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Please note that, where applicable, links have been provided to original texts which these letters address. Also, feel free to submit your thoughts via the online Letters to the Editor section.
Rabbit Revered
"Rabbit Reread" ("The Browser," July-August) by Professor
Robert Kiely calls John Updike to task for creating in the character of
Harry Angstrom someone who is not very bright, only vaguely aware of momentous
political and other events taking place around him, and doesn't change much
over the years. Kiely criticizes these four novels for not having "a
moral, political, or emotional edge."
But why should these matters loom large in Updike's or anyone else's novels?
Updike's genius lies partly in his refusal to turn his characters into literary
clichés-people who undergo cathartic changes which result in redemptive
and/or constructive behavior. Updike has exercised his gifted imagination
to create a character who, like Flaubert's Emma Bovary, wants to change
his life from the outside in and ends up at square one. Furthermore, like
Flaubert, Updike is a master of le mot juste; his obvious love for the English
language shines from every page. Finally, he has made it possible for me
to know Harry Angstrom intimately-perhaps more intimately than some "real"
men in my life.
I'm not sure that I like Harry, but I do know him well enough to feel sorry
for him, to be exasperated by him, and to want to throttle him from time
to time. I have, over the 60 years of my life, undergone more than one cathartic
experience, but I do not disparage those-real or fictional-who have not.
Dorothy Meckel, M.A. '62, Ed.D. '77
Cambridge
As a rule, a novelist cannot offer his commercial success to rebut a critic's
dismissal of his literary achievement. Kiely's dismissal of Updike's achievement
is an exception to this rule. Kiely faults Updike for not providing the
protagonist of his critically acclaimed and commercially successful "Rabbit"
cycle of novels with the traits that protagonists of commercial fiction
commonly have. Rabbit is not larger than life. He is narrow, selfish, vulgar,
and boring. He lives his life in settings that are not glamorus or dangerous
but drab and glum.
All of this Updike's admirers may easily concede. What Updike himself said
of Rabbit at Rest is true to a considerable extent of the entire cycle:
Rabbit is "depressed and depressing." But depressing books do
not usually become bestsellers. Updike's cycle ought to have been a commercial
failure. If it was a success, and it was indeed a success, the explanation
can only be sought in Updike's literary skill, his ability to make himself
interesting as a writer even when writing on an intrinsically uninteresting
and occasionally repellent character. He made it hard for himself. He put
obstacles in his own path. When he overcame them, he brought millions with
him.
Is this not obvious? I should think that even readers who for other reasons
don't care for Updike would have to concede at least this much. Updike has
weaknesses, but Kiely, perversely, has faulted him for a strength.
Jack Miles, Ph.D. '71, Director
Humanities Center
Claremont Graduate School
Claremont, Cal.
Seldom has a usually perceptive critic so badly misread a work of fiction
as Kiely has misread Updike's Rabbit books. With eerie accuracy Kiely has
found the novel's virtues...and then turned them into defects.
I recommend that Kiely get out of Cambridge for a while and go to live in
a medium-sized city in Pennsylvania or any other state. He will then discover
Rabbit's world just as Updike has captured it. The Rabbit books are a portrait
of a large segment of America. Kiely may not like that large segment, but
his dislike should not diminish Updike's achievement in rendering it exactly,
without the alterations, condescension, or elevation that Kiely seems to
want.
Harvey Ginsberg '52
New York City
The trouble with being a successful, productive writer like Updike is that
you have to endure being set straight by dissatisfied readers. Recently
Gore Vidal has taken him to task for loving America too much, too complacently;
now Kiely expresses his displeasure with the Rabbit novels and their protagonist,
Harry Angstrom. Harry "and his ilk," so Kiely tells us, are "clueless
about the big political and social forces that are raging around them."
And Updike doesn't seem to mind this "untalented lowbrow" all
that much, even seems to approve of his insularity and insensibility.
It's odd that Kiely, an English professor, shouldn't think to look to where
the energy and excitement of these novels lie: that is, in the writing,
the individual sentences that make a "dumb" character very interesting
indeed. In fact the "character" of Rabbit Angstrom is not a monolithic
given, but as smart or as dumb, as prosaic or poetic, as inarticulate or
eloquent, as Updike's writing chooses, moment by moment, to make it.
Kiely invites us to read Flannery O'Connor, Bellow, Pynchon, and Ellison
for "a more vital, challenging, entertaining portrait of life in postwar
America." In fact Bellow's marvelous Seize the Day has a protagonist,
Tommy Wilhelm, who is even more "clueless" than Rabbit. Considered
apart, that is, from Bellow's prose, which makes him into something very
different.
At one point I note that Kiely describes Rabbit's Pennsylvania hometown
as "nondescript." I grew up in Johnson City, New York, in a town
not far from and much like the one in Updike's tetralogy. It was not in
the least nondescript. Where did Kiely grow up?
William H. Pritchard, Ph.D. '60
Department of English
Amherst College
At first I took [Kiely's review] to be a parody of politically correct criticism,
complete with the idea that the only people one can mock or rebuke are middle-class
WASPs like poor Rabbit. Perhaps he is not Leopold Bloom, but as a character,
he stands distinctively above Babbitt and Forrest Gump.
Even though Updike writes in the third person, he preserves Rabbit's perspective.
This makes the charges of bigotry and anti-Semitism against Updike particularly
unfair. The creator of Bech is no anti-Semite. And characters that have
some typical traits are not necessarily stereotypes.
I hope fervently that Updike will win the Nobel Prize, but fear the political
biases of the judges are more in sympathy with Kiely's. George Steiner,
one of our finest critics, has said that Updike's genius has earned his
books a place on the bookshelf next to Hawthorne and Nabokov. Not bad.
Mal Oettinger '54
Chapel Hill, N.C.
"Rabbit Reread" got one thing right: it was unwise to publish
the four Rabbit volumes in one mega-novel. Although Updike conceived this
idea about halfway through the venture, his 1995 introduction to the quartet
notes the importance of reading it in the separate sequence of its composition:
with roughly a decade intervening for reflection and recollection. Only
one of the many delights of such reading lay in sifting one's perceptions
of the previous book(s) in the light of the new one. Moreover, for me the
Rabbit books marked significant stages in my own life, so they offered a
fascinating measure of my own relation to Harry's American culture that
Updike so sensitively documented.
Naomi Ritter, Ph.D. '69
Professor emerita of German
University of Missouri
Bloomington, Ind.
Kiely's putdown of the Rabbit novels seems almost willfully unresponsive
and unobservant. Updike's achievement in these books goes well beyond tracing
the life history of one frequently self-pitying and certainly uneducated
but not at all insensitive or unintelligent protagonist. Through the whole
series, the manifest ground or field of action has been the progressive
breakdown of all the main traditional supports of ordinary life-church,
marriage, schooling, community and family, occupational stability and satisfaction-and
a resulting hollowness or emptiness in our common quotidian existence that
leaves homeless and dangerously unanchored the deep human desire for integration,
for some decent fusion of selfhood and living circumstance. As all Updike's
writing acknowledges, the imperatives of this desire are ultimately religious,
whatever reckless form they may take on.
Updike has set this story in the world he knows best and has a birthright
intimacy with, the world of small towns and small cities, economically decaying
(as in fact they have been for decades); a world with no opening to the
privileged life of well-rewarded professionalism with its workplace sanctuaries
and sabbatical escape hatches. I do not myself find that he has "condescended"
(Kiely's term) to this world and its embroiled populace. He has been at
once the ruefully accurate chronicler of our vast middle-class American
peasantry and the loving poet of its ramshackle daily environment.
Perhaps the critic's error in this case was in rereading all four Rabbit
novels, all 1,516 pages, straight through without time out for imaginative
incubation. Even the Bible suffers if you go at it in that fashion.
Warner Berthoff '47
Concord, Mass.
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