Sound Commentary - Your Wise Guide to Audiobooks and Audio Book Reviews

Despite quantum leaps of achievement in the areas of science and technology, John Updike's Rabbit quintet is likely to be the closest we will ever get to a time machine.  For all who want to explore 50 years of Americana with a lovingly unsparing guide, there's now the opportunity to pop a disk into your CD player and go boldly forth, or back and forth, as you will.  Watch '50s television shows with Janice Angstrom.  Meet black militants and flower children, and relive the sexual revolution and the civil rights movement of the '60s.  Wait on the gas lines of the 70s, track the insidious rise of crack/cocaine, note advances in cardiac surgery, nod a hello to Monica Lewinsky, and relive all that silly anxiety over the Y2K.  All this, and more, is possible, from the comfort of your car or living room. 

When John Updike died on January 27, 2009, he left behind an enviably prodigious literary legacy encompassing many novels, short stories, poems, essays and works of criticism.  Five of his books followed the life of a fictional one-time high school basketball star named Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom from Mount Judge, Pennsylvania and are considered his best known works.  Indeed, two of them - Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest - won Pulitzer Prizes.  Random House/Books On Tape released the entire series this year in audio format, and it has never been easier to tackle an important and highly approachable collection from one of America's finest contemporary authors. 

From his emergence as a 26-year old protagonist burdened with a disappointing marriage and career from which he learns he cannot run, to his unnecessarily early death 30 years later, Harry Angstrom is a small-town Everyman, through whose utterly normative eyes and reactions to the social and physical forces that shape him, we are able to inspect not only his life, but our own. 

We first meet Rabbit in the 1950s at a time when he is feeling most constrained by adult responsibilities.  His wonder days as a much adulated local athlete are behind him.  His job, demonstrating a kitchen appliance called "The Miracle Peeler" at a local department store, is uninspiring. His marriage to his wife Janice, a plain and almost dull-witted woman who deadens her own inner pain with too much television and booze, was a shotgun wedding. "Doing the right thing" by Janice seemed a good idea at the time he wed her, but the birth of his son Nelson and her subsequent pregnancy two years later have only increased the weight of the millstone around Rabbit's neck. One day he hops into the car, leaves for the store to buy some cigarettes, unaccountably turns south and tries to escape his fate. 

Rabbit's odyssey is short-lived.  Before the end of the first novel, Rabbit returns to Pennsylvania and, ultimately, to Janice.  And as the decades go on, he becomes complacent with, even smug in, his ordinary mediocrity.  He makes his compromises and lives with the consequences. Things happen, sometimes for the good, other times not.  Rabbit makes do.  He is, if little else, a realist and a survivor. 

Rabbit is not a particularly likeable person.  He is emotionally limited, to say the least: sexist, racist, opinionated and largely unmotivated. He's a poor parent and incapable of heartfelt love or fidelity.  He is, however, curiously open-minded and receptive to stimuli.  Updike puts us squarely in his head and makes us privy to every last one of  his thoughts, which we continue to follow, frequently despite Rabbit,  because Harry's dreams and fears, and for that matter his distractions and limitations, begin to mirror our own, however we may wish that were not so. Rabbit thinks all the time about relationships, money, religion, politics, responsibility, life, death and sex, and he does so while being bombarded with the same subliminal and overt cultural messages that are so ubiquitous that we do not process their effects on us any more than he does on himself. In short, as Harry Angstrom rolls out before us, so does America, complete with its music, books and movies, its newscasts and headlines, its celebrities, successes and failures, and even its commercial interruptions.

 Each of the Rabbit novels memorializes a decade, and Rabbit's experiences and reflections are tempered by their times.  As Harry doesn't grow up so much as grow out, we mellow with him through the '60's, 70's, 80's and 90's and beyond.  We watch him get somehow smaller and less important, as the nation and all it stands for looms larger and larger, ultimately reducing him in its relentless progress to little more than an outdated statistic, whom we will, like his family in the final novella, remember in bittersweet moments of occasional reflection until it's our turn to be left behind. 

Arthur Morey provides a sensitive, semi-vocalized narration of all 5 novels. He is completely at one with his material and sustains an entirely consistent level of interest and effort throughout.  His tone and pacing shift appropriately from one book to another, in keeping with the tenor of the times and Updike's themes and concerns.  As the novels are reflections of Rabbit's point of view, most of the narrative is in Rabbit's voice. Here is where Morey excels.  He is more than a convincing performer.  He is Harry Angstrom.  

Don't miss this series. 

Updike, John.  Rabbit, Run.  Read by Arthur Morey.  10 compact disks. 12 hrs. 6 mins. Books on Tape.  1960/2008. 978-1-4159-5852-0.  Vinyl binder; contents notes $90. SA*. 

Updike, John. Rabbit Redux.  Read by Arthur Morey.  13 cds.  15 hrs.  58 mins. Books on Tape. 1971/ 2009.  978-1-4159-5854-4. Vinyl binder; contents notes. $110. SA. 

Updike, John.  Rabbit is Rich.  Read by Arthur Morey. 17 cds. 19 hrs. 24 mins. Books on Tape.  1981/2009. 9781415958568. Vinyl binder; contents notes. $120. SA.* 

Updike, John, Rabbit at Rest.  Read by Arthur Morey.  18 Cd. 22 hrs. 14 mins.  Books on Tape.  1990/2009. 978-1-4159-5858-2. Vinyl binder; contents notes.  $129.  SA* 

Updike, John, Rabbit Remembered. Read by Arthur Morey.  6  Cds. 7 hrs. 1 min. Books on Tape.  2000/2009.  978-1-4159-5930-5. Vinyl binder; contents notes.  $60. SA.

By Francine Levitov

Francine Levitov was a high school English teacher and had a second career in law as a New York public defense attorney before discovering audiobooks. Now in her third professional reincarnation, she is a former KLIATT audiobook reviewer and, along with Jean Palmer, a founding co-editor of SoundCommentary.com.