Harry Angstrom of John Updike’s Rabbit series is an unusual protagonist. There are plenty of characters in literature who are ‘everymen’- Winston Smith from 1984, for example- but for the most part, they are the kind of people who would be capable of writing a book, or at least a diary.
Harry, by contrast, doesn’t seem capable of reading a book. He’s not entirely dumb, but his character is defined by an inability to think deeply about anything. He almost defiantly refuses to mature or have a character arc. A big part of the series’ prurient appeal is putting us in the head of someone who wouldn’t normally write to us.
Books are not a big part of the Rabbit series, in any case. The quartet’s backdrop is bad tv, sex, bars, car dealerships, sex, junk food, golf, country clubs, sex and sex. The books are perfect fat slices of Americana between the 1960s and 1980s.
Updike has fallen out of fashion in literary circles- he has been rightly called a ‘penis with a thesaurus’1, and the Rabbit series is marbled with sexism. They are flawed books, about a very flawed person.
Updike, as far as I can tell, is aware of his protagonist’s deficiencies, but seems to see the women in his life with derision and disgust, particularly in the first two or three books. There’s a sense that Harry can’t really be blamed for being a cheating jerk when he’s constantly surrounded by a bunch of dumb hussies.
The closest comparison I can come up with to Harry Angstrom is someone drawing an exquisite painting of a puddle of vomit. The artist really captured the lighting and texture of the vomit. You feel like it is in the room with you. It shows amazing skill, but also, you question why they, you know, chose that as a subject.
Nevertheless, the beauty of Updike’s prose somehow makes the books fly. They are compulsively consumable, even when they probably aren’t doing you any good.
Rabbit Redux is the poisoned morsel in the mix, however. No idea what the hell he was thinking with that one.
Rabbit, Run
The best of the series, and the most ambivalent about Harry as a character; it relates to his desire for freedom while being aware that he is an irresponsible jerk. Updike knew that if the ‘manic pixie dream girl’ exists, it is something men project onto people to make up for the flaws in our own lives. Usually with disastrous results.
The real weak point is Janice, Harry’s wife, who feels like a shadow of what should have been a much more complex character.
Rabbit Redux
The set-up, with Harry forming a commune with a barely legal hippie and a manipulative, half-crazed black drug dealer, reads like a KKK fantasy. I have no idea why Harry, who has been established as racist, behaves the way he does in this book. The only good part is that his ambivalent (homoerotic?) feelings about Skeeter, and his son’s feelings about Jill, give them some complexity later in the series.
Rabbit is Rich
Arguably the only book in the series where Harry doesn’t do anything horrible. Attention starts to shift to his son Nelson, and Janice improves as a character in this and the next book and starts to feel more three-dimensional.
Rabbit at Rest
I like that this brings most of the threads of the series to an end in a true to life way.
The most realistic part is that Harry dies being about as good and as bad a person as he was through the whole series. He saves his granddaughter, thus ‘redeeming’ himself, but fundamentally he isn’t capable of being different from the unreflective jock he was in the first book, and he still cheats on his wife. He can’t even give up the fast food.
Chris Barker 
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