It's 1989, and Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom feels anything but restful. In fact he's frozen, incapacitated by his fear of death--and in the final year of the Reagan era, he's right to be afraid. His 55-year-old body, swollen with beer and munchies and racked with chest pains, wears its bulk "like a set of blankets the decades have brought one by one." He suspects that his son Nelson, who's recently taken over the family car dealership, is embezzling money to support a cocaine habit.
Indeed, from Rabbit's vantage point--which alternates between a winter condo in Florida and the ancestral digs in Pennsylvania, not to mention a detour to an intensive care unit--decay is overtaking the entire world. The budget deficit is destroying America, his accountant is dying of AIDS, and a terrorist bomb has just destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 above Lockerbie, Scotland. This last incident, with its rapid transit from life to death, hits Rabbit particularly hard: Imagine sitting there in your seat being lulled by the hum of the big Rolls-Royce engines and the stewardesses bring the clinking drinks caddy... and then with a roar and giant ripping noise and scattered screams this whole cozy world dropping away and nothing under you but black space and your chest squeezed by the terrible unbreathable cold, that cold you can scarcely believe is there but that you sometimes actually feel still packed into the suitcases, stored in the unpressurized hold, when you unpack your clothes, the dirty underwear and beach towels with the merciless chill of death from outer space still in them. Marching through the decades, John Updike's first three Rabbit novels--Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), and Rabbit Is Rich (1981)--dissect middle-class America in all its dysfunctional glory. Rabbit at Rest (1990), the final installment and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, continues this brilliant dissection. Yet it also develops Rabbit's character more fully as he grapples with an uncertain future and the consequences of his past. At one point, for example, he's taken his granddaughter Judy for a sailing expedition when his first heart attack strikes. Rabbit gamely navigates the tiny craft to shore--and then, lying on the beach, feels a paradoxical relief at having both saved his beloved Judy and meeting his own death. (He doesn't, not yet.) Meanwhile, this all-American dad feels responsible for his son's full-blown drug addiction but incapable of helping him. (Ironically, it's Rabbit's wife Janice, the "poor dumb mutt," who marches Nelson into rehab.)
His misplaced sense of responsibility--plus his crude sexual urges and racial slurs--can make Rabbit seems less than lovable. Still, there's something utterly heroic about his character. When the end comes, after all, it's the Angstrom family that refuses to accept the reality of Rabbit's mortality. Only Updike's irreplaceable mouthpiece rises to the occasion, delivering a stoical, one-word valediction: "Enough." --Rob McDonald
From Publishers Weekly
Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, morbidly depressed, overweight and living with wife Janice in a Florida retirement community, recovers from a heart attack and is led astray by his libido one last time. "Updike is razor-sharp and mordantly funny," said PW. "If this novel is in some respects an elegy to Rabbit's bewildered existence, it is also a poignant, humorous, instructive guidebook to the aborted American dream." The book took a Pulitzer Prize. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is back in this final installment of Updike's four-decade chronicle. Now 55 and semi-retired, Harry spends half the year in Florida with wife Janice while Nelson, their son, runs the family business. Yet Harry's "golden years" are far from happy: he has ballooned to 230 pounds and suffers from angina. Janice is becoming increasingly independent. Nelson's cocaine habit is bankrupting Springer Motors. Harry sees decline on all sides, and the novel's great strength is how Updike links Harry's decline to that of his country, giving his sense of loss an elegiac feel. Despite some flaws--excessive length, a weak characterization of Nelson--the novel measures up well against the rest of the series. This is the saddest and deepest of the "Rabbit" novels, an aching portrait of America at the end of the Reagan era. Certain to be in demand. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/90.- Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass.Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review
The Rabbit novels, for all their grittiness, constitute John Updike's surpassingly eloquent valentine to his country.
Review
"Brilliant...It must be read. It is the best novel about America to come out of America for a very, very long time." -- The Washington Post Book World
"Powerful John Updike with his precisian's prose and his intimately attentive yet cold eye is a master." -- The New York Times Book Review
"The most authoritative and most magical portrait yet written of the past four decades of American life." -- Time
"A rich and rewarding novel...Updike is working at the full height of his powers." -- The New York Times
Review
"Brilliant...It must be read. It is the best novel about America to come out of America for a very, very long time." -- The Washington Post Book World
"Powerful John Updike with his precisian's prose and his intimately attentive yet cold eye is a master." -- The New York Times Book Review
"The most authoritative and most magical portrait yet written of the past four decades of American life." -- Time
"A rich and rewarding novel...Updike is working at the full height of his powers." -- The New York Times
Book Description
In John Updike's fourth and final novel about ex-basketball player Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the hero has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild. His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending out mixed signals; and his wife, Janice, decides in mid-life to become a working girl. As, though the winter, spring, and summer of 1989, Reagan's debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live.
Download Description
Rabbit at Rest is the fourth of five John Updike Rabbit novels, all of which focus on their central character Harry Angstrom. In Rabbit at Rest, Harry Angstrom has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild. His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending out mixed signals; and his wife, Janice, decides in mid-life to become a working girl. As, though the winter, spring, and summer of 1989, Reagan's debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live.
From the Publisher
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From the Inside Flap
In John Updike's fourth and final novel about ex-basketball player Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the hero has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild. His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending out mixed signals; and his wife, Janice, decides in mid-life to become a working girl. As, though the winter, spring, and summer of 1989, Reagan's debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live.
From the Back Cover
"Brilliant...It must be read. It is the best novel about America to come out of America for a very, very long time." -- The Washington Post Book World"Powerful John Updike with his precisian's prose and his intimately attentive yet cold eye is a master." -- The New York Times Book Review"The most authoritative and most magical portrait yet written of the past four decades of American life." -- Time"A rich and rewarding novel...Updike is working at the full height of his powers." -- The New York Times
Rabbit at Rest FROM THE PUBLISHER
In John Updike's fourth and final novel about ex-basketball player Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the hero has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild. His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending out mixed signals; and his wife, Janice, decides in mid-life to become a working girl. As, though the winter, spring, and summer of 1989, Reagan's debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live.
FROM THE CRITICS
Washington Post Book World
Brilliant...It must be read.
Publishers Weekly
Harry ``Rabbit'' Angstrom, morbidly depressed, overweight and living with wife Janice in a Florida retirement community, recovers from a heart attack and is led astray by his libido one last time. ``Updike is razor-sharp and mordantly funny,'' said PW. ``If this novel is in some respects an elegy to Rabbit's bewildered existence, it is also a poignant, humorous, instructive guidebook to the aborted American dream.'' The book took a Pulitzer Prize. (Oct.)
Library Journal
Harry ``Rabbit'' Angstrom is back in this final installment of Updike's four-decade chronicle. Now 55 and semi-retired, Harry spends half the year in Florida with wife Janice while Nelson, their son, runs the family business. Yet Harry's ``golden years'' are far from happy: he has ballooned to 230 pounds and suffers from angina. Janice is becoming increasingly independent. Nelson's cocaine habit is bankrupting Springer Motors. Harry sees decline on all sides, and the novel's great strength is how Updike links Harry's decline to that of his country, giving his sense of loss an elegiac feel. Despite some flaws--excessive length, a weak characterization of Nelson--the novel measures up well against the rest of the series. This is the saddest and deepest of the ``Rabbit'' novels, an aching portrait of America at the end of the Reagan era. Certain to be in demand. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/90.-- Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass.
Washington Post Book World
Brilliant...It must be read.
Carol Joyce Oates
Rabbit at Rest is certainly the most brooding, the most demanding, the most concentrated of John Updike's longer novels....One begins virtually to share, with the doomed Harry Angstrom, a panicky sense of the body's terrible finitude, and of its place in a world of other, competing bodies: ''You fill a slot for a time and then move out; that's the decent thing to do: make room.'' ....The being that most illuminates the Rabbit quartet is not finally Harry Angstrom himself but the world through which he moves in his slow downward slide, meticulously recorded by one of our most gifted American realists. -- The New York Times, September 30, 1990
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