In Rabbit Redux, my favourite, which is set in America in 1969 (the Apollo moon landing race riots the oil crisis etc), it’s Janice who has left Harry. In the first volume, he leaves his boozy wife, Janice, to go off with a call-girl (but not for long). Harry is a good man whose circumstances provoke him to do bad things. On first meeting, Harry is selling a revolutionary vegetable-peeler on commission (later, he will run a Toyota dealership), and wrestling with a miserable suburban marriage. Perfect pitch illuminated every line he wrote with an airy and zestful brilliance Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, who owes something to Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt ( No 47 in this series), is as much Updike’s fictional alter ego as Zuckerman is Philip Roth’s, a college basketball star of Swedish ancestry who has to reconcile himself, after a dazzling start, to the long littleness of life among the American middle class. Among many possible fiction choices – his debut, The Poorhouse Fair the sensational scandal of Couples the exhilarating magical realism of The Witches of Eastwick – I’ve picked his panoramic masterpiece, the Henry Angstrom series, a portrait of America compiled over four decades: Rabbit, Run (1960) Rabbit Redux (1971) Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990). By the end of his career, he had become one of the most complete and versatile men of letters in his country’s history. Finally, he brought his gifts of wit, curiosity and invention to the American novel. When that ambition misfired, he took his delight in the English sentence and made a name for himself as a New Yorker short story writer.
He was always something of a miniaturist. J ohn Updike is 20th-century American literature’s blithe spirit, a virtuoso of language whose perfect pitch illuminated every line he wrote with an airy and zestful brilliance.
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