Rabbit Redux

by John Updike

Book Overview

In this sequel to Rabbit, Run, John Updike resumes the spiritual quest of his anxious Everyman, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Ten years have passed; the impulsive former athlete has become a paunchy... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0449911934
• Release Date: August 1996
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.2" x 0.9" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Updike's most forceful novel

The second of the Rabbit novels. Ten years have elapsed since the end of RABBIT, RUN, and times in America are not so good: chaos reigns as the country is embroiled in Vietnam, the "sexual revolution" is exploding, and social unrest spreads. The novel reflects that chaos through Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom and his world: Janice, his wife, is having an affair and leaves when Rabbit refuses to fight for her; Harry takes up with an 18-year-old runaway named Jill; and a black revolutionary man, Skeeter, comes to live with him. Chaos and violence escalate until Harry's house burns down and Jill is killed. Eventually Harry and Janice are reconciled. Again Updike masterfully portrays the times in which the novel is set through the reaction to them by Harry, and despite the death and destruction all the characters learn important things about themselves and gain perspective. It's an explosive work, an important one, and one of Updike's best.

This book grows on you.

Updike is good at balancing the perspective of characters, so that we figure out what is happening through their heads sometimes, and at other times, we hear it in the third person. When inside a head, Updike also doesn't let a linear transgression occur through objectified and common facts, but instead shows us a kind of stream of consciousness, though patterned, way of thinking, and of being wrong about a physical and social world that is constantly changing. This book is a clarion call for class/race/gender analysis--these issues do not exist independently, and cannot exist independently. We get Americana at its finest, but here, things clash, and people talk; instead of any kind of dreamy removed abstraction, we have Updike challenging the social roles: is Jill a prostitute? Is she Harry's daughter? Is she at once Harry's daughter, a prostitute, a white rich girl from CT and Nelson's girlfriend, a heroin addict, a good role model, and a wise philosopher? Well, yeah! That's what makes Updike so good. People are boxed in the way that we traditionally box them, as is Harry, but they are simultaneously moving through space and time, so that the boxes are also moving around them. Through this kind of everyday analysis, Updike moves to tackle major social issues, and he does so, what, two decades ahead of many elite social scientists? And, in my opinion, he does so in a more accessible way--because looking at some of the issues presented in this book cannot be separated away from living a middle class lifestyle; race riots, urban sprawl, gender equity, coming of age adolescence, capitalistic monotony, family breakdown, love affairs, boredom, elitist, racism, the freedom of the road, the neutrality of whiteness, etc.--They are all intermingled and mashed up together, so that we get some kind of more realistic view on how things happen. That's the bottom line I guess. This book is like a moving snapshot, and Updike parses out enough details and specificity to tell us a story, but without losing some of the complication and ambiguities of how life is experienced on multiple levels, from multiple angles, and from simultaneous, but traditionally opposing, viewpoints.

Rabbit Angstrom And The 1960's

I did not expect to expect to read, much less like "Rabbit Redux," Updike's first sequel to "Rabbit Run." I read the first book about 20 years ago and found it mundane and uninteresting. I felt that the only future that Rabbit had was as a Readers Digest entry. Then the next 2 sequels each won a number of literary prizes. About a year ago I purchased at Strand Book Store in NYC a large, paper-bound edition containing the first 3 Rabbit books. I started to read the "Rabbit Redux" section, but decided to put the volume down after the book's binding ripped (and later split in two). After reading and loving Updike's "Bech: A Book," I decided to purchase two used, hard-bound editions of "Rabbit Redux" and "Rabbit Is Rich."I have just finished reading "Rabbit Redux" and was not only pleasantly suprised, but was greatly moved. The book takes place in 1969. We find Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom sharing many of the views of "the silent majority": he supports the Vietnam War, believes in monogamy, is against hippies, drug use, and is suspicious and mistrustful of "Negroes" (he cannot accept the term "black" which comes into common usage in the late "60s.). However, after his wife leaves him for another man, and after an 18 year old female runaway and then her black miltant friend move in with Rabbit, the 1960's literally come "crashing down" on Rabbit Angstrom. I won't say that Rabbit becomes radicalized, but he is changed forever.I found the book moving, disturbing, and in many ways quite touching. By the time I finished the last page of "Rabbit Redux," I actually found myself liking this new, more mature Rabbit Angstrom very much.

adultery and gloom makes for a great novel!

Ah yes, how nice to settle in with another Rabbit novel by that patron-Saint of adultery John Updike. Here we meet a Rabbit (how sad that no one remembers or cares about his beloved nickname except Updike and us) ten years older, just as gloomy and perhaps more irascible and conservative.But I always stand by my belief that Rabbit is more intelligent than everybody around him even when he is spouting nonesense. I have talked to a few people who think him stupid but i feel that he has a naturally expansive nature, and is not afraid to look at life at its ugliest and most awful. Of course Janice is back, and is presented as more complex and enigmatic, as she herself is involved in an affair with someone else. I thought Updike wrote of the relationship between Rabbit and his son wonderfully; one could sense acutely the admiration Nelson had for him, though at times it was difficult for them to relate. The relationship between Nelson and Rabbit reminded me of that of Peter and Caldwell in The Centuar. Beyond this there is a mad cast of characters and some scenes of absolutely high drama. Sad fires in the middle of the night, lessons dictated to Rabbit about the history of racism in America, stress between Rabbit and both his wife and his son, the troubled teenage girl who happens to fall into the picture and much more.I did not think this book a dissapointment at all (in fact I applaud Updike's courage for attempting to follow up the brilliant Rabbit, Run at all) and also feel that this book has more narrative explosiveness and drama than did the earlier novel.It goes without saying that this book is written beautifully and filled with tons of images which my unartistic brain would never have dreamed of. From the enchanting opening scene of workers freshly emerging into the overwhelming daylight that renders them all looking like ghosts coming into focus, Updike proceeds to sprinke the dialouge and narrative with bizzare images which compel one to stare at things anew, with wide-open eyes. It is in such little details that Updike exhibits his genius and original mind. If this were merely a novel "about life and love in America" I would have no interest in it whatsoever. The real beauty of the novel is simply Updike's shimmering prose and originality of textured thought (who else would describe a couple holding hands and walking away in the night as "a starfish leapt in the dark as they walked away" - such images make a novel).

The Great Sixties Novel

All the Rabbit books have their pleasures, but this one really stands out. Not only that, it is the great 1960s novel -- eventhough it didn't arrive until the early 1970s. Updike, no less than Bob Dylan, brought it all back home: the war, hippies, riots. He took all the turmoil of his times and put it on a purely domestic level.A thousand years from now, someone will pick up this book to understand life in that turbulent decade, and the picture they receive will be true.