- Mass Market Paperback: 427 pages
- Publisher: Fawcett; Reprint edition (Aug 31 1991)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0449219623
- ISBN-13: 978-0449219621
- Product Dimensions: 17.3 x 10.7 x 2.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 227 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,230,035 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
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 --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
What 5 stars are for,
This review is from: Rabbit at Rest (Paperback)
This book is greatness. It is what five stars are for. Obviously, being the last of the Rabbit series, it is about our hero's demise. There's very little I can say that won't "spoil the ending" for you. The ending is really touching. The author ties it all together. He even closes a loose end about his "other" daughter, letting us know that the girl he met at the car lot, and making a reprise at the hospital, is in fact his own biological daughter. He goes the way he should go. And his wife and son react just right. If you don't appreciate this book, it isn't because there is something lacking in the book, it is because there's something lacking in you. Sorry, but you just missed it.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Genious at Work,
By
This review is from: Rabbit At Rest (Hardcover)
When I read this book, I thought of the faults of all human beings but how we all strive to be as good as we can be.Harry is a very average, and is challenged by a lot of imperfections. Updike is a writer who can take average situations and make them surreal. Harry's angst about his son who is hooked on cocaine, the nature of the car business, and his dull and boring marriage. While being angry at his son's addiction, Harry is addicted to food and the comfort commercial America promises him. As the Publisher's Weekly stated, its about the aborted American dream, or is Updike saying something deeper about American, about its meaningless materialism and about the things we value. This was the best of the Rabbit series. The writing about Harry's slow personal disintegration can be painful to read about, but even more painful, finding some parallels between my life and Harry's. Reading Updike is like entering a colorful dream world which also urges the soul to consider some grim realities. Jeffrey McAndrew p.s. Another Updike book I would recommend: "Roger's Version"
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, but Rabbit Run was Better,
This review is from: Rabbit at Rest (Paperback)
Not quite as captivating as "Rabbit Run" but quite excellently written; I guess writing about somebody's slow demise just doesn't lend itself to intense interest, not like the living foibles of a character's life, as you find in "Run." Updike is a master of prose and this is extremely well researched. Very few living people can write fiction as well.
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