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Rabbit's Penn Villas warren becomes a crash pad for Jill, a teen-age runaway from suburban Connecticut, and a skinny black radical named Skeeter, a curious combination of Flip Wilson, Rap Brown and early Malcolm X. As in Couples, it is again a fire that destroys, purges or does whatever fire is supposed to do in such charged circumstances. Rabbit's house is burned down by Penn Villas residents who are less concerned about their property values than about their children watching Jill and Skeeter get high and fornicate.
Here are all the ingredients for a standard shocker. Still, Updike handles his characters with a combination of controlled repugnance and tolerance that results in some very close readings of their emotional fevers. His style does not preclude tenderness, kindness or sensitivity, although he often seems like an experienced physician smoothly examining a naked patient. The effect is a fascination that distracts the mind from predictability of both plot and retribution. The end finds Rabbit and Janice joining up once again with the cold, metallic precision of a lunar landing vehicle docking with its command module after a mission. "O.K.?" is the last word of the novel. It is a taciturn echo of space talk, but it is also a grounded, middle-aged Updike saying, in effect, "What did you expect?"
Such a well-programmed novel might be described as "situation tragedy," were it not for the suspicion that Updike also intended a sort of nursery fable for grownups: naughty Rabbit gets into strange cabbage patches but is always chastened and led back home. Yet Redux is superior to recent novels that trudge after social significance like recruits in new boots. Updike, after all, owns a rare verbal genius, a gifted intelligence and a sense of tragedy made bearable by wit. How the truth about Janice's well-known affair finally gets on the kitchen table is a tidy masterpiece.
As a character, the older Rabbit is far from flawless. His tongue is sometimes a trifle too sharp for his faculties. But there is something hard and durable about him. It is as if his brief glory as an athlete left him with an inner grace that will never be completely hidden by the sallowing of middle age. He possesses a certain open-endedness and possibilities, if not for change, at least for further misadventure.
∙R. Z. Sheppard