“America is beyond power, it acts as in a dream, as a face of God,” he believes. “That’s one of my Goddam precious American rights.” But he becomes apoplectic when the topic is the Vietnam War, which he supports with a worshipper’s faith. “I don’t think about politics,” Harry Angstrom (nicknamed Rabbit in his high school basketball days) insists during a mealtime quarrel. called Brewer in the novel - senses that the world he had known, of placid neighborhoods where “the doors would slam and the games begin again,” with “a war being fought across oceans just so he could spin out his days in such happiness,” is changing, almost daily, and he’s powerless to stop it. The novel’s working-class hero, an imagined inhabitant of Reading, Pa. It bears no resemblance to “All the King’s Men” or “The Last Hurrah.” Updike’s subject is instead the politicization of everyday life. There are no candidates or campaigns in “Rabbit Redux,” no demagogues or ward bosses. The populations in these states are not especially diverse, but they seem, time and again, to yield the richest harvest of “independent voters,” so often depicted as paragons of the national character - thrifty, family-oriented, churchgoing - especially if they are white males of Protestant stock, each an Everyman caught in the tangle of post-industrial America, a “man in the middle,” as John Updike puts it in “Rabbit Redux.” Published in 1971 and set in 1969 - the year of Chappaquiddick and the moon landing, the beginning of Richard Nixon’s presidency - it remains the most illuminating and prophetic of modern political novels, though on the surface it seems not about politics at all.

In most cases the outcome hinged on the marshaling of dependable blocs of voters.īut in the heartland “battlegrounds” - Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin - the calculation seemed more complicated. Some were on the Eastern Seaboard (Florida, Virginia), others in the West (Colorado, Nevada). As the long election night began to take shape, all eyes remained fixed on the swing states.

John updike rabbit redux