John Updike, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, and I

When John Updike gave a reading at Franklin and Marshall College (where I was then teaching), I was privileged to introduce him to a large enthusiastic crowd. Updike was a man who needed no introduction, especially to people who had waited up to two hours for him to sign their books and who regarded him as southeastern Pennsylvania’s literary son. I began by pointing out that Updike and I had much in common: both of us had been born in Pennsylvania and both of us had been writing for the pages of the New Yorker magazine since the middle 1950s. I let the last observation sink in, and added that, unlike me, the New Yorker had published him. The audience got the joke but not the wealth of identifications curling inside it.

One of Updike’s earliest short stories, “Ace in the Hole,” focuses on a former high-school basketball star who finds himself trapped by a variety of new roles: husband, father, breadwinner. But, if Fred (“Ace”) Anderson has a web of entangling responsibilities, he also has an abundance of raw sexuality, and that is enough to get Updike’s protagonist into—and out of—many tight spots.

“Ace in the Hole,” which first appeared in the New Yorker in 1955, contains the rough outline of the character that Updike would expand in Rabbit, Run (1960), his lyrical rumination about manhood, spiritual isolation, and America in the 1950s. As with Ace, Rabbit knows, ah knows, that nothing trumps conventional behavior like being a bad boy, and that other people will always be there to clean up your messes.

Rabbit Angstrom is a character whom readers love to hate—and in the four Rabbit novels and novella-like coda (“Remembering Rabbit,” 2002), that take him from the 1950s to his death from a heart attack at the end of the 1980s—we see his life, with all its high-intensity vicissitudes, against the larger backdrop of America during the latter half of the twentieth century. Each decade has its distinctive metaphor, whether it be the lingo of black militancy during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency (Rabbit Redux, 1972) or the long lines for gasoline that turn Rabbit’s Toyota agency into a gold mine (Rabbit Is Rich, 1981). As the twentieth century winds down, so too does Rabbit. He moves to Florida, grows ever more sluggish, and packs on the pounds.

Updike is at once a healthy arm’s-length from his protagonist and close enough to be his cousin, for Rabbit Angstrom is Updike’s lyrical rumination about the life he himself might well have lived—that is, if he had stayed in Shillington, Pennsylvania, rather than leaving to attend Harvard. Updike always felt a bit out of place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just as he later felt a bit out of place in New York City, where as a young man he wrote “casuals” for the New Yorker, or Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he lived for most of his life. In his heart—and, more important, in his imagination—Updike remained a staunchly Pennsylvania boy.

I read each of the Rabbit books with rapt attention, not only because I was teaching at a college a twenty-minute drive from his birthplace but also because I too was a product of small-town Pennsylvania, albeit a town at the other end of the state. I am hardly the only English professor who included Rabbit, Run in a course on post–World War ii fiction. Few novels got to the heart of what made fifties America tick more surely than did Updike’s. But I also wanted to teach the other Rabbit novels and, moreover, to put them into the wider context of Updike’s work.

After much deliberation I offered a senior seminar in Philip Roth and John Updike, close contemporaries (Updike was born in 1932; Roth, a year later) and authors of wide significance. Rabbit gets his news and music via am radio; by contrast Nathan Zuckerman not only listens to fm radio but is likely to be interviewed on npr. I worked my students hard, but...