When Verity switches over from hot type to offset, jobs will be lost, including Harry’s. “The city in those days was largely Democrat in registration,” Forester pointed out, though he added, “the typical Democrat here would be a Republican anywhere else.” “I voted for Hubert Humphrey.” Today the formulation seems off-key. “I’m a conservative,” he tells a policeman at a crime scene. every name in the book but believe me he did a lot of good for the little man.” “There’s no medical expense can break us now. “I’ve been paying in since ’66, it’s like a ton of anxiety rolled off my chest,” he tells his son over a Schlitz after work. Earl, rescued first by the New Deal and then by the Great Society, swears by Medicare. The Angstroms, father and son, are forerunners of those who would later be called Reagan Democrats.
RABBIT REDUX FULL
The car dealership owned by Harry Angstrom’s father-in-law is “in real life, Lancaster Avenue, which was lined in those days with large, successful dealerships and flanked by factories and a blue-collar neighborhood called Millmont,” Forester told me in an e-mail, adding that now the avenue is full of “empty showrooms, a smattering of vacant lots and empty factories.”
RABBIT REDUX ARCHIVE
He was on its staff in 1969 and got to know Updike, who in his teens had been a copy boy at the paper and had since kept up with the city’s changes, filing stories and photos in the archive he kept. Forester Jr., news editor of The Reading Eagle. Someone well acquainted with Reading-Brewer is John D.
Eliot or Wallace Stevens: “Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them,” the novel begins, Updike’s celebrated pointillism refreshing a moribund cityscape: “The row houses differentiated by speckled bastard sidings and the hopeful small porches with their jigsaw brackets and gray milk-bottle boxes and the sooty ginkgo trees and the baking curbside cars.” Harry, one of the lumpen pale men, works as a linotypist at Verity Press at a time when Verity and all the moral verities that undergird Rust Belt America seem to be corroding. He elevates them through a kind of social realist poetry, what John Dos Passos might have written if he had the help of T. S. The moon landing is replayed in the pages of “Rabbit Redux” among the flooding images of the nightly news: “Vietnam death count, race riots probably somewhere.” Updike doesn’t simply record all these facts. called Brewer in the novel - senses that the world he had known, of placid neighborhoods where “the doors would slam and the games begin again,” with “a war being fought across oceans just so he could spin out his days in such happiness,” is changing, almost daily, and he’s powerless to stop it. The novel’s working-class hero, an imagined inhabitant of Reading, Pa. It bears no resemblance to “All the King’s Men” or “The Last Hurrah.” Updike’s subject is instead the politicization of everyday life. There are no candidates or campaigns in “Rabbit Redux,” no demagogues or ward bosses.
The populations in these states are not especially diverse, but they seem, time and again, to yield the richest harvest of “independent voters,” so often depicted as paragons of the national character - thrifty, family-oriented, churchgoing - especially if they are white males of Protestant stock, each an Everyman caught in the tangle of post-industrial America, a “man in the middle,” as John Updike puts it in “Rabbit Redux.” Published in 1971 and set in 1969 - the year of Chappaquiddick and the moon landing, the beginning of Richard Nixon’s presidency - it remains the most illuminating and prophetic of modern political novels, though on the surface it seems not about politics at all. In most cases the outcome hinged on the marshaling of dependable blocs of voters.īut in the heartland “battlegrounds” - Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin - the calculation seemed more complicated. Some were on the Eastern Seaboard (Florida, Virginia), others in the West (Colorado, Nevada). As the long election night began to take shape, all eyes remained fixed on the swing states.
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