Rabbit at Rest
by John Updike
List Price:
Our Price: $3.98
You Save: $12.02 (75%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.02 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: John UpdikeEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1996-08-27
ISBN: 0449911942
Number of pages: 608
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Book Reviews of Rabbit at Rest
Book Review: This is how it ends
Summary: 5 Stars
Readers who have made their way through all four of Updike's Rabbit novels (and really that's the way to do it) have seen the Angstrom family go through a slew of changes, fumbling through their lives as the decades change, cheating on each other, trying to raise the kid, living apart, living together. At the center of it all stands Harry Angstrom, Rabbit himself, unconsciously convinced that everything revolves around him, feeling bad for himself only when it's convenient to do so, loving his family ineptly only to tick them off in his spare time. In the proceeding three books, there was a sense in Harry that he could rise above it all, that whatever happened in the US and to his family he could overcome and let slide off of him, he could be untouched by it all. As the country nears the end of the eighties, leaving a hard fought decade, there's a subtle change to Harry's mood, a sense that he's lost control of everything and he doesn't know how it happened and he's not sure how to get it back. Nearing sixty, his body is beginning to fail, heart trouble plaguing him and reminding him constantly of his own impending mortality. The years when he was a hero, the star basketball player of his school, are long gone and all he has now is a wife (who is finding her own independence) and son (who has kids of his own and maybe a drug problem) and the used car lot (that he doesn't really own and he doesn't work at anymore to give his son free rein). Updike's novel is a masterful look at a man who is starting to realize that he achieved his peak years ago and it's been all downhill since and he hasn't reached bottom yet. Harry acts more like a witness here than a participant, sliding through it all unsure of himself. Updike takes us into the decade as it crumbles apart, showing us the scandals and the drugs and the growing sense of the country that something was about to go terribly, terribly wrong. After going along with the characters through four novels, they start to feel like distant relatives, cousins that you know too well but that you see only rarely, poking in to visit every ten years. In these four books, Updike wound up creating four flawed but compelling characters. All of them are selfish in their own ways, needy and patronizing and wrong, but possessed of some goodness, something that keeps them from being totally irredeemable. But through it all, Harry tries to endure. As he lives part of the year in Florida, seeing the old men with their medical problems that are soon going to be his if he doesn't shape up. Back home, trying to deal with the fact that his wife doesn't need him anymore, that his son might just hate him and his daughter-in-law might want him. In the end, he can't change, his stupid petty human arrogance won't let him change, won't allow him to let go of the glory he once had for a second, over thirty years ago, a thing that people remember but no one cares about. In the end, his body does him in and Harry does himself in, by being himself, by acting the only one he knows how, stupid and selfish and innocent. Reading the last pages, knowing that the end is probably going to mean the end of Harry, I found myself consciously slowing down, as if I was forcing the man to rush through the rest of his life somehow. In the end, Harry stands as the best and worst of what an everyday man had to offer and Updike deserves all the awards he can for chronicling the upheveals of his country and the people who live in its shadow, just trying to get by. The four novels stand as great pieces of American literature and Harry himself as one of the classic characters of the twentieth century. And in the end, that's just enough. It just is.
Summary of Rabbit at Rest
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Howells Medal, and the National Book Critics Circle AwardIn John Updike?s fourth and final novel about Harry ?Rabbit? Angstrom, the hero has acquired a Florida condo, a second grandchild, and a troubled, overworked heart. His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending him mixed signals; and his wife, Janice, decides in midlife to return to the world of work. As, through the year of 1989, Reagan?s debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of the first George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live and opportunities to make peace with a remorselessly accumulating past.
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
Family Saga Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in Family Saga Books
Elephant Manby Christine Sparks
Ballantine Books; Published: 1986-11-12; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.03
Price in other shops:
Assegaiby Wilbur Smith
Thomas Dunne Books; Published: 2009-05-12; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $1.95
Price in other shops:
Birds of Preyby Wilbur Smith
St. Martin's Griffin; Published: 2003-05-16; Paperback; Book
Best price: $48.99
An Act of Loveby Nancy Thayer
St Martins Pr; Published: 1997-09; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $7.85
Price in other shops:
Honoluluby Alan Brennert
St. Martin's Press; Published: 2009-03-03; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $7.92
Price in other shops:
Family Treeby Barbara Delinsky
Anchor; Published: 2009-10-27; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.99
Price in other shops:
Those Who Save Usby Jenna Blum
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Published: 2005-05-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.48
Price in other shops:
Vinegar Hillby A. Manette Ansay
Penguin USA (P); Published: 2000-05; Paperback; Book
Best price: $14.99
Billy Phelan's Greatest Gameby William Kennedy
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 1983-01-27; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.69
Price in other shops:
Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)by Neal Stephenson
William Morrow Paperbacks; Published: 2004-09-21; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.50
Price in other shops:
Similar Books and other products
A Thousand Acres: A Novelby Jane Smiley
Anchor; Published: 2003-12-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.16
Price in other shops:
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Storiesby Robert Olen Butler
Grove Press; Published: 2001-05-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.49
Price in other shops:
Erasure: A Novelby Percival Everett
Graywolf Press; Published: 2011-10-25; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.78
Price in other shops:
Independence Day: Bascombe Trilogy (2)by Richard Ford
Vintage; Published: 1996-05-07; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.00
Price in other shops:
Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamerby Steven Millhauser
Vintage; Published: 1997-03-25; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.40
Price in other shops:
American Pastoralby Philip Roth
Vintage; Published: 1998-02-03; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.97
Price in other shops:
Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, "Rabbit Remembered"by John Updike
Random House Trade Paperbacks; Published: 2001-11-27; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.40
Price in other shops:
Rabbit Reduxby John Updike
Random House Trade Paperbacks; Published: 1996-08-27; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.00
Price in other shops:
Rabbit Is Richby John Updike
Random House Trade Paperbacks; Published: 1996-08-27; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.73
Price in other shops:
Rabbit, Runby John Updike
Random House Trade Paperbacks; Published: 1996-08-27; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.72
Price in other shops: