Updike’s talent for raising mundanity to the level of beauty, in language approaching poetry, is nowhere more in evidence than in the Rabbit series, four books spanning the decades from the 1960’s to the 1990’s. They chronicle the life of former high school basketball star Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, after his moment in the sun has passed. In a way, Rabbit was Updike’s alter ego, as he said in the Academy of Achievement interview: “Rabbit…and I share roughly the same age and [were] born in the same place, but I’ve long left Berks County. He stayed there, and it’s a kind of me that I’m not. I never was a basketball star. I wasn’t handsome the way he is, and nor did I have to undergo the temptations of being an early success that way, so that for me it was a bit of a stretch. Not an immense stretch to imagine what it’s like to be Rabbit, but enough of one that it was entertaining for me to write about him, and maybe some of the self-entertainment got into the book….I can kind of walk around Rabbit in a way it’s hard to walk around, say, the autobiographical hero of some of your short stories, where it’s your twin, you know, and you’re attached. It’s the idea of breaking that attachment, I think, that matters and where the fiction really begins to take off when you can get somebody else in your sights.”
Not only did Updike get Rabbit firmly in his sights but also the other characters in the book: Rabbit’s wife, Janice, his son, Nelson, his parents, Janice’s parents, and a host of other characters, including Reading itself, which he named Brewer. Rabbit is not an easy man to love; he is selfish, often disloyal, startling in the narrowness of some of his viewpoints. The books feature much lust and infidelity. He floats along in what seems like a perpetual undertow that threatens to suck everyone, including himself, under. “Breaking the attachment” allowed Updike to make of Rabbit someone who can do more than his fair share of damage.
