Rabbit at Rest.

RABBIT AT REST is not just the best of the Rabbit books, of which it is the final installment, it is probably the best of its author's novels. Unless John Updike has something surprising up his sleeve, Rabbit at Rest is likely to prove his masterpiece. In this novel, Updike has achieved the serious writer's aim: namely, the perfection of his unique peculiarities of style, and their perfect reconciliation with one another. This is not to say that Updike has written a perfect novel (there is, and could be, no such thing), but simply that he has developed the technique of his own personal literary form just about as far as it can be pressed.

The earlier Rabbit books (Rabbit, Run, 1960; Rabbit Redux, 1971; Rabbit Is Rich, 1981) were more or less successful artistically, but each of them was in some degree spoiled by the author's inability (perhaps unwillingness) to subordinate the quality of natural and social realism to something superior and more real still. With Rabbit at Rest he has discovered that something and made the proper subordination. The result is a true and moving work, a beautiful book.

Rabbit at Rest opens with Harry Angstrom (former high-school star basketball player and car dealer in Brewer, Pennsylvania, now 55 and semi-retired in a condo in Florida) suffering angina pains, working up to his first heart attack, and closes with him lying minutes or hours from death after a second, catastrophic one. In the 512 pages that stretch between these situations, Updike gradually reveals the direction in which the uncertain saga of Harry, as chronicled in three previous novels composed over a period of twenty-some years, has actually been headed. In the fourth novel, an overriding preoccupation with mortality provides the text with an extra dimension that the previous works, though they too were not strangers to death, lacked. In its shadow, the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom resolves itself finally, not as farce nor as bittersweet picaresque but as tragedy, albeit tragedy in a minor key. With the perspective provided by this last of the Rabbit tetralogy, we can see that throughout Harry's adulthood the oscillations both of his mind and of his spirit have swung progressively closer, narrowing in a steadily regressive direction.

At the start of the first novel Rabbit is running toward what he perceives to be life; at the conclusion of the last one, he is running again, this time toward his burrow in Florida, in which instinct tells him he is to find death. His son Nelson-just released from the detox center where he has been treated for cocaine addiction-tells him before his final attack, "'I keep trying to love you, but you don't really want it. You're afraid of it, it would tie you down. You've been scared all your life of being tied down."' Harry himself tells Nelson's wife, Pru-immediately after fornicating with her in Nelson's own house-"'I'm tied down too. .. I'm tied to my carcass."' What he does not understand-and never will this side of the grave-is that his fear of being bound is a spiritual fear, not a creaturely one. Harry does have intimations of this truth, as Updike tells us in a poignant and brilliant passage:

Though his inner sense of himself is of

an innocuous passive spirit, a steady

small voice, that doesn't want to do any

harm, get trapped anywhere, or ever die,

there is this other self seen from outside,

a six-foot-three ex-athlete weighing two thirty

at the least, an apparition wearing

a sleek grey summer suit shining all over

as if waxed and a big head whose flurry

shadowy hair was trimmed at Shear Joy

Hair Styling (unisex, 15 bucks minimum)

to rest exactly on the ears, a fearsome

bulk with eyes that see and hands that

grab and teeth that bite, a body eating

enough at one meal to feed three Ethiopians

for a day, a shameless consumer of

gasoline, electricity, newspapers, hydro-carbons,

carbohydrates.

By dramatic skill and painstaking attention to metaphor and conceit chief among them an airplane with a bomb in its belly, symbolizing Harry with his bad heart inside himUpdike conveys from the beginning of the novel a conviction not only of Harry's impending doom but of its inevitability. Rabbit's end is an appropriate one, and a chosen one as well. Even before he suffers his first attack, Harry has nothing to live for except food and sexual fantasy; after it, he ceases to believe in the possibility of his own future, and even of its desirability. He refuses bypass surgery and loses himself in reveries and self-pity, and grows-if such were possible-even more passive than he was before. Half-consciously, he is preparing himself for death; as, also not quite knowingly, his wife, Janice, is preparing herself for life beyond Harry-taking real-estate courses, making plans to sell the condo and the house in Brewer and to move into her parents' old house with Nelson and his family. While Harry lies dying in hospital in Florida and Janice thinks, "From what Dr. Olman said he would never be alive the way he was," Updike is delivering to the reader a deliberately nasty little shock. For the point is that Harry has not been "alive the way he was" since he was graduated from high school; he was indeed, as his budding widow also reflects, already drifting downhill when she got to know him in Kroll's store in Brewer.

The "realistic" prose of Rabbit at Rest, like that of Updike's work in general, remains a pastiche of closely observed detail, together with nuggets of fact and brand and popular culture, but here "realism" is moderated by a careful and elaborate (though never intrusive) structure of poetic reference, as well as by the sophisticated narrative technique. Narrative in Rabbit at Rest is essentially a clarified interior monologue, so straightforward that much of the time the reader is lulled into mistaking it for the voice of an omniscient narrator. By the same narrative technique, Updike forbears to impose any values or moral sense from outside the reality of his "realistic" universe. Has Rabbit's life been worthless, as even Rabbit himself thinks? Is it truth that he, like so many people he knows, is faced inescapably by the fact of "life's constant depreciation"? There is nobody there within the novel's aesthetic envelope -to deny or to confirm such axioms. Weeds don't know they're weeds," Harry reflects; while Pru asks, "'What's life supposed to be? They don't give you another for comparison."' It is at this point that Updike breaks through to the ultimate level in literary realism.

'A man needs an occupation,"' Harry's cardiologist tells him. "'He needs something to do. The best thing for a body is a healthy interest in life. Get interested in something outside yourself, and your heart will stop talking to you."' So Harry, for the first time in his illness, takes the doctor's advice: He gets interested in something. It is basketball, what else could it be?-the only thing in life, outside of himself, that has ever interested him. In an improvised game with a young street black he collapses on the dirt lot, stricken by his final seizure. Either his is in some sense a redemptive death or else, of course, it is not.