Harry Angstrom first started retailing his exurban existentialism in Rabbit Run (1960), Updike's second novel. A 26-year-old faded high school basketball star, living in Pennsylvania's "fifth-largest city" (i.e., Reading), Rabbit agonized over his lost athletic glory and suffocated in the company of Janice, his pregnant, alcoholic wife. Confused, lustful, crisis-ridden, he ran out on her and took up with a prostitute. Rabbit Run ended in tragedy, with Rabbit still psychologically on the lam.
Harry returned in Rabbit Redux (1971) as a 36-year-old linotypist for his local Brewer, Pa., paper and was assaulted by walking news items of the late '60s - hippies, drugs, anti-war types.
Janice, now working for her father's Toyota dealership, leapt into an affair with a co-worker. Rabbit's 13-year-old son, Nelson, disdained him. Rabbit took up with a trampy 18-year-old girl and wound up a psychological captive of her pimp and friend, a Messianic black Vietnam vet and drug user. Surviving that novel for Rabbit meant simply ending up in a motel bed with his own wife.
Ten years later, Comet Harry orbited through again, in Rabbit Is Rich (1981). On the Carter-Reagan cusp, Rabbit, now 46, found himself a successful middle-aged Toyota dealer, successor to his father-in-law. Accustomed to the good life, comfortable around Brewer, Rabbit golfed, drank and fooled around.
Still married to Janice after 23 years, he jaunted to Bermuda with her for spouse-swapping. Rabbit remained a wire service to his era, voicing concerns about OPEC pricing, TV shows like The Waltons, the Iran hostage crisis. Nelson, a 23-year-old showing Rabbit-like tendencies, returned home from
college trailing two women, one of them pregnant.
