“WHO LIKES RABBIT, apart from his author?” asked Hermione Lee in 1990 (quoted in De Bellis 2005, 169).

Well, I do, for one. Perhaps we all should—despite critical disparagements.

This “most notorious ‘runner’ in contemporary American fiction” (McCarthy 1997, 25) has been perceived as a comic hero, “ordinary but attractive, passive, resilient, playful and, above else, vital” (Keener 2005, 46); as an absolute “non-hero with still less potential for tragedy than Arthur Miller's salesman” (Detweiler, quoted in Keener 2005, 45); and even as the “saint, anti-hero, existential man, God-seeker, whatever he is” (Weber 1971, 55). John Updike's character Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom has also been condemned as nothing but an “emotionally stunted, intellectually barren, morally repulsive egotist, whose self-absorption lacks even the fascination of large scale” (Will 1990), and he has been dismissed as a rabbit who “merely reacts on an emotional, visceral, or glandular level” (Turner 1975, 37), a “complex slob” and “manifest failure.”

Yet amid such critical disparagement, Harry Angstrom deserves to be seen as one of the most remarkable literary characters of the twentieth century, a model white American Everyman “fitting a niche somewhere between the comic Babbitt and the tragic Willy Loman” (Oldsey 1972, 54). Next to Ishmael and Huck, Gatsby and Caulfield, Harry is a modern equivalent of Natty Bumppo or Augie March—in short, an American icon. And whether or not we side with the German journalist Peter Kümmel (2003, 33), who writes that he represents the “archetypal American full of greed for happiness and veneration for God … the preemptive portrait of the post-40-year-old George W. Bush,” he was certainly Updike's cultural barometer, his “ticket to the America all around [him]” (RA, ix). Or, as Sven Birkerts (1990) has convincingly argued, “on one level Rabbit is but a shallow and reactionary male of his class and era,” but on another level, he is “a sweet and watchful soul, as deep in his affectionate perceptiveness as the man who made his world” (4). “Not to love him is not to love ourselves,” writes Anne Roiphe (2000) with persuasive psychological precision.

Turn, Turn, Turn

PUBLISHED IN 1968, John Updike's Couples appeared in print only one year before the Woodstock Music and Art Fair of 1969, a quintessential moment in the life span of the peace and love generation. Though the novel's action is set in the years 1962 and 1963, it met readers at a point in American social history when hippie culture and its various manifestos, such as “If it feels good, do it” and “Love the one you're with” were affecting the national mindset. The idea of “finding oneself” gained traction even in bourgeois society, as it too began to countenance personal and sexual permissiveness. These changes were, of course, hastened by the women's liberation movement and the attendant introduction of freely available oral contraceptives. The most frequently quoted line from Couples, set in affluent New England exurbia, is “welcome to the post-pill paradise” (C, 63).

A decade later, though, counterarguments to the counterculture were in wide circulation, perhaps most famously advanced in M. Scott Peck's (1978) best-selling self-help book The Road Less Traveled, which advocated delayed gratification in the service of love. Love, Peck maintained, is not a feeling but an action. It requires discipline and the acceptance of responsibility. It sometimes involves the renunciation of personal pleasure. His book went on to sell more than 10 million copies. Clearly, just ten years after John Updike published Couples, and eleven years after the sweeping bohemianism of 1967 (dubbed the Summer of Love), growing segments of the American public were contemplating an ethics of restraint.

Updike's novel, however, is fortuitously set early enough in the 1960s to preclude its characters sufficient twentieth-century societal preced for sexually hedonistic behavior, never mind its aftermath. Its fictional events begin some five years before hippie culture gained much sway and long before it yielded to the more conservative but no less self-serving phenomenon that came to be called yuppie culture, “yuppie” being an acronym for the young, urban professionals of the early 1980s.