Word: angstroms
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...Intellectually, I'm not essentially advanced over Harry Angstrom. I went to Harvard, it's true, and wasn't much good at basketball...other than that we're rather similar. I quite understand both his anger and passivity, and feeling of the whole Vietnam involvement as a puzzle, that something strange has gone wrong...but it's no great leap of the imagination to do that...
That little bothers me in a sense--all writers do that to some extent. Harry Angstrom is supposed to be some kind of an American. But at least there's tact when you do it as a novel, whereas Mailer's is the sublime conviction that whatever happens to him happens to Them--it's like what's good for General Motors is good for the nation. Still, Armies of the Night was made wonderful by the richness, the ironic complexity of Mailer's view. He does have a very complicated mind at times. I quite like Prisoner...
...Rabbit Redux (redux: Latin, "led back") we find that the course of a decade hasn't brought him any closer to what he wanted. It has, in fact, taken him down a peg. Angstrom is back in Brewer, working with his father as a linotyper (a fading breed...) in a print shop. There are, of course, enormous differences, in Rabbit and family, in Brewer, and in Updike's own attitudes and approaches...
...Skeeter's problems are not Rabbit's: Angstrom can accept neither his nihilistic analysis of American history, nor the irrational fire of his revolutionary solutions. Skeeter tells him what was lurking in the plumbing of America; Angstrom does not believe the sewer's backed up all that far. "Confusion is just a local view of things working out in general," says Rabbit. Which does not imply that Rabbit returns to a passive acceptance of what's laid out for him. He comes to grips with his life. He accepts guilt for his own domestic mess, and (with his father) recognizes...
...content, Rabbit Redux resembles Updike's much-lambasted Couples, which told of Piet Hanema, a wealthier, more intelligent Angstrom type striving to build foundations against death in the sexually gymnastic but spiritually hollow "Tarbox, Mass." That's where politics made a hasty entrance into Updike's America; Tarbox couples coupled during Asian wars and American assassinations, forced to form their own secular groups partly by their total disengagement from those encroaching headlines. The major critical complaint was lodged against the novel's bulk; its themes and symbolic framework, were not filled out with sufficient flesh-and-blood drama...