RR

 

Whenever I’ve run out of reading material and can’t sleep, I pull out 

Updike’s 1500 pages Rabbit tetralogy. Its the great 20th century American novel. Sometimes I pick a page at random. Sometimes I compare opening or closing sentences. For example:  

Rabbit Run  

Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. 

Rabbit Redux  

Men emerge from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.

Rabbit is Rich 

Running out of gas, Rabbit Angstrom thinks as he stands behind the summer-dusty windows of the Springer Motors display room watching the traffic go by on Route 111, traffic somehow thin and scared compared to what it used to be. 

Rabbit at Rest 

Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a sudden funny feeling that what he has come to meet, whats floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominously and intimately his: his own death shaped vaguely like an airplane.