Rabbit Redux
John Updike · 1932–2009 · United States
Why it matters
A decade after fleeing his marriage, Harry Angstrom faces 1960s upheaval (race, drugs, the counterculture) invading his own suburban home. The second Rabbit novel widens Updike's study of American manhood into the era's turmoil.
At a glance
Dense, sensuous prose sustained across a loosely plotted domestic drama.
Deep dive
What happens once the 1960s, race, drugs, a runaway teenager, a fugitive radical, start moving into Harry Angstrom's own house instead of staying safely out on the highway he used to run down.
Written for readers who have finished the book. No plot recap, and nothing here is safe to read first.
Themes & symbolism
A decade after Rabbit, Run, the flight has reversed direction: Janice is the one who leaves, taking up with a colleague from her family's car lot, and Harry, left alone with his son Nelson, goes strangely passive, letting his house fill with people who represent everything mid-century suburban Pennsylvania has spent a decade trying not to look at. Jill is a runaway teenage heiress fleeing her own wealth into drugs and a performed kind of radicalism; Skeeter is a Black Vietnam veteran and self-styled revolutionary hiding out from a weapons charge.
Updike stages long, uncomfortable late-night arguments between Harry and Skeeter, Skeeter lecturing him on Black history and rage with a force Harry can neither refute nor absorb. The novel isn't interested in whether Harry gets converted, he doesn't, cleanly, but in what it does to a man built entirely around instinct and reflex to be forced, for once, to sit still and listen to an argument he can't outrun. Where Rabbit, Run gave Harry all the interiority and treated the women around him as terrain, this one widens the frame by handing whole scenes over to people the earlier book would have kept off the page, even as Updike keeps the prose anchored in Harry's limited, half-comprehending point of view throughout.
Nelson, the Only One Actually Watching
The household's slide into drugs and chaos is narrated partly through what twelve-year-old Nelson witnesses and can't process, a child's helpless, uncomprehending spectatorship that indicts the adults' self-absorption more precisely than any authorial commentary could. Updike keeps returning to Nelson's confusion specifically because none of the grown-ups around him ever stop to consider what he's seeing.
Nelson's later resentment of his father, which Updike lets simmer rather than resolve within this novel, is built almost entirely out of scenes like these: a boy left to watch Jill get high in his own living room, left to intuit rather than be told why his mother has moved out, left, essentially, to parent his own understanding of the collapse because neither Harry nor Janice is doing it for him. The next two Rabbit novels cash that resentment in slowly, but Redux is where Updike plants it, in real time, without comment, trusting a reader to notice what none of the adults in the house ever do.
The last seal: what actually happens, and why it lands the way it does.
The ending, explained
Jill dies in a house fire that grows out of neighborhood hostility toward Skeeter's presence, an act of vigilante hatred the novel never lets Harry, or the reader, off the hook for failing to prevent. Skeeter flees before he can be blamed or protected, and Harry is left with nothing resolved, not his marriage, not his politics, not his sense of who he is. Only Janice, in the novel's exhausted final pages, drifts back toward him, both of them settling for each other less out of reconciliation than out of simply having nowhere else left to go.
