John Updike Interview (page: 5 / 8) Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction	Print Interview

Did you think you were through with Rabbit after the first novel?

John Updike: Yeah. I didn't write that with any idea of a sequel, but the book does kind of end on a hovering note, and enough people asked me, "Well what happened?" Not too many, but a few put a bee in my bonnet. When I had run out of subjects, I thought...

"Well, why not tell what happened and bring Rabbit back." This was during the late '60s, when there was a lot of turmoil in America, and so I brought him back this time as kind of an everyman who is witnessing the pageant of protest and disturbance, distress, drug use, everything, almost everything was in that book, including the moon shot. In fact, the moon shot is kind of a central event in it, so that the Rabbit who came back the second time was a much more purposefully representative American than my initial Rabbit. He was just, you know, a high school athlete who had no where much to go after he graduated, whereas the second Rabbit was kind of a growing man trying to learn in a way. I've always seen Rabbit, and indeed Americans in general, as learners, as willing to learn. They may be slow to learn, but there is an openness to our mind set that I think enables us to overcome our mistakes or our prejudices and move forward. Certainly the world now is so much more open. I mean, it is easy to be sentimental about the '30s and '40s and the war time solidarity and all that, but there was so much racism, sexism, everything. The brutal -- it was a brutal world compared to the one we're trying to make now.
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You could be said to have pioneered the use of the present tense in American fiction. You used it in Rabbit, Run, and in several books since.

John Updike: Yes. It was a great liberator somehow. I loved writing in the present tense. It has become a bit of a cliché now among younger writers, but at the time it was a bit of a novelty, and certainly a novelty to me. There's kind of a level, a speed, you can get going without the past tense that was suitable to Rabbit and also suitable to me as a writer, because the books wrote themselves fairly easily. I say that now. I'm not sure it was always easy, but the combination of the present tense plus a landscape that was in my bones, this rural Pennsylvania, semi-rural, metropolitan actually.

I always felt at home writing about him, and didn't have much trouble having things for him to do and the other characters to interact. So I was happy to return the first time, and then having returned for Rabbit Redux, it seemed obligatory on my part to write at least two more. More than four I thought would be milking it unduly. People are mortal. That's one of the things about them that a fiction writer should be aware of, so I thought even though he was relatively young that I should kill him off while I was still writing well. Suppose I get sick and you're all left without a Rabbit wrapped up? Hmm. "Rabbit Wrapped Up" would not be a bad title

At any rate, I did that and then, since I was alive as it turned out ten years later, I wrote a novella about the two children finding each other and remembering their father and him kind of haunting the book. I wanted him to be there as a ghost, felt as a ghost.

Was it hard for you to let him go?

John Updike: Yeah. I think that's a good honest way to put it. It was hard for me. Also because he had been so good to me. The books won prizes, and they were fairly easy to write, so it was a step. At the time I wrote Rabbit at Rest I thought the time had come to put him to rest. It was not as if I was a writer who could only write about this guy. I had a good long run of it and it was time to let go.

His death was spectacularly realistic.

John Updike: Was it? I wasn't sure. It was almost corny to take him back to another street game, because you first see him in Rabbit, Run joining some kids around a telephone pole playing basketball, but that said, it felt good to me, that whole thing. I went down to Florida and did some research, walked around Ft. Myers, tried to get a feel for a Florida city, and it was fun to do the research and fun to write those scenes. You do get very wrapped up in these characters and care about them. You don't want to get sentimental about them, but yes. And the doctor he sees tells him he must find something to do. Rabbit's trouble is that he hasn't really had enough to do since he stopped playing basketball.

And there's his wonderful companion in these books. Janice, his wife, and Nelson, his son. They were the principals in the first novel. I had the pleasure not only of seeing Rabbit age, but of trying to turn Nelson from an infant into a man, and a man with a grudge, and yet a man with certain qualities, but it's a destructive capability that Harry can't match in the end, because Harry was destructive when young but he has become kind of a sweet old geezer towards the end.

A 56-year-old geezer?

John Updike: Yeah, a 56-year-old geezer. He feels old to himself, and of course he is overweight and he is kind of among the retirees down there, and if you'll remember he is banished for some sexual behavior, so he's kind of alone and he doesn't feel too wanted in the world.

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