Rabbit at rest
Rabbit at rest (Engl. Rabbit at Rest ) is a 1990 published novel by John Updike . The German translation by Maria Carlsson was published in 1992 by Rowohlt Verlag . It is the fourth and most extensive novel in the five-part Rabbit series about the libertinism of the North American bourgeoisie between 1960 and 1990. It begins with Rabbit Heart , is continued in Under the Astronaut Moon and in Better Conditions and ends with Rabbit, a return in 2002 .
overview
The plot of the fourth book plays in the last year of his life Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the antihero of the series and former basketball star of the school team in his hometown Brewer, Pennsylvania . His heart disease and the signs of his death are compounded by the crisis of his son Nelson, which affects his relationship with his wife Teresa "Pru" and her children. In a tragic cycle of repetition, “Rabbit's” own marriage story and Nelson's childhood trauma are continued in the next generation. The novel present is filled with Harry's feelings of guilt and memories of his affairs, v. a. associated with Thelma Harrison and Ruth Leonard-Byer.
action
In the first chapter of the novel (FL) Harry left his hometown and granted himself and his wife Janice a second domicile for the winter months in the Valhalla Village, an apartment complex with sports facilities on the Gulf Coast in Florida . His son Nelson now runs the family business Springer Motors , a Toyota car dealership that forms the financial basis of the family. But “Rabbit” is not happy in Florida either. He doesn't tolerate the heat well, is bored with the offerings in the senior residence, has few contacts other than his three golf partners and is now dangerously overweight because he constantly has to nibble on chips and nuts. He ignores the pain in his chest.
The novel begins in December 1988. Between Christmas and New Year, Nelson, his wife Pru and their two children, four-year-old Roy and nine-year-old Judy, who is particularly close to the grandfather's heart, come to visit. Nelson looks very irritated and old tensions with his father reappear. The grandparents therefore go on excursions with their grandchildren. A sailing tour “Rabbits” with Judy ends tragically when the boat capsizes. He saves the child from drowning and can thus prevent an old family trauma from repeating itself. In the first novel, his heavily drunk wife drowned her second-born child, Rebecca (Becky), in the bathtub. But “Rabbit” suffers a heart attack during this action and has to be treated in hospital. After this experience, his preoccupation with death becomes more and more intense. In a conversation running parallel to the accident, Janice learns the reasons for her son's marital crisis. He is addicted to drugs again and is heavily in debt. The chapter ends with the departure of the children and Nelson's and “Rabbits” promises to put their lives in order.
In the second chapter (PA) the Angstroms return to Brewer in the spring. Here Harry shows the feared and existence-threatening problems that Janice has suppressed in full. Nelson is heavily addicted to drugs and has embezzled the necessary money in the company together with his Aids-ill accountant Lyle through booking manipulation. At the same time, Harry has a catheter operation on his heart - balloon dilatation . But the pain persists and as a result he does not have the discipline to eat healthily. He returns to his old habits and sexual fantasies, visits places of his childhood and youth, remembers his affairs and visits his lover Thelma Harrison, known from the "better circumstances", with whom he has been three married couples since the partner swap vacation had a long affair in the Caribbean and is now suffering from lupus erythematosus . In the troubled present, he has to deal with his wife after the operation, who as the mother judges the son's financial embezzlement more leniently than he does and apologizes in part because of his difficult childhood. But after a consultation with her old friend Charlie Stavros, with whom she lived for some time in the "astronaut's moon", Janice faces reality with unexpected harshness: Nelson has to go into rehab, the bookkeeping is checked and Harry takes over the management again. She is preparing herself for a professional career as a real estate agent to secure herself, goes back to school and lets "Rabbit" feel her role as head of the car dealership and her search for independence. One night Pru encourages her father-in-law, who is fascinated by her attractiveness, to have sex. Both seek support in a desperate situation: Pru sees her life with the failed and now violent Nelson desolate and is depressed over the entire Angstrom family, and Rabbit constantly sees the loss of his life force and his death.
In the third chapter (HI, after Hage an acronym for the no man's land of heart attacks) the tragic development is brought to an end. On the national holiday , July 4th, Harry has his last big appearance: Disguised as Uncle Sam , he leads the Mt. Judge Parade despite heartache, and the spectators wave to the old basketball idol. The other events, on the other hand, are humiliating for him. Mr. Shimada, the representative of the Toyota company, revokes “Singer motors” the license and accuses him of neglecting his supervisory duties as a businessman and father. At the same time, he used his example to criticize the lack of discipline, frivolity and lust for pleasure in the American lifestyle. The second settlement takes place after Thelma's funeral by her husband Ronnie Harrison. He holds him against egoism because he did not love his long-time lover, who died of an autoimmune disease , and only used it as a sex object. The big crash, however, happens when Nelson returns from therapy in the fall. He is a person who has been converted to a new life, wants to dare a new beginning with his wife and Pru confesses the sex night with Rabbit as a 'mistake'. Janice is extremely indignant about this climax of his affairs and threatens him never to forgive this "incest" and the betrayal of his son.
While Nelson suggests family therapy, Harry evades pronunciation and analysis and flees, as in the first novel. He leaves the house without notice and drives to his vacation home in Florida alone. There he becomes more and more lonely, as he is almost alone in his residential complex in this unusual time for retirees in Florida, he is homesick for Brewer, remembers situations from his life, glorifies his childhood and sees his country and his biography in one increasing downward movement. His sexual needs are the center of his existence and their fulfillment is a natural requirement of life. That's why he doesn't feel guilty about Janice and waits for a signal from her. But he only gets a call from his son informing him that his mother is now working as a real estate agent, that she wants to sell their joint house in Penn Park and lease “Springer motors” to Hyundai to pay off the debts . He himself plans to become a social worker and to re-establish his marriage to Pru with a third child.
On the advice of his doctor to exercise more, Harry wanders through the city and also comes to a black neighborhood. There he observed young people playing basketball, the sport in which he was “shining” for the only time in his life. In memory of his previous abilities, he asks to be allowed to play, despite the clear warning signs from his body, but overworked himself, suffers a severe heart attack and lies “like dead”. He's going to the hospital. The doctor's diagnosis leaves no hope of recovery. Janice and Nelson visit him in the intensive care unit, where Harry, connected to medical equipment, briefly regains consciousness, and forgive him. The novel closes with “Rabbits” assurances that dying is “not so bad” and the thought that this conversation with his expectant looking son is “enough. Maybe. Enough."
reception
The 1991 Pulitzer Prize- winning novel met with a largely positive response from US and European literary critics: "Rabbit in rest" is described by many as one of Updike's best novels. A brilliant finale, one of the great farewells of contemporary literature. It contains the essence of Updike's literary work in distilled form. Joyce Carol Oates praises it as the most elegiac, most ambitious, most demanding and most unsettling work of the writer. Ian McEwan rates the novel, the end of the "Rabbit" tetralogy, as an important part of Updike's masterpiece. The row will certainly become his monument.
Oates justified this assessment with Updike's precise ability to observe everyday situations and his eloquent implementation: the very talented American realist meticulously draws his image of society. For Volker Hage , the author is one of the few gifted human actors in contemporary literature who can shape fears, obsessions and shameful wishes as well as everyday defeats without scruples, but with pity for his characters, so that the readers can recognize themselves in them. There is hardly a situation among people that the narrator cannot make clear, he is a master of the nuances and connoisseur of everyday speech.
Secondly, the criticism acknowledges u. a. Boswell, the writing skills in connection with a big topic that Updike has taken on: Post-war America in its intellectual crisis from the perspective of a white, male representative of the middle class with its typical role models and prejudices. In Oate's opinion, this time of uncertainty is where the Florida retired seniors fit in. In the connection of Harry as "Mr. Death ”and as a heart-sick“ Uncle Sam ”in front of the applauding crowd in a festive mood, a grotesque apocalyptic image of the American lifestyle emerges. For McEwan, there has never been such a fallible, exposed figure in modern literature as Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Not only does the tetralogy describe the large and small dishonesty, self-deception, defensive strategies and the clumsy passivity of a modern man, it also traces the slow physical and mental decline, laziness, junk food and the American over four novels and over thirty years Accelerate prosperity.
Oates and McEwan add that Updike is not only a critical chronicler of the western attitude towards life from the sixties to the nineties, but that he looks at the scenery with autobiographical knowledge from the perspective of a corner of Pennsylvania, with a feeling of homesickness and a memory of the lost Youth. In all its details, implied or unsparing, in all its fields - work, politics, retirement and above all sex, the metaphysical is always present.
literature
- John Updike: Rabbit at rest (. English Rabbit at Rest ). Rowohlt, Reinbek, 7th edition 1994, ISBN 3-499-13400-4
- Kindler's new literary dictionary. CD-ROM 2000
- Marshall Boswell: John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion. Columbia Missouri 2001.
Awards
The novel received the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 and the William Dean Howells Medal in 1995 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Volker Hage: End with sex. DER SPIEGEL 38/1992, September 14, 1992.
- ↑ Volker Hage: "End with Sex". In: DER SPIEGEL 38/1992, Sept. 14, 1992.
- ^ Marshall Boswell: "John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion". Columbia Missouri 2001, p. 231. books.google.de.
- ↑ Joyce Carol Oates: "Rabbit at rest". A review. The New York Times, Sept. 30, 1990
- ↑ Ian McEwan. "A brilliant blasphemer". Welt Print February 7, 2009. www.welt.de