Rabbit at Rest, Indeed

January saw the death of one of the English language’s most prolific authors – John Updike. Undoubtedly, Updike will be best remembered for his four Rabbit novels – Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. Chronicling the adventures of one Harry Rabbit Angstrom - high school basketball star turned car salesman, householder and errant husband - and his efforts to cope with the seismic public changes (from feminism to the counterculture to antiwar protests) that rattled his cozy nest, the Rabbit novels captured four decades of middle-class American life. Each of the novels concludes with a one-word sentence, a condensed summation of the moral state of the main character, his world and, perhaps, his creator. The first book (Rabbit, Run) ends in "Runs"; the second (Rabbit Redux) in "O.K.?"; the third (Rabbit Is Rich) in "His"; and the last word in the final novel (Rabbit at Rest) is "Enough." Both Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Updike belonged to a time when novelists were relevant, when novel-writing could still have a major cultural impact. Even spats between writers mattered: remember the confrontation between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett Show? I quite imagine writers like Franzen, Chabon, and Lethem have good reason to envy that world.