When John Updike killed off Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom in Rabbit at Rest (1990), he was also closing an important chapter in US social history. Rabbit's life story is more than one man's skid from youth to age, it chronicles four decades in the life of a nation in crisis. And if the first three volumes, Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971) and Rabbit is Rich (1981) read as a manic chase rather than dance to the music of time, that remarkable final volume culminating in our hero's death pulsates throughout with a subtle whiff of mortality. It is among Updike's finest achievements. Now, 10 years on, he has wisely decided not to revive his dead buddy, ever in a hurry, dead at 56, instead evoking his memory in "Rabbit Remembered".
This sequel dominates - indeed almost overpowers - several, though not all, of the dozen short stories gathered in Licks of Love, his first collection since The Afterlife (1994), his best collection to date. Not that the Rabbit sequel dominance surprises: old Harry and his blue-collarish clan, including Janice, the betrayed wife who eventually had her own moment of rebellion, were always that bit louder than Updike's slightly more refined middle class marrieds-in-a-mess.
What does surprise is that his publishers did not opt to publish a Rabbit sequel as a solo book. Even at just under 200 pages, this novella could easily have stood on its own. While his master has allowed Bech, Updike's WASP variation of the stock Jewish writer ever at the mercy of sex, ambition and reputation, to defy time and death (a weak Bech story features here), Rabbit is different. Any Updike fan will approach Rabbit 10 years beyond his death with some caution. No nostalgic step back in time is on offer. From the opening sound of the old door bell as it "scrapes the silence, decades of rust", having "all but destroyed its voice, the thing will die entirely some day", Janice and co. are firmly in a brutal present in which the ghost of Harry resides less as a memory and more like a wayward genie.
Janice, re-married to none other than Harry's old pal and rival, Ronnie Harrison, seems to have lost her former, late-found energy. Her hip twinges when she moves, and she doesn't hear as well as she used to either. "So many she cared about are dead." When she opens the door, the middle-aged stranger standing there introduces herself as an orphan, her mother having just died, and hopes Janice has some answers. Made nervous by Janice's unhelpful attitude, the woman falters. "Oh. I guess - I guess you were married to my father." As the news washes over Janice she notices a mail truck passing: "mailmen used to be men; now theirs is a mail-lady." She invites the stranger in, "though admitting to her home this piece of a shameful dead past disgusts as well as frightens her". The conversation that develops is classic Updike, balancing the sheer physical presence of Annabelle Byer, daughter of Ruth Leonard and Harry, against Janice's emerging fears. "Her heart is caught in a net of calculation as to how this innocently disgusting intrusion will affect her life and disturb her peace. With Ronnie being so steady compared to Harry, she has known peace.".
It all unfolds without recrimination; "in spite of herself" and her instinct to protect herself, Janice's curiosity begins to evolve in the story Annabelle, Harry's "emissary from the grave" has to tell about growing up in the country with her mother and the man her mother married and whom Annabelle knew as "dad". Good old Harry ignored his responsibilities, but he did visit Ruth, as Annabelle recalls, "the year he died, I guess. Somehow he had found our farm". The appearance of another child gathers momentum when Nelson, the now divorced son of Janice and Harry, currently living back with mom, is told about the visit. Having proved a disaster in business - and there was that trouble with drugs - Nelson is now, oh irony of ironies, working as a counsellor. Nelson is very interested in his new half-sister.
Throughout this story Updike displays his genius for sustained characterisation and describing family tensions and aggressions, in particular the layers in which these turmoils remain suspended in time. Mention of the now dead Ruth also reintroduces the fact that Ronnie also spent some time with her. And let us not forget that Rabbit also had an affair with Ronnie's now dead first wife Thelma. So many ghosts come out to play in this piece, including the long-dead baby girl, Becky. There are also the inimitable physical descriptions that have always featured in Updike's work. Ronnie "has lost 30 pounds since Janice first knew him, and he has that deflated, slumped look of people you remember as fatter. His hair, which was kinky and brass-coloured, is almost all gone, even over his ears, so they stick out as rubbery red flesh. His pale eyelashes are almost invisible now, which makes his eyelids look pink and rubbed".
Although the tone is determinedly unsentimental and an element of open warfare hangs over it, Updike retains the punch of the Rabbit quartet, and there are some quiet moments of revelation, such as when Nelson ponders about Harry. "His father had been a rebel of a sort, and a dare devil. But as he got older and tame he radiated happiness at just the simplest American things, driving along in an automobile, the radio giving off music, the heater giving off heat . . ." It is a suitable epitaph for the muddled, instinctive responses of Harry, even when Nelson admits to Annabelle, "I saw him eventually as a loser, who never found his niche and floated along on Mom's money, which was money her father made". He emerges not as hero but as person. "To Nelson as a child his own death seemed possible in so perilous a world but he never believed his father would die."
Yes, Rabbit overshadows this collection. But two superb stories - "The Cats" , which returns to the gentle mastery of Updike's finest story, "A Sandstone Farmhouse"; and "My Father on the Verge of Disgrace", in which the narrator recalls "a tall, long-legged man who needed to keep moving" - are beautiful. In "The Cats", the narrator summoned by his mother's death returns to the old sandstone farmhouse in the country where he had once lived to deal with the 40 stray felines dependent on her. As he contends with the starving cats, and his bickering family who have arrived for the funeral, the narrator reflects, "As for my mother, it is strange, once a life is over, how little there is to say about it".
Elsewhere a loving woman is used for sex and companionship while the narrator knowingly admits to sacrificing her in favour of an unloved wife and the status quo. When the lover does find a new life, the narrator can't forgive her. More than any other writer, Updike has consistently explored the often cruel confusion of love and sexual dependence as well as the brutality of time passing. His fine novel, Toward the End of Time (1997), continued the elegiac mood which has entered his work since The Afterlife collection. Even at his most personal, he is also assessing the US. His work has contributed a nearly complete portrait of modern America and social class. Above all, at its best, his prose is as beautiful as it is vibrant. It takes the complex intelligence and wit of the clever, humane Updike, now 69, to make life, any life, even that of a Harry Angstrom, as profound as it is. I still think he should win the Nobel Prize. Perhaps this year he will.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
