Word: brewers
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...never returned. He fled: from a drunken, child-like wife, and a dank, frame-house row-home apartment. From wealthy in-laws, and cloyingly supportive parents. From the town of Mt. Judge, Pa., once greener, once marked by the men that lived in it; from the city of Brewer, its asphalt and industries. He left a baby son, Nelson, and the promise of a second, unborn, child...
Rabbit knew the guy was half-crocked: "Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath." But a feeling of unease, of inevitable doom, sank into his gut, and he returned to Brewer. Finally disappointed by a mistress too scared to let Rabbit get through to her, and slightly stirred by the selfless (if misguided) urgings of an Episcopalian minister, he returned to his wife Janice as well...
...final gesture of revolt. He was naive and inarticulate, and not wholly conscious of the implications his acts held for others. But his faith in that single emancipating impulse was beyond his neighbors' compromises: Rabbit became their conscience and scapegoat. To his parents, he was "the worst kind of Brewer bum"; to his in-laws, the destroyer of his wife Janice; to his mistress, something too inspiring...
...Rabbit couldn't ponder the problem, only rebound emotionally off surrounding situations. He expressed himself through actions, which, in the clogged Brewer-Mt. Judge landscape, made him incomprehensible to more interiorized residents. His mistress never quite understood why Rabbit asked for a blow-job, or Mrs. Eccles why he slapped her on the rump. But Rabbit had his reasons, deep-rooted ones, true to his sympathetic nature. And because he was tired of lives too needlessly convoluted for direct personal response, because if we are in hell, we must build something to protect ourselves, and to build with the second...
...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...