Rabbit Redux

"I happen to believe that the peak period of conservatism as an intellectual force in American life came in the years 1967 to 1973. That’s when figures who were not identified in any way with conservative ideology or politics began making arguments that sounded classically conservative. Another example is Updike’s great novel Rabbit Redux, published in 1971. It’s the second in his Rabbit tetralogy, and generally the least admired today. The books themselves constitute a great classic in American literature , maybe the greatest of our period. Rabbit Redux is set in 1969 and it involves racial conflict, drugs, the dissolution of the family, and reactions and struggles over the war in Vietnam. Updike himself supported the war in Vietnam, and found himself almost isolated as a figure because of that support. And the reason he supported it is one that sounds very like the reason neoconservatives today supported the war in Iraq – it’s because Updike was offended by the liberals who denounced it. He didn’t necessarily believe there was much to be won in Vietnam – what shocked him was that Lyndon Johnson, the heir to the New Deal (and Updike was very much a New Dealer), should be accused of murder by American citizens in a very taunting, aggressive and dehumanising way. It was shocking to him. He describes this in his memoir, Self-Consciousness . The anti-Americanism of the American left appalled Updike. So, going back to his own world, his lower middle-class roots in Pennsylvania, what he does is make Rabbit Angstrom the precursor of the Reagan Democrat. Rabbit Angstrom is a lifelong Democrat, who voted for Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and is angered by the racial unrest, by African-Americans who seem to want government handouts. He is angered by students who come from much wealthier homes and circumstances, who have opportunities that Rabbit Angstrom has never had, who seem to hate America. Updike captures those passions with great immediacy. So that book made a huge impression on me. No, not at all. The genius of Updike is that he throws himself and his characters into the middle of the controversies of the day. So Rabbit himself smokes pot and has sex with an 18-year-old runaway who comes from a wealthy family in Connecticut. He lets a black militant live in his house. He’s drawn to all the forces that he is appalled by. And that’s the genius of fiction – instead of lecturing us about all of this, Updike tries to bring it to life from many perspectives, and make it feel very concrete. Not only did they miss them, they repudiated them. Both Updike and Bellow were very admired literary figures, but they were, to a certain extent, exiled from the most trendy and chic precincts of American culture. Bellow spent very little time in New York; Updike had already left New York in the 1950s. Updike has a line in his memoir, Self-Consciousness, where he says, ‘I don’t like New York audiences, they’re too smart and left-wing for me.’ He’s talking about the most brilliant people of his time. They were not only unheeded, but they were scorned for much of this. These are two of the greatest fiction writers in all of American literature and neither one of them is taught much on campus curricula, even to this day. I gave a talk at Yale a couple of years ago, and I knew that there would be people in the audience who would blog or comment about what they assumed my politics were, and how The Times Book Review has become neoconservative and all this silliness. I said, ‘Here is the most controversial thing I have to say: to me it is a disgrace that the fiction of John Updike and Saul Bellow is not taught to college students on this campus.’ That’s true. Updike was a lifelong Democrat, and Bellow was very ill at ease with the strong neoconservative agenda. He agreed with parts of it. I think they like Bellow better than they do Updike. Also they write very openly about sex – Updike in particular. They do not belong to ideological camps. I think that’s right."