Word: redux
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...Rabbit ran from a variety of constricting consequences only to be thrust into quiet Eisenhower-era oblivion. This older Harry (rarely "Rabbit" now except in conscience) plays the same role in all the conflicts he's involved in. He changes internally more than the earlier Rabbit ever did; in Redux, he learns to live his life with a higher degree of consciousness...
...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...
There is plenty of that, and some melodrama, in Rabbit Redux, and the novel is every bit as complex as Updike's previous one. The politics are accurate, and interesting; Rabbit is a wavering hawk, his cagier father a sort-of populist, his used-carlot-owning in-laws, fashionably lib-rad. The changing landscape is vigorously perceived: the social differentiations between tract housing developments and more wooded lots, plastic hamburger stands moving ever-closer towards the heart of the old city. Dominant metaphors resonate with historical substance. As Rabbit journeys, the theater marquee goes from 2001 to TRUE GRIT...
Perhaps because Updike so meticulously spelled out his philosophy in Couples, he here leaves it in only where (as with the Skeeter-Rabbit talks) it matters. Redux makes concrete a cyclical vision of human interaction. Rabbit goes through a free fall which Janice endured, on her own scale, in Run; and as Janice then caused the death of a child, Rabbit's sodden neglect causes Jill's violent end in a blazing house. Updike's characters change and grow with each other, spinning globes in solar systems of an inexplicable universe. Is there no justice to these systems...
What makes Redux exciting is, ultimately, the language. Updike again uses the terse, present tense sentences of Run, the texture of the novel deriving from Rabbit's rapid observations, what he smells, and touches. As the world crowds Rabbit, Updike's precision grows accordingly, down to the news stories Harry sets in type. And, as sexual needs become franker (it is in sex that Rabbit's peers are as sentient as he), Updike's use of stream-of-consciousness is ecstatically successful, Janice's already-famous Molly Bloom jag vitally compresses an expository confession until it is touching...