Two more Updike novels down the hatch. The first, Seek My Face, published in 2002, is an extended short story rooted in the author's prodigious knowledge of the contemporary art scene. It's casually written — as if Updike didn't try very hard. Should I be insulted that Updike didn't extend himself to invent a plot? The second novel is Rabbit at Rest, composed back in 1990 when Updike was trying harder. Harrry "Rabbit" Angstrom, "hero" of four novels, is a force in modern fiction. He's nasty, amoral, and crude, but hardly more so that the gaggle of suburbanite creatures who surround him. Updike mercilessly draws attention to everything odious in America culture — he's the poet laureate of tacky. Rabbit is fascinating but repellent. Whatever happened to "to teach and to delight?"
Every once in a while Rabbit, always, alas, comprehensible, becomes momentarily sympathetic. But then Updike allows him to speak — and Rabbit's words are invariably aggressive and offensive. I think that the gap between what Rabbit thinks and what Rabbit says is a major structural flaw in the novel — and one that will eventually push the novels from center to periphery. But time will tell. For now, the Rabbit books are a guide to our own American kind of shallowness — and so here I am, off to the library or to the second-hand bookstore to hunt down the earlier novels in this series. What does Dickens say about Uriah Heep — something about "fascinating in his own repulsion." Yes, I think that phrase will serve nicely for Updike's Rabbit.
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