Newswise — Throughout his prolific career, author John Updike has been occupied with issues of faith and doubt. How Updike has dealt with that tension, particularly through the exploits of his most famous character " Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom " is the focus of a new book by St. Lawrence University Professor of English Peter J. Bailey. "Rabbit (Un)Redeemed: The Drama of Belief in John Updike's Fiction" was published in 2006 by Fairleigh Dickison University Press.
The book offers a selective reading of this prolific author's oeuvre, concentrating on Updike's career-spanning reoccupation with issues of faith and doubt. In Bailey's reading, what's at the heart of his work is the tension between affirming the continuance of the "heady wine of religious consolation" and the deepening anxiety that the best that humanity can hope for is "the bleak fare of more endurance."
Rabbit Angstrom is Updike's most significant fictional creation, Bailey contends, because his impulses toward religious skepticism are so inadequately possessed of the intellectual and literary buffers that provide Updike and some of his other protagonists with temporary forms of solace or compensation.
"Rabbit freed something in Updike," Bailey says, "allowing him to be funnier and more misogynistic behind the Rabbit mask. But Harry's four-volume acts of attention to the world around him suggest that he, like Updike, is one on whom very little is lost."
Although Rabbit is the centerpiece of Bailey's critical argument, in making his case for the centrality of issues of faith to Updike's literary production, Bailey also cites from other fictional Updike works, as well as essays, reviews and interviews. Without seeking to reduce Updike's massive output to a single idea, Bailey shows how the contention between faith and doubt permeates the work, using the Rabbit tetralogy as the site where Updike hazards most in juxtaposing Rabbit's deepening agnosticism against his own increasingly "faint faith."
Bailey is the author of the books "Reading Stanley Elkin" (1986) and "The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen" (2000). He attended Kenyon College and the New School College, New School of Social Research, from which he received his bachelor's degree. After earning a master's degree at the Writing Seminars, The Johns Hopkins University, Bailey earned the Ph.D. in English from the University of Southern California. He joined the St. Lawrence University faculty in 1980, teaching American literature and fiction writing.
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