The previous Rabbit books had their share of incident – deaths, desertions — but Rabbit is rich now, and largely protected from contingencies. His life, he feels, has devolved to an ‘inner dwindling’. The reader is bound to feel a bit like this too, since the novel’s structure is not linear so much as quotidian or seasonal. Updike toys with plot and incident, then flirtatiously retreats. Rabbit’s son pushes his pregnant wife down the stairs! But she is fine, and so is baby. The leggy blonde at the showroom might be Rabbit’s long-lost daughter! But she isn’t, and that’s that. In the end, the most dramatic events in the book centre on things like car dents, mortgage rates and gold futures.
If Rabbit is Rich has a central theme — and it is by no means clear that it wants or needs one — it has to do with the one-directional nature of life: life, always heading towards death. Not surprisingly, Updike injects a little low-church churchiness here. ‘I always felt I was very innocent, actually,’ says Rabbit’s fat, busted ex-mistress. ‘We all are, Ruth,’ consoles Rabbit. A few pages later we read: ‘Like what souls must feel when they awaken in a baby’s body so far from Heaven: not only scared so they cry but guilty, guilty.’ It is a fruitful confusion: We Are All Not Guilty, though we keep on thinking we must be. Rabbit, of course, is only lightly touched by this knowledge. He swans on down the long slide, clumsy, lax and brutish, but vaguely trying.
The technical difficulty posed by Rabbit is a familiar and fascinating one. How to see the world through the eyes of the occluded, the myopic, the wilfully blind? At its best the narrative is a rollicking comedy of ironic omission, as author and reader collude in their enjoyment of Rabbit’s pitiable constriction. Conversely — and this is the difficult part — the empty corners and hollow spaces of the story fill with pathos, the more poignant for being unremarked.
Not remarking on things, however, isn’t one of Updike’s strengths. There is just no stopping him remarking on things. The Rabbit books are not first-person but localised third-person: Updike’s voice can therefore flit freely in and out of Rabbit’s hick musings. A certain nervousness about this device perhaps explains the two derisory sorties into the consciousness of Rabbit Jr. More seriously, in his desire to keep the emotional content topped up, Updike repeatedly lapses into winsome editorials, as if to fill the spiritual gaps. ‘Her blurred dark eyes gaze beyond him into time…. love floods clumsily the hesitant space — saying, in a voice tears have stained …’
Being a boor and a goon, Rabbit is on the whole a healthy influence on Updike’s style; but Updike’s style remains a difficulty. In every sense it constitutes an embarrassment of riches — alert, funny and sensuous, yet also garrulous, mawkish and cranky. Updike often seems wantonly, uncontrollably fertile, like a polygamous Mormon. His recent novel about Africa, The Coup, was praised as an astounding ‘departure’ from his usual beat; in fact, though, the very facility of the experiment gave grounds for alarm. Plainly, here is a writer who can do more or less as he likes. But what ought he to like?
Furnished with such gifts, a novelist’s main challenge is one of self-contraception. A talent like Updike’s will always tend towards the encyclopaedic. Rabbit is Rich is a big novel, and in some ways it would be churlish to wish it any thinner. It is never boring but it is frequently frustrating. You feel that a better-proportioned book is basking and snoozing deep beneath its covers, and that Updike never really tried to coax it out.
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After Rabbit, Run came Rabbit Redux. After Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich. Now after Bech: A Book, we are offered Bech is Back. What next? Bech is Broke?
Actually Bech is in pretty good shape by the end of Bech is Back, financially at least. In the Rabbit books John Updike delivers a commentary on the unreflecting side of human nature (at a certain, unspecifiable distance from his own): this is what the unexamined life would be like: venality, fear, and the innocence born of knowing no better. Rabbits are the victims of whatever set of values gets to them first. They are the people whom you see every day and dismiss as junior aspirants, junior sufferers, unvexed by soul. But the Rabbit, like the Babbit, does have his inner life, his private culture, and Updike dissects it with tingling fascination.