I have chosen to focus on Updike’s Rabbit novels because they demonstrate that print fiction continues to represent society in the complexity that we find in nineteenth-century realist novels, but also because these novels demonstrate how that social reality has changed. It is my argument that the use of mass culture in the Rabbit novels stands as a refutation of Jameson’s notion that such culture somehow makes realism obsolete. Rather, Updike shows that mass culture is now a significant component of the real. These four books tell the story of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom in ten-year intervals beginning in 1959, when he is twenty-six, and ending in 1989, when dies of a heart attack. Each novel is quite precisely located in time by reference to popular culture and current events. Throughout the novels, Harry is married to Janice, has a son named Nelson, and has interactions with many of the same characters who reside in the vicinity of Brewer, Pennsylvania, a fictional version of Reading. Since Updike is widely recognized as a realist, it is not my main task to demonstrate that his fiction fits the conventions. Rather, it is to show how these novels render their picture of the social order. “Realist,” however, does have many different connotations, so it is also worthwhile first to briefly show that Updike’s novels meet the criteria defined by the nineteenth-century paradigm I set out earlier.
More than most fiction, the Rabbit novels are rigorously contemporary. The action of each novel takes place within a year or two of the novel’s publication. We can date the novels’ events so precisely because of the mass-cultural references, which include songs, movies, news events, political issues, and social and economic conditions. Updike has said that he views himself as akin to a chronicler, a role that nineteenth-century realists as different as Balzac and Trollope often understood themselves explicitly to have performed. Moreover, Updike is known for his indulgence in description, for which he has been both lauded and criticized. Alfred Kazin in the early 1970s classified Updike as a “professional observer” and asserted, “Updike writes as if there were no greater pleasure than reconstituting the world by writing”. James Plath has likened Updike to Vermeer and observes that his “attempts to apply painterly techniques in fiction . . . have elicited nearly the same lack of critical understanding that greeted Vermeer during the painter’s lifetime.” Plath quotes Arthur Mizener’s review of Pigeon Feathers, which avers that Updike has a “highly negotiable talent for adorning his stories with a cosmatesque surface of very great and radically irrelevant decorative charm,” showing that the old critique of realism’s visual detail was alive and well in the 1960s.
As we saw with nineteenth-century novels, the sensory detail in the Rabbit tetralogy includes the visual but are not limited to it. Rabbit, Run opens with what Harry sees and hears when he comes upon some boys playing basketball: “Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices into the moist March air blue above the wires”. When Rabbit arrives home, Updike describes “the sunless vestibule” where “overhead, a daytime bulb burns dustily. Three tin mailboxes hang empty above a brown radiator. His downstairs neighbor’s door across the hall is shut like a hurt face. There is that smell which is always the same but that he can never identify; sometimes it seems cabbage cooking, sometimes the furnace’s rusty breath, sometime something soft decaying in the walls”. The sense of touch is described often in connection with sex, as in Harry’s memory of being with Janice before they were married, “her inside softly grainy, like a silk slipper”. Since Harry will be increasingly obsessed with food and drink as the series develops, there is much description of taste. These books are elaborately sensory.
Updike’s biographer, Adam Begley, noted the importance of character in Rabbit, Run, saying “the novel ultimately succeeds or fails as a portrait of its central character”. Since we are inside Harry’s head for much of the four novels, it is vital that we find him plausible. Most critics have, although it has been noted that Harry’s observations and his thoughts don’t always fit with what we expect of people with his level of education and social position. It is clear that the other major characters in the novels are also intended to be as lifelike as possible. Of course, Rabbit’s wife, Janet, is the most important of these, and Updike makes her a compelling character despite, or perhaps because, she allows her newborn daughter to drown in the bath. A few characters, like Skeeter and Reverend Eccles, strain credulity by seeming exaggerations, perhaps to the point of parody in Eccles’s case, but these instances would seem to represent a failure of design rather than intentional violation of plausible psychology.
Updike is famously described as a novelist of the domestic and the quotidian. As I argued in Modern Love, a number of Updike’s works that seem focused on adultery are better understood as “marriage fiction.” While the marriage plot may be the staple of the novel, novels usually end with the marriage and thus fail to describe it. Exceptions tend to be books where adultery is the focus. While Rabbit, Run does make Harry’s adultery a major focus, the Rabbit novels as a group are a four-volume portrait of a marriage. They are defined by domesticity, which Rabbit, try as he might, cannot abandon to light out for the territories. Rabbit’s marriage is certainly not happy in any conventional sense, yet it is not unendurable either. Almost all of the novels’ events happen within a domestic space, and most of these are mundane. Even the baby’s drowning, while terrible for the family, is not presented melodramatically. Perhaps the most extreme event in the series is the arson murder of the runaway Jill when Rabbit’s neighbors torch his house in Rabbit Redux. The violence and social unrest of the late 1960s here enters the domestic space, which for a moment is no longer mundane. Except for Skeeter, however, the characters are ordinary people (mainly white, but including some African Americans), and, as I will argue, they are not bourgeois. Their class status is also ordinary.
The horizon of the domestic pretty much guarantees the plausibility of these novels’ events. While religion is an important issue in Rabbit, Run, there is no sense in which the novel has God actively intervene in the characters’ lives. Indeed, one might conclude that His lack of intervention is one of the novel’s chief concerns. A few years later in discussing Couples, Updike will describe God as destroying our Churches, and one has the sense that Rabbit, Run is already depicting such churches. As I will discuss in more detail below, Updike’s references to contemporary events have the effect of confirming the likelihood of the novels’ events. But here again, Rabbit Redux may seem an exception. The little “commune” that Harry allows to develop at his suburban home does strain credulity. The extremity of events in this novel, however, for Updike reflects the extremity of events in contemporary America. Under these circumstances, a story too ordinary would not seem real.
Given the ordinariness, domesticity, and “middling” character of Rabbit’s world, it may not seem as though these novels deal with aspects of social life that are normally not known, confronted, or represented in artistic works. This perception is not entirely wrong; critics have generally not described these works with the adjective “gritty,” and indeed, Updike’s prose and Rabbit’s improving economic conditions have often inspired adjectives such as “lush.” But in at least one area, sex, one might also argue that revealing the mind of such an ordinary man as Harry is equally unusual. Finally, there is the matter of the drowned baby. What was new here is less the fact of the event than the way it is handled. It is neither the cause of a criminal charge nor the beginning of a character’s downfall. It isa more or less private tragedy with which Janet and Harry will learn to live. In these novels, the characters must live with their own sins or failures, because neither law nor society will punish them.
But if the Rabbit novels are obviously realist in most of their aspects, their representation of the social may be less apparent. These novels are focused on one character and his domestic life, and it is mainly in terms of his subjectivity that we experience their world. Harry’s interactions with the world, however, allow for a rich portrait of American society. Rather than be trapped in Harry’s head, we are propelled into the world by his thoughts and emotions. We are not trapped within the horizon of the middle class either, even though the Angstrom family will join that class as the series progresses. Thus, the breadth and depth of the social depiction in the four novels are unusually detailed even among the other contemporary realists.
Harry Angstrom is the son of a linotype operator from a small town in southeastern Pennsylvania. When we first meet Harry, he is working in retail, demonstrating products in a department store. Neither he nor his wife Janice went to college. He started his employment at the store moving furniture around the showroom, but he now wears a suit to demonstrate “MagicPeels” to housewives. Janice is the daughter of the owner of a used car lot. She is now at home raising their two-year-old son, Nelson, and expecting another child. They live in a rented apartment on the top floor of a triplex. In 1959, they own a used 1955 Ford that Janice’s father insisted Harry buy from him to replace the 1939 Nash he had acquired while in the service in Texas. We learn all of this in first few pages of Rabbit, Run, but it seems as though the novel’s critics haven’t paid much attention. They insist that Harry and Janice are “middle class” or “bourgeois,” when the novel makes it plain that they are working class, as Updike himself acknowledged in his introduction to the one-volume edition of the novels, Rabbit Angstrom. Janice’s family are petit bourgeois, which makes them middle-class, but Janice has married down.
The Rabbit novels’ social vision begins from a working-class perspective, which is strongly reinforced in the next installment. In Rabbit Redux, Harry has joined his father working the linotype at the Verity Press in Brewer, apparently soon after the end of Rabbit, Run, since the novel tells us he has been at it for ten years. In the first novel, Harry briefly becomes a gardener for a genuinely bourgeois widow, but his work life fades into insignificance as the novel focuses on his marriage, affair, separation, and the death of his daughter. In the second novel, however, Harry’s work is central to the development of plot and character. As the novel opens, we find Harry and his father leaving work “pale” like “ghosts” in the winter dark. The effects of Harry’s sedentary employment are shown on his body, “the thick waist and cautious stoop bred into him by a decade of the Linotyper’s trade”. This work is, unusually even for realist fiction, incorporated into the novel’s text, which includes passages from the weekly newspaper he has set in type. These passages include mistakes that Harry has made, causing him to have to retype lines or to duplicate lines apparently left uncorrected. His boss complains about Janice calling him at work, and one of her calls results in his typing becoming gibberish. Before the novel’s end, Harry will lose this job as the company shifts to photo-offset technology. The novel represents in this way the decline of traditional skilled working-class jobs in the face of automation, and as the next novel will explore, foreign competition.
One reason that critics may read Harry and Janice as middle class is that at the start of Rabbit Redux, they have moved to new suburban subdivision known as Penn Villas, with “ranch houses and quarter-acre lawns”. This is doubtless an improvement over their third-floor apartment in Mt. Judge, but it would be a mistake to understand merely living in a new suburb as a definitive marker of middle-class status. The exodus of Americans from urban centers beginning after World War II to subdivisions such as the several Levittowns included many working-class families. As wages for working-class men increased during the 1950s and 1960s, many more would move into what seemed to be middle-class neighborhoods. These improved economic fortunes contributed to the illusion that most Americans were now part of a large, homogeneous middle. Yet these subdivisions themselves were class stratified; the workers who lived in them continued to be ranked by the work they did. They remained “blue-collar” workers, lower in status and usually employment stability than professional or “white-collar” workers. Harry’s class status is reinforced by the fact that he has to take the bus to work, the family now owning only one car, a Ford Falcon.
Rabbit Redux makes much of the difference between Penn Villas and the city of Brewer. The latter’s decline is described on the opening page, “The city, attempting to revive its dying downtown, has torn away blocks of buildings to create parking lots, so that a desolate openness, weedy and rubbled, spills through the once-packed streets”. Brewer is inhabited increasingly by African Americans. Harry at the beginning of the novel thinks that there are too many Negroes on his bus and that they are too noisy. While Harry also expresses some sympathy for African Americans and awareness of their unequal treatment, the novel has him set articles that describe crimes that they have allegedly committed. These observations of social disorder are accompanied by talk of economic peril ahead. When Harry loses his job, his father explains that they are keeping him on only because he will retire within the year, saying their boss “is running scared, of course. The whole economy’s running scared”. The novel ends with Harry having neither a job nor a house, though he is reunited with Janice.
Ten years later, at the start of Rabbit Is Rich, Harry’s fortunes have changed as result of Janice inheriting her father’s car business, which has grown into a Toyota dealership. Yet the novel does not begin with a celebration of Harry’s good fortune, but with him thinking that the “world is running out of gas,” and observing “the people out there are getting frantic, they know the great American ride is ending”. The nation is in the midst of the second energy crisis of the 1970s, with rising gas prices and many gas stations closed. As a result, gas-sipping Toyotas are in demand, and that has been very good for Harry. He is “rich,” yet he is still living with Janice’s mother in her house in Mt. Judge. Harry has risen out of the working class – not by hard work, but dumb luck – but he is still not genuinely rich, not a member of the bourgeoisie. As Updike put it in his introduction to Rabbit Angstrom, “Rabbit is rich, of course, only by the standards of his modest working-class background”.
As the owner of an auto dealership, Harry is still not bourgeois, but petty bourgeois. He is a small-business man, and, as the final two novels will show, not someone with much real power. It is important to insist on this analysis of class, even though it is not one most Americans are in the habit of using. The vast majority Americans, as polls have often shown, think of themselves as “middle class.” Historically in Europe, the bourgeoisie were the middle class, positioned between the peasants and the aristocracy. But since the United States has never had an aristocracy, the haute bourgeoisie are not middle, but upper class. Among those who fall generally in the middle are not only the traditional petty bourgeois, but the professional-managerial class, and the upper echelons of the working class. That all of these people are likely to identify as middle class does not make them a genuine class: like the peasants Marx discusses in the “Eighteenth Brumaire,” they lack a sense of common interests and a political project, and they have very different roles in the relations of production. Updike’s richly detailed accounts of Rabbit’s social and economic position allow us to better understand how class functions in American society.
While the term “petty bourgeois” is foreign in a way that “bourgeois” is not, the petty bourgeoisie were long the backbone of American capitalism and of American conservatism. The owners of small businesses were the bedrock of the economies of small towns, especially if one considers prosperous family farms as such businesses. Those small towns and the smaller cities, such as Brewer, that resemble them in many ways, were beginning to decline in the late 1960s, the two later novels coinciding with the beginning of the general decline of the American petty bourgeois and the small towns and cities where they once were locally dominant. Rabbit at Rest gives us a stark example of the limits of petty bourgeois power and economic stability in the meeting between Harry and Mr. Shimida, the representative the Toyota Corporation, who arrives at Harry’s lot in a limousine to tell him that he is taking away the franchise.
This is not to say that in Rabbit Is Rich Harry himself continues to struggle economically, just that his place in the social hierarchy now really is “middling,” and it is by no means secure. The Angstroms will purchase their own home in Penn Park, a more upscale suburb populated by “divorce lawyers and dermatologists,” a place Harry has “always kind of dreamed . . . of living”. Even here, their home will be smaller than average, perhaps a former “gardener’s cottage”. Harry will invest in gold and then silver coins, reaping in about four months nearly $10,000 in profit, money that covers nearly two thirds of the down payment on the house. After buying the house, Harry, Janice, and several other couples take a vacation to Puerto Rico, where Rabbit will get “cleaned out” at the blackjack tables. The second event does not negate the first – Harry isn’t really “cleaned out” – but it does emphasize that financial speculation is gambling. The novel calls attention to the way risky investments, once the province only of the very rich, were now being pursued by many who really cannot afford the risk.
We learn in Rabbit at Rest that the Angstroms bought a condominium on the west coast of Florida in the mid-1980s and started spending half a year there while leaving Nelson in charge of the dealership. Second-home ownership would seem to be another marker of success, but Updike makes clear that this partial retirement – he is “at rest” even as the novel starts – is not good for Harry. He eats too much and badly, exacerbating his heart problems. Moreover, Nelson has developed a cocaine habit and has been embezzling from the business in order to support it. As a result, the Angstroms will lose the Toyota agency and have to consider selling the condo. Janice will get her real estate license and Harry will die before that can happen.
The four novels, then, do not tell a Horatio Alger story, although Rabbit’s path to success does involve the luck (but not the pluck) that the Alger novels featured but played down. The Rabbit books do not in any simple sense transmit the ideology of universal upward mobility, since the Angstrom family does not inherit any riches from Rabbit. The novels aren’t intended as an explicit critique of the American class system or ideology’s erasure of it, but they reveal that system to anyone willing to look for it. They embed their characters in a social web that is as detailed as any described by Zola. It has been argued that Rabbit Is Rich is a naturalist novel: “Updike restricts his protagonist’s freedom in so many ways that Rabbit Is Rich suggests the naturalistic “chronicle of decline,” the reverse success story. While a careful comparison of Rabbit to the protagonist of naturalist fiction would reveal many differences and even this critic himself backs away from this claim in his conclusion, his reading also gains support from Rabbit at Rest, where we see Harry’s decline in multiple registers. There is one clear allusion in Rabbit is Rich to Frank Norris’s naturalist novel McTeague (and to its film adaptation in von Stroheim’s Greed) when Harry and Janice have sex on a bed covered in gold coins. Moreover, if Updike does not treat either hereditary or environmental conditions as determinate in the way that Zola did, he does regard each impinging significantly on his characters’ fates. While Harry may not have anything so specific as the Lantiers’s propensity for alcoholism, his character nevertheless enables some things and rules out others. One might say that Updike’s sense of human limitations is closer to Gramsci’s premise that “the consciousness of what one really is . . . as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory”. Neither Harry nor Updike’s readers can know exactly why he must end up as he does, but both have a sense that it is not merely a matter of making rational or moral choices.
