Updike

by Begley, Adam

  Though the Maples saga had come to an end, he continued to track the comings and goings of a collection of young people—children of divorce who bore an unsurprising resemblance to his own progeny.* In “Still of Some Use,” a middle-aged divorced man’s familiar guilt is accompanied by a tardy urge to protect his broad-shouldered but “sensitive” teenage son. The boy, modeled on Michael, is upset at having to help clear out the attic of his childhood home after his parents have split up; the unwanted games and toys are to be discarded, consigned to the “universe of loss” explored a decade and a half earlier in “My Children at the Dump.” An identical teenager reappears—or at least his artwork does—in “Learn a Trade,” about a highly successful sculptor, Fegley, who has grown rich selling his art, yet finds the idea of “artsy-crafty stuff” depressing; “He was like a man who, having miraculously survived a shipwreck, wants to warn all others back at the edge of the sea.” He had hoped his four children would become scientists, or anyway do something useful, but every one of them, including his younger son, his only “practical, down-to-earth child,” has drifted into the “limbo of artistic endeavor.” Working with copper wire, pliers, and snippers, the boy has filled the basement with “unsold, unrequested” mobiles, a leafy forest stretching into dark corners.

  Fegley blames his ex-wife, herself a painter. He tells her, “You’ve brought these kids up to live in never-never land.” She gently reminds him that he, too, was indulged in the years before his commercial success, that she never urged him to do the practical thing, to abandon sculpture and resign himself to secure, white-collar work; she’d left him free to follow his muse. (One hears an echo of Mary mildly noting that she made no objection when Updike quit his safe, steady job as a Talk writer.) Unwilling to argue the point, Fegley merely says that he was driven in a way their children are not. He was, he reminds her, “desperate” to escape his provincial upbringing; “Our children aren’t desperate,” he says; “they’re just kidding around.”

  By the time Michael began making mobiles in the basement at Labor-in-Vain Road, Updike was well aware that all four of his children might easily end up in the “limbo of artistic endeavor.” Liz, after a year at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London and a couple of years at Bennington, had enrolled in the Mass General School of Nursing and become a student nurse at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital—but couldn’t commit to the profession and dropped out after six months. There seemed, after this, little chance that any of the young Updikes would “learn a trade.” None—not even David, despite his precocious New Yorker success—seemed in a hurry to make a mark; they gave no sign of having inherited their father’s urgent need to outstrip the competition. Compared with the eager young man who rocketed out of Shillington High School with a single aim—a job at the magazine of his dreams—Updike’s children seemed directionless, happy to drift. If they harbored any professional ambition, they disguised it brilliantly. He could be forgiven for thinking that they, too, were “just kidding around.”

  However disappointed or frustrated, he never scolded, never nagged, never tried to hurry them along a particular career path. As he observed to his mother, his children seemed to have “all the gifts but the one of making their way in the world.” He was inclined to see their laid-back attitude as generational, a sign of the times. “The work ethic is crumbling,” he told a journalist in the early seventies. By the end of the decade, as his two younger children were leaving their teenage years behind, the topic of work—how his fellow citizens earn a living, why they strive or fail to strive—had become something of an obsession. His worries about leading a sheltered life went hand in hand with a recurring worry about losing touch with ordinary, middling, nine-to-five Americans. “You grow up of course with these people who become car salesmen,” he told a journalist, “but the older you get the less you see of them.” He explained that “your average American writer is far too innocent of the actual workings of the capitalist consumerist society he’s a member of.”

  Even as he was articulating the problem, he had in his sights a solution. Once again, Rabbit rode to the rescue: Harry Angstrom would become a car salesman.

  THOUGH IN MOST ways utterly unlike The Coup, Rabbit Is Rich benefits from the lessons Updike learned when he decided, three and a half years after a four-week trip to Africa, to invent a drought-stricken sub-Saharan nation. This time around, he invented a working life. Harry’s personality and social milieu, the push and pull of his desires, his fears, his loyalties—Updike knew these inside out; ditto the hometown geography. But what did he know about his hero’s new job? What did he know about the business of running a Toyota dealership? As he did for The Coup, he rolled up his sleeves and hit the books. And he also enlisted outside help, hiring a researcher to untangle the arcane protocols of automobile finance and the corporate structure of a dealership—how salesmen are compensated, how many support staff work in the back office, what the salaries are for the various employees, what paperwork is involved in importing foreign cars, and so on. Updike visited showrooms in the Boston area, hunting for tips from salesmen and collecting brochures. He aimed for, and achieved, a degree of detail so convincing that the publisher felt obliged to append to the legal boilerplate on the copyright page a specific disclaimer: “No actual Toyota agency in southeastern Pennsylvania is known to the author or in any way depicted herein.”*

  The first scene of the novel presents us with Rabbit in his new element, the showroom of Springer Motors, one of two Toyota dealerships in the Brewer area. Updike plants us next to Harry as he surveys the dispiriting scene on the other side of the dusty plate-glass window with its paper banner bearing the latest Toyota slogan, “YOU ASKED FOR IT, WE GOT IT.” The traffic on Route 111 is “thin and scared”; the energy crisis, manifest in long and fractious lines at gas stations, has spread disquiet; Jimmy Carter will soon deliver his famous “malaise” speech. The country is running out of gas, Harry thinks; “the great American ride is ending.” But his gloom is skin deep. Fuel-efficient Toyotas are selling well, money is rolling in. “Life is sweet,” he tells himself, savoring his personal prosperity in the midst of a national anxiety bordering on panic. “Bourgeois bliss” is how Updike described Rabbit’s state of mind.

  Janice’s father died five years ago, and now Harry “co-owns a half-interest” in Springer Motors. He’s “king of the lot,” his place validated by the cheery patter of his salesman’s pitch, which he tries out on a couple of country kids who drive up in a rundown station wagon, the girl “milky-pale and bare-legged,” with a snub nose and pale blue eyes. His reaction to the girl is typically sexual, but also fatherly; by the time he takes them for a test drive, chatting smoothly about base models, extras, trade-in value—“paternal talkativeness keeps bubbling up in Harry”—he’s already wondering whether the girl is his daughter, the child he believes, he hopes, he fathered with Ruth Leonard some two decades earlier. Hints pile up, and Rabbit eagerly convinces himself that she is indeed his child, her white skin a mirror, her pale blues eyes conclusive evidence of a genetic link.

  It’s worth pausing to admire the efficiency of the setup. Despite the apparently leisurely pace, Updike has already established his essential themes: the parlous state of the union, money, sex, fatherhood (“this matter of men descending from men”). When the workday is done, Harry leaves the showroom, stepping out into a golden early summer afternoon. In the seconds it takes him to walk across the lot to his car, Updike makes time for an extraordinary aria: Harry reflects that sales peak in June, and from there launches into a calculation of the monthly profits of Springer Motors, a single-sentence stream of consciousness that extends for more than a page and touches on topics as various as pneumatic tools (“rrrrrrt”), OPEC (“the fucking Arabs are killing us”), Medicaid, and “his poor dead dad.” Perched on Harry’s shoulder, we hear the echo of his scattered thoughts. The technique is remarkably flexible, opening up interior space, the inner dimensions of a sentient being, and at the same time allowing us to
see Harry from above, as it were: We know what he knows and also what he doesn’t know. We sympathize with him and his failings, at once superior to him and keenly aware of a shared humanity. Immersed in Harry, we’re immersed in ourselves.

  The free indirect style is only one strand of Updike’s virtuosity. In his ambition to leave behind a faithful record of the second half of the twentieth century—an ambition that dates back to his Harvard years but that began to take a concrete shape only after Rabbit Redux—he paid minute attention to the delicate art of weaving popular culture, politics, and economics into the fabric of his narrative. Harry drives home through rusting Brewer, snug in his “Luxury Edition” 1978 Toyota Corona, “the four corners of the car dinging out disco music as from the four corners of the mind’s ballroom.” Donna Summer sings “Hot Stuff,” and Harry imagines the backup singers “standing around on some steamy city corner chewing gum and who knows what else.” The music blends with the scenery in a magically tight weave.* Elsewhere he charts the fate of Johnny Frye’s Chophouse, an old-fashioned Brewer establishment that once fed pork chops and sauerkraut to an old-fashioned clientele. The Chophouse became Café Barcelona (paella and gazpacho), then morphed into the Crêpe House, serving “glorified pancakes wrapped around minced whatever.” This latest incarnation is a hit with the “lean new race of downtown office workers,” and that elicits a wry reflection: “The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun just started”; the relaxed syntax and colloquial diction paper over the profundity of the observation and tie it securely to Harry. At home, our hero reads Consumer Reports; the parade of goods in the magazine forms a running commentary on the way we lived then. A stack of Playboy and Penthouse magazines from earlier in the decade gives him a lesson in evolving pornographic fashion; he flips to each centerfold and discovers that the modesty of the models recedes inexorably: “An invisible force month after month through each year’s seasons forces gently wider their flawless thighs until somewhere around the bicentennial issues the Constitutional triumph of open beaver is attained.” (Note the exquisite mingling of patriotic celebration, First Amendment rhetoric, and crass schoolboy slang.) Inflation is nibbling at Rabbit’s savings account—how to dramatize this dreary topic? Updike turns it into an erotic romp: Harry and Janice making love on a bedspread scattered with the thirty Krugerrands bought at Fiscal Alternatives in downtown Brewer, Rabbit’s first speculative foray. The scene is a comic gem, and suggestive as well of the metaphoric link between sex and speculation. The coins come in tightly packed cylinders; hidden away in Harry’s coat, they feel “like a bull’s balls tugging at his pockets.” The rising price of gold and the Angstroms’ newly buoyant sex life seem to go together naturally, like disco and urban decay.

  Pleased with his newly flush and frisky wife, Rabbit works, Rabbit plays, Rabbit runs—his jogging is an affirmation of health and vitality, and inevitably a reminder of the opposite. His new blue-and-gold running shoes skim “above the earth, above the dead.” The novel is punctuated with memorials to the dead, Harry naming them again and again: Mom and Pop; Skeeter, gunned down by policemen; Jill; and the baby, Becky. Harry tells himself he will never die. In fact, nobody dies in Rabbit Is Rich, and this makes it unique in the tetralogy; instead of a funeral, we get the wedding of Nelson Angstrom and the five-months-pregnant Teresa (“Pru”) Lubell, a twenty-five-page set piece almost exactly in the middle of the book. The ceremony at the Episcopalian church makes sentimental Harry weep as the couple stand at the altar:

  And the burning in his tear ducts and the rawness scraping at the back of his throat have become irresistible, all the forsaken poor ailing paltry witnesses to this marriage at Harry’s back roll forward in hoops of terrible knowing, an impalpable suddenly sensed mass of human sadness concentrated burningly on the nape of Nelson’s neck.

  Even in the midst of this timeless ritual, current events impinge. The father of the groom marvels at the effect of inflation on the cost of the wedding (“one hundred and eighty-five American dollars for a cake, a cake”) and feels the pain of OPEC’s squeeze: “What a great waste of gas it seems as they drive in procession . . . through the slanted streets of the town.” He flicks on the car radio and listens to the news: Russian tanks in Kabul, a natural gas pact with Mexico, the pope’s visit to nearby Philadelphia.

  Step back from the parade of detail, and the larger pattern begins to look familiar: from the hope and despair of the American scene, Updike has fashioned a tapestry that looks a lot like history unfurling. It unfurls to the tune of the extraordinary speech Jimmy Carter delivered in midsummer, a televised address in which he told his fellow citizens that there was something wrong with America. Threatened by “paralysis and stagnation and drift,” the country was suffering from a “crisis of confidence.” His diagnosis of the problem sounds as if it might have been hatched in Brewer, after an extended sociological study of our own Harry Angstrom. Said Carter:

  In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.

  Rabbit reflects several times on the transformation that has devalued hard work in favor of “a whole new ethic.” Men under thirty “just will not work without comfort and all the perks”—whereas his father (“poor dead dad”) slaved away and “never got out from under” and “didn’t live to see money get unreal.” Money is now “unreal” because it’s divorced from honest toil. As for self-indulgence and consumption, at the end of the novel, having returned from a frolicsome, sex-filled holiday in the Caribbean, Harry allocates to himself a Celica Supra, the “ultimate Toyota,” a model “priced in five digits”—this after spending the afternoon furniture shopping for the new house he and Janice have bought but not yet moved into. All in all, an orgy of owning and consuming. The one-word refrain in the last pages of the novel is the possessive pronoun “his.” And yet ownership isn’t enough somehow; he still feels compelled to drive out toward Galilee, to the farm where Ruth lives, to ask about the girl he believes is their daughter. President Carter would say that Rabbit’s riches have not satisfied his “longing for meaning.”

  Oddly enough, the president’s speech was shaped in part by a critique elaborated by Updike’s Harvard roommate Kit Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism, published seven months earlier. A surprise bestseller, Lasch’s book was widely discussed in the wake of prominent reviews and a profile of the author in People magazine. He warned of America’s ebbing confidence, the erosion of the work ethic, weakened family bonds, and a creeping permissiveness—ideas that struck a nerve with Carter, who was interested in their political implications. Lasch was astonished to receive an invitation to dinner at the White House.

  Updike was only very sporadically in contact with his old roommate, and didn’t write to him about the success of The Culture of Narcissism or make explicit use of it in the novel (though Harry’s narcissism is in full bloom).* In fact, he never publicly discussed Lasch’s ideas or his career as a cultural critic, a sign that his memories of his erstwhile friend and rival were not exclusively fond. But Updike did acknowledge the centrality of Carter’s pronouncements, which Lasch had influenced; to a British journalist he explained that in the “malaise” speech, Carter “was trying to put his finger on what he thought, as a good Christian, was somehow wrong”—and that he, in his novel, was “mucking about the same area.”

  Despite the clear echoes of a president’s sermonizing address and the mass of cleverly embedded sociological detail, Rabbit Is Rich is less political than Rabbit Redux—there’s no Vietnam to rile Harry—and just as focused on domestic and quotidian concerns; family is once again the big event. Family is also where Harry diverges from the norm, where our American Everyman, the self-proclaimed “man in the middle,” begin
s to look more like an oddball on the fringe. There’s nothing run-of-the-mill about his relations either with the son he’d like to get rid of or with the daughter he’d like to acquire.

  At the end of Rabbit, Run, when the young Harry tries to dissolve the responsibilities weighing on him, his son, not yet three years old, is the stubborn fact that cannot be wished away: “Nelson remains: here is a hardness he must carry with him.” The hardness endures; you might say it hardens. An oedipal struggle unleashed in Rabbit Redux escalates in the last two novels. In Rabbit Is Rich, Harry resents Nelson crowding up behind him; the king of the lot feels his place is being usurped, both at work and at home. He’s not entirely wrong: Nelson, feeling stifled, wonders, “Why doesn’t Dad just die?” Of course oedipal conflict is not unusual, but its naked expression—“Harry wanted out of fatherhood”—is nonetheless startling. Actually, Harry only wants out of being father to a male child; the thought of Nelson’s genitals is what disturbs him most. The idea of having a daughter thrills him—and sends him out into the country to stalk the girl he met at the lot, whose name, he eventually learns, is Annabelle Byer. Only when Nelson has skipped town, following the family tradition by running out on his wife and child, is Rabbit satisfied: “The kid was no threat to him for now. Harry was king of the castle.” Updike had no firsthand experience of hopelessly bitter father-son relations, but it’s not too hard to imagine that he was prodding a sore point, that the travails of Nelson and Rabbit are a nightmare extension of his anxieties about his feckless children, a product of the guilty sense that he himself was holding them back—that his single-minded and monolithic success was at the root of their aimlessness.

  Harry’s obsession with Annabelle is usually explained as a symptom of his unacknowledged (in fact, loudly denied) guilt over Becky’s death. Ruth’s pregnancy begins, so to speak, when Janice lets her baby girl sink into the bathwater—the symmetry is essential to the internal logic of the novel. And Rabbit’s refusal to believe that a pregnant Ruth would go through with a threatened abortion gives birth, metaphorically, to a phantom daughter. Until Rabbit catches sight of Annabelle at the beginning of Rabbit Is Rich, he has to make do with surrogates: enter the doomed Jill, whose fiery death still haunts him. But could the obsession with a fantasy daughter also be the product of the author’s own long-term guilt—could Updike have been thinking back to his lover’s abortion fifteen years earlier? Did Updike, like Harry, moon over might-have-beens, plotting the hypothetical future of a child who was never born? I very much doubt it. Rabbit’s baby daughter died on paper on a summer afternoon in 1959, at the Penningtons’ farmhouse in Vermont. Once the work-weary young author came downstairs and announced to his family that he had “drowned the baby,” his hero’s obsessive yearning for a daughter was inevitable. It’s a literary conceit, not some kind of slip an amateur shrink might decode.