and oil is subject to the whims of a global market. Carter argued that if the United States did not change the way it constituted and reproduced itself through petroleum, the country would destroy both its future and its sense of history.

John Updike's 1981 novel Rabbit is Rich was written and set during the energy crisis of 1979. It won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award that year and affirmed the post-Carter narrative of "malaise" and "morning in America" in real time. By linking the aging of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom's with the futural anxieties provoked by the energy crisis, Updike lends an existential credence to the environmental and economic concerns of the Carter administration and exposes the short-sided speculative solutions of the Reagan era. Jonathan Yardley, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism the year Rabbit is Rich was published, predicted that the novel would be "gone and quite forgotten" in "a quarter century … if not sooner."⁴ If the novel remains relevant today, it is partly because the conditions that it describes continue to shape present structures of feeling. While scholars have read Rabbit is Rich in the naturalist tradition,⁵ or as a "novel of character" in which naturalistic motivations become central to the economic plot,⁶ it is in fact Updike's realism, I argue, that articulates private emotions, using the landscape of energy and political economy that emerged in the 1980s. Melinda Cooper observes that "the operative emotions of neoliberalism are neither interest nor rational expectations, but rather the essentially speculative but nonetheless productive movements of collective belief, faith, and apprehension."⁷ In Cooper's affective reading of neoliberalism one hears the echo of Irving Howe's remark that "the main achievement of the Reagan administration has not been institutional or programmatic," but "has consisted of a spectacular transformation of popular attitudes, values, and styles."⁸ Updike's realism catalogues the effects of these transformations in the mundane lives of his characters, depicting a structure of feeling that is specific to that era of energy and financial instability—one that would result in the proliferation of speculative attitudes toward the future.

In what follows, I read Rabbit is Rich as a petrofiction—an emerging, still ill-defined, genre, proposed by Amitav Ghosh, which describes a...