DeBellis, Jack, Ed. John Updike: The Critical Responses to the "Rabbit" Saga.(Book review)

DeBELLIS, JACK, ED. John Updike: The Critical Responses to the "Rabbit" Saga. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005. 298 pp. $97.95.

This collection of essays, edited by Jack De Bellis, is devoted to the Rabbit novels--Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux, (1970), Rabbit is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990)--which occupy the central place in the oeuvre of John Updike. All four novels were republished under the title Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy in 1995. The novella "Rabbit Remembered" was published in 2000 within the collection Licks of Love. De Bellis, author of The John Updike Encyclopedia (2000), as well as a number of bibliographies of the writer, includes in this collection more than thirty essays, including those by Alfred Kazin, Thomas Disch, Richard Locke, Hermione Lee, Donald Greiner, Stacy Olster, and Updike himself, both in person and as his alter-ego, Henry Bech. The essays cover variously the pastoral and anti-pastoral in Updike's work, Rabbit as Adamic hero, movies as both motif and background, and ethical issues that the novels raise. As De Bellis states, "the reader will discover how initial praise or objection lays the groundwork for critical arguments using historical and biographical approaches, as well as feminist, psychological and popular culture response" (xiii). In other words, the collection discovers the dynamics of the process of critical thinking and dialogues built around one distinctive work.

What makes these dynamics especially interesting is the fact that the Rabbit novels have been published in almost regular intervals of ten years as a kind of commentary on the past decades. Updike has brought to these novels a developing reality; all the novels are narrated in the present tense-everything happens now, in the very moment of narration/reading. The everyday life depicted as a stream, not only of thoughts but also of events, gives the illusion of duration without beginning and ending. The search for the essence, the mysterious, multi-meaningful, almost inexpressible "it" has been exactly the core of the Rabbit's existence which we have followed for all these years.

Is Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom an American Adam, a hero who questions the relation of an individual to the society, a lonely man who, according to R.W.B. Lewis, comes from nowhere? Donald Greiner argues that although Harry cannot think so sophistically, he does feel that he is "a relative innocent, trapped in the American culture of 1950-1990" (51). Close to the Adamic hero could be the figure of Everyman (sometimes questioned as an Everymale in feminist readings) which has also been the archetype used in reading Rabbit's fate. Stacey Olster reviews and argues with some of these readings, including Mary Allen's famous attack on Updike regarding his portraits of women. Marshall Boswell investigates how this tetralogy has been constructed on the principles of Kirkegaard's irony, as well as by applying the Barthian ...