John Updike's Pennsylvania Interviews by James Plath

Author:James Plath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lehigh University Press
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 26

“Fresh Air with Terry Gross: John Updike (Rabbit at Rest)”

As heard on Fresh Air with Terry Gross (1990)

WHYY Radio / Terry Gross / October 17, 1990

Transcribed from Fresh Air with Terry Gross (1990). Fresh Air is produced at WHYY in Philadelphia, Pa., and distributed by National Public Radio.

John Updike didn’t want to leave the story of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom unfinished. With the fourth Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest, Updike completes the series and completes the story of an American life. Each of the Rabbit novels is set in the last year of the decade, beginning with Rabbit, Run in 1959. When we meet Rabbit, he’s in his late twenties, a former high-school basketball star living in a small Pennsylvania town. He’s dissatisfied with life, alienated from his wife and child. As the books progress, Rabbit inherits his late father-in-law’s car dealership. He’s prosperous, he has extramarital affairs, but he’s still dissatisfied. He remains alienated in 1989, in the final novel. He’s overweight, fifty-five years old, and living in retirement half the year in Florida. His heart is bad, he’s losing his drive, his life is running down, and he’s in debt because his son has been stealing money from the family car dealership to feed his coke habit.

Like Rabbit, Updike is from a small town in Pennsylvania, but the author has led a very different life from his character. Yet the Rabbit novels are marvelously detailed. I asked Updike how he knows so much about Rabbit.

Updike: He’s not so different from me. He’s about my age, so that’s easy, and I know about Pennsylvania. And the details of how to run a car dealership I tried to work up in the preceding novel, although there isn’t an awful a lot of that detail here. The rest is a matter of faith, really. You construct these dolls and then you throw yourself at them and hope that they’ll walk and talk and that you’ll be able to know what goes on in their heads. And I’ve never had trouble making Harry do things or having access to what seems to be a very busy mind of his. He’s always reflecting and seeing and making remarks to himself. In that sense, he’s a very responsive character.

Gross: There are very detailed descriptions of heart procedures, like angioplasty, in your book. How was your health during the writing of this book? The character Rabbit is constantly experiencing chest pains, even from the first page. Were you undergoing anything like this yourself?

Updike: Well, I think my chest has always been one of my weak points, and I did have chest pains. I found that they ceased, though, once I stopped writing the book. The book kind of weighed on my chest, and I had to, as they say, get it off my chest. So yeah, I felt kind of frail and squeezed. He also talks about that feeling of being squeezed—but that’s very Rabbit-like, isn’t it? I mean, life itself squeezes him in ways he doesn’t like, and his whole exertion is to get away from the squeeze of the circumstances.

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