Cabbage Moon

By R.Z. Sheppard

RABBIT REDUX by John Updike. 406 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk.

--Rabbit, Run

When last seen through the mist of such depressing lyrics. Harry ("Rabbit") Angstrom was hustling his 6 feet 3 inches over the drab surface of Mount Judge, Pa., and away from his responsibilities. That was in 1960 at the conclusion of John Updike's Rabbit, Run. Unlike Huckleberry Finn, Rabbit had no expansive territory ahead. Tethered by circumstances, he could only enjoy what Updike calls "a little ecstasy of motion."

Rabbit, Run appeared just after a decade that had seen the American family organized into malleable consuming units by television and magazines dedicated to "togetherness." It was a time of young marriages, early pregnancies and "coping." Rabbit's species, in fact, was rapidly proliferating in millions of small garden apartments from coast to coast. At 26, his exploits as a high school basketball star had faded into barbershop statistics. He was wed-locked to Janice Springer, the dim little broad who had sold nuts at the five and dime. He had fathered a daughter and a son, inheritor of those "little Springer hands" that preclude championship ball control. In his first escape attempt, Rabbit sought solace with a girl nearly as melancholy as himself. But he had to return home to bury his baby daughter who drowned after a drunken Janice misplaced the child in the bathtub.

In Rabbit Redux (Rabbit led back), Rabbit, at 36, is still married to Janice. The time is the apogee of the Swinging Sixties. Rawest obscenities have become household words. Adulteries are public events, and man is about to land on the moon--a lifeless body that Updike employs to suggest the deadness of Rabbit's own existence. Janice still has her special little knack for attracting attention. "I'm searching for a valid identity and I suggest you do the same," she tells Rabbit in her best TV talk-show jargon. Her search has led her to the bed and board of Charlie Stavros, a car salesman at her father's Toyota agency.

In effect. Rabbit has been dozing for ten years. War protesters, longhairs. demanding blacks and all the upheavals of the decade have touched him only as agitated dream shadows on his TV set. His son Nelson, now 13, is still undersized and smallhanded. Home is a cheesy one-family house in a development on the outskirts of West Brewer, Pa. Mom Angstrom is dying; Pop works at Verity Press, where Rabbit finally wound up as a linotype operator.

Rabbit now sees himself as a C-minus human being, and practically boasts, "1 don't think enough to know what 1 think." His gut reaction to difficult issues is a cynical conservatism. Like so many lifers with little hope of parole, he defends his prison because he must live in it. From this human and literary dead end, Updike leads Rabbit back to a measure of vitality. Not surprisingly, the agents of change come courtesy of the youth rebellion and those threatening yet fascinating blacks.

Rabbit's Penn Villas warren becomes a crash pad for Jill, a teen-age runaway from suburban Connecticut, and a skinny black radical named Skeeter, a curious combination of Flip Wilson, Rap Brown and early Malcolm X. As in Couples, it is again a fire that destroys, purges or does whatever fire is supposed to do in such charged circumstances. Rabbit's house is burned down by Penn Villas residents who are less concerned about their property values than about their children watching Jill and Skeeter get high and fornicate.

Here are all the ingredients for a standard shocker. Still, Updike handles his characters with a combination of controlled repugnance and tolerance that results in some very close readings of their emotional fevers. His style does not preclude tenderness, kindness or sensitivity, although he often seems like an experienced physician smoothly examining a naked patient. The effect is a fascination that distracts the mind from predictability of both plot and retribution. The end finds Rabbit and Janice joining up once again with the cold, metallic precision of a lunar landing vehicle docking with its command module after a mission. "O.K.?" is the last word of the novel. It is a taciturn echo of space talk, but it is also a grounded, middle-aged Updike saying, in effect, "What did you expect?"

Such a well-programmed novel might be described as "situation tragedy," were it not for the suspicion that Updike also intended a sort of nursery fable for grownups: naughty Rabbit gets into strange cabbage patches but is always chastened and led back home. Yet Redux is superior to recent novels that trudge after social significance like recruits in new boots. Updike, after all, owns a rare verbal genius, a gifted intelligence and a sense of tragedy made bearable by wit. How the truth about Janice's well-known affair finally gets on the kitchen table is a tidy masterpiece.

As a character, the older Rabbit is far from flawless. His tongue is sometimes a trifle too sharp for his faculties. But there is something hard and durable about him. It is as if his brief glory as an athlete left him with an inner grace that will never be completely hidden by the sallowing of middle age. He possesses a certain open-endedness and possibilities, if not for change, at least for further misadventure.

sbR. Z. Sheppard

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