Rabbit at Rest

Dec 14, 2008 brian rated it 4 of 5 stars

we believe that with time comes wisdom, that by the time we’re older we’ll have acquired a natural sense of life and other people and our own self and how to live -- how to cast aside the pettiness and do away with the small things that mean nothing more than cancerous nibblings at our gut. but no. it doesn’t just happen. we don’t leave that stuff behind unless we make a serious effort to do so. and it’s hard work. we don’t wanna turn into one of those morons that’s always happy and even (y’know...more we believe that with time comes wisdom, that by the time we’re older we’ll have acquired a natural sense of life and other people and our own self and how to live -- how to cast aside the pettiness and do away with the small things that mean nothing more than cancerous nibblings at our gut. but no. it doesn’t just happen. we don’t leave that stuff behind unless we make a serious effort to do so. and it’s hard work. we don’t wanna turn into one of those morons that’s always happy and even (y’know the old ‘let fury have the hour, anger can be power’ business is something i firmly stand behind), but we can’t be one of those people that goes home and lays in bed all night stewing about george bush or how their parents fucked them up or what they should have said to that rude dmv worker or cocky bookfacer or self-obsessed friend etc…

the Rabbit books so perfectly lay down exactly what i’ve spent so much of my life fighting against. and against becoming. how all those forces – the time in which one lives, nature, nurture, genes, parents, bad luck, tragic events, bad people and/or circumstances etc – all work to turn us into a petty and unhappy person. and that hate turns outward against other people and against society and you continue the legacy of unhappiness and impotence and pettiness in the form of a son/daughter who’s gotta spend his/her time in the same demented struggle.

fuck that. i’m stunned by how many of my contemporaries still, in their 30s, blame who they are on their parents – there’s truth in it, of course, but how personally damaging to continue to blame who you are on anything other than to realize that by a certain point who you are is who you decide to be? particularly given the priviliged life even the worst off of us have in america in 2008.

so i give the individual books four stars, but i list the single volume collection with five stars. yeah, they really are more than the sum of their parts. and it’s not a flawless single volume or up there with Moby Dick or Don Quixote or War and Peace… and i don’t think they even match the majesty of Dos Passos’s or Roth’s USA trilogies in detailing american life and history over the first and second half, respectively, of america in the 20th century. it’s simply that the compounded power of 1500 pages of a single life over thirty years is overwhelming. and not all that much even happens. and i love this. many of the threads contained therein have false starts, other seemingly minor ones grow in significance, others are buried and lost under the weight of the pages of life, others are forgotten until a chance encounter… and as with most american lives after the third decade, it’s a steady plateauing off.

i’m turning 35 next month and I can already feel it. the slowing down. i’m tired more than i ever was. i require and relish sleep more than i ever did. i don’t feel as large a need for human socialization. i like things the way i like them. and i know i gotta fight this shit and be curious and surprised and sad and strange and perpetually seek out the new and reinvent myself and dig deeper and deeper and live! live! live! …or else I wake up in the morning look in the mirror and see Rabbit.

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Jan 06, 2012 Frank rated it 4 of 5 stars

I didn't expect to be sad at the end of this. But after four novels, each gradually getting deeper into the character, moving from about 300 pages in the first to almost 500 by the last, I've logged in a lot of time with Harry Angstrom. And so when this one brought his story around to the end, I got a little sad.

It's an accomplishment to write a character essentially from birth to death. And so much of Rabbit's story involves all of the mundane details of small-town life -- watching TV, knowing...more

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Jul 11, 2010 Kate rated it 5 of 5 stars

I have really enjoyed re-reading Updike's Rabbit series over the last year. I first read Rabbit, Run in high school (some 10 years after it was published); Rabbit Redux in college; Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest as soon as I could get my hands on them. But Harry Angstrom is about 20 years older than I am, so now that he and I are the same age (his age, that is, in Rabbit at Rest)I understand him in a different way. All the books, and particularly the last two, are beautifully written. I can't...more

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Oct 12, 2011 Stephen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: united-states, 20th-century

Just as the first hundred pages of RABBIT, RUN were written in a breathless pace to match their manic tone, the last hundred pages of RABBIT AT REST, which mirror the beginning moments of the series, linger on in a depressingly meaningless manner. Highway billboards, trite pop tunes from past decades, and trivial news headlines about baseball players blur with the names and minutiae of a history book, the snapshot memories of Harry's somewhat uneventful life, and the chronic ups and downs of his...more Just as the first hundred pages of RABBIT, RUN were written in a breathless pace to match their manic tone, the last hundred pages of RABBIT AT REST, which mirror the beginning moments of the series, linger on in a depressingly meaningless manner. Highway billboards, trite pop tunes from past decades, and trivial news headlines about baseball players blur with the names and minutiae of a history book, the snapshot memories of Harry's somewhat uneventful life, and the chronic ups and downs of his erratic family life. Insipid, self-destructive meal follows unhealthy meal, and the sitcoms in getaway Florida are the same idiotic mindlessness that shows on the televisions in Pennsylvania. Rabbit tries, in the last moments of his life, to find a reason for all that living, and it's not so easy to say that he does. As he staggers through bland smalltalk with a Holocaust survivor who's been reduced to a decrepit buffet patron and tries to pack a punch in awkward conversations with his distant grandchildren, one realizes that if life does have some driving purpose, Rabbit Angstrom has never tapped into it. Even the most cherished moment of his last year on earth, a spontaneous and rather scandalous sexual encounter, is reduced to psychological rationalization and neurotic impulses by his frustratingly forgiving family, who whittle even his sex drive down to a few taboo missteps.

RABBIT AT REST is a bleakly beautiful book, with razor-sharp prose that begs to be reread and read out loud. One might expect a novel about an intimately familiar protagonist to contain some epiphanies, some poetic truths, or at least some tender moments, yet throughout the series Updike never surrendered to cliches or melodrama and nor does he here. RABBIT AT REST is a slice of reality, and sometimes reality ends in unresolved regrets and pitiful, self-defeating attempts at impossible reconciliations.

Updike is also an American historian, an ethnographer of the middle American malaise, and in RABBIT AT REST, just as with previous decades in the previous books, he captures life in the late eighties as though from some well-informed future vantage point. Debt, computers, racism, the wasteland of American industry--Updike envisions and eviscerates all of society's ills with an acuteness that leaves me wishing I could pick up something like RABBIT IN RECESSION, a 2010 novel that could maybe help us all figure out where our troublesome future might lie.

RABBIT AT REST is a splendid novel, maybe not quite as powerful and moving as RABBIT, RUN, but then again--to paraphrase Harry--when you get older it gets harder to muster the same enthusiasm you once held for everything. (less)

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Jan 30, 2008 Rebecca F. rated it 4 of 5 stars

Updike's Rabbit series ends - suprisingly - softly. Despite a tumultuous 60 years full of controversial life decisions by the main character Rabbit, Updike decides, perhaps NOT suprisingly (since Updike himself was in his own later years when writing this book), that things should wind down gracefully. Updike did an amazing job in this series making plot and theme connections between books, and here in his waning days, Rabbit's character comes full-circle, with echoes of Book 1, Rabbit Run, and...more

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Aug 01, 2012 Mark Juric rated it 5 of 5 stars

I dreaded reading this book and I have to admit that it took me two weeks to get through the last 50 pages. I miss Harry Angstrom not as if a dear friend has died, but as if I have died myself and yet somehow remain around to mourn my own loss. What's odd is that I didn't really like Rabbit. I did understand him though, in a way that I've never understood anyone aside from myself. That, to me, is Updike's true gift: chipping away to an unvarnished life to expose the raw emotion and thought upon...more

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Feb 10, 2009 Cristina rated it 5 of 5 stars

the end of the 'Rabbit' books = the end of my affair with john updike. don't want to read 'Terrorist,' read 'S.,' was disappointed. but the Rabbit books i will read over and over.

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Feb 15, 2009 Carole rated it 2 of 5 stars

I read this at a suggestion from a book group. I had earlier in my life been unable to get through RABBIT, RUN, but thought maybe added maturity would help me appreciate Updike's writing more. I was wrong. Even his gift with words (the reason for the second star in the rating) wasn't enough to make up for the thoroughly unlikable characters and depressing picture of several wasted lives. Even the style of writing I often found difficult, making the reading of this novel a slow and painful experi...more

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Apr 14, 2013 Stephen Thomas rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

FINALLY COOKED IN HIS OWN JUICES

Another decade on and Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is well into his middle-age. He’s 56, overweight, and still living the American dream. He splits his time between the old home town in Pennsylvania and his condo in Florida. All should be well, but his cokehead son is running the family business into the ground and Harry is eating himself to death. As flawed and human as ever Harry is still struggling to balance his conflicting impulses. He’s the product of an excessiv...more

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Mar 18, 2013 Dan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Listening to the 60+ hours of Rabbit Angstrom audiobooks in succession has been one of the most moving reading experiences in my life. This last chapter is a fitting end to a series of masterpieces. It's not as good as Rabbit is Rich, primarily because Rabbit's son Nelson's drug addiction diminishes the strengths of his character. Not only that, but Ma Springer has died. Rabbit is no longer triple-teamed. His wife Janice causes some grief, but she's growing - good for her, she needed it, but she...more Listening to the 60+ hours of Rabbit Angstrom audiobooks in succession has been one of the most moving reading experiences in my life. This last chapter is a fitting end to a series of masterpieces. It's not as good as Rabbit is Rich, primarily because Rabbit's son Nelson's drug addiction diminishes the strengths of his character. Not only that, but Ma Springer has died. Rabbit is no longer triple-teamed. His wife Janice causes some grief, but she's growing - good for her, she needed it, but she has become less of a foil for Harry.

Harry himself as a character is diminished. He's dying from heart problems. Premature, but really, do we want to see him boffing young women in his 80s?

What really impressed me about this book is Updike's supreme sense of responsibility to this series. He knows he's got something for the ages, and he brings his A game. To use a basketball metaphor, almost required for Rabbit, Updike is like Michael Jordan or LeBron James - when time is running out and the game is on the line, he wants the ball, and you give it to him, because you know he'll do something extraordinary with it.

The heart attack scene in the beginning is exquisite. But where Updike really brings it is towards the end. First, with Harry taking on the costume of Uncle Sam and leading a parade down Brewer. Yes, it is a rather obvious statement - Harry is Every American. Indulgent of Updike, yes, but goddamn it, the sonofabitch has earned it. But what really got me misty eyed was Harry's reaction to his latest self-induced crisis. He goes back on the road taking the same journey he did thirty years earlier in Rabbit, Run. If for no other reason, this is why you have to read all four novels, warts (Rabbit Redux) and all. This time he makes his destination, and its melancholy is heartbreaking. But Rabbit doesn't go without a fight, and dies with his Nikes on.

Now onto Rabbit Remembered, a seven-hour novella I hadn't been aware of until I started listening to these books. It can't be as good without Rabbit, but I still want to know what happens to this crazy, all-too-human, all-too-recognizable family.(less)

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Feb 07, 2013 Al rated it 4 of 5 stars

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Howells Medal, and the National Book Critics Circle Award

In 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

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Howells Medal, and the National Book Critics Circle Award

In 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.

Amazon.com Review

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.

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Oct 07, 2012 Alan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Reading this book when it first emerged, I was relieved that finally Updike had written a book as good as Saul Bellow's, which
always enriched one's thought about life. Granted, some of Bellow's success lay in the European culture behind so many of his
characters, like Mr Sammler, or Ravelstein. Updike has always written stunningly, with a facile and facetious prose, at its best. But often the books added up to little; they were a smattering of decadent bourgeoise capitalist suburban culture, wher...more

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Aug 02, 2012 Andrea Mullarkey rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: audio

John Updike’s Rabbit series follows Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom from his mid-20s as a young father living in Brewer, Pennsylvania to his retirement 30 years later. In the first book he is looking for a way out of his lackluster life. His marriage, his children, his job, and his family all pale in comparison to his memories of being the star of his high school basketball team. His desire for a brighter life drive him to questionable decisions which have bad consequences. In the end he is back near wh...more

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Aug 31, 2011 Alex Csicsek rated it 4 of 5 stars

I hadn't read any of the others in Updike's Rabbit series, the much-acclaimed series documenting the life of a middle-class American everyman through the later half of the twentieth century, but that didn't stop me from instantly recognizing Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom. Because he really is the American everyman, and his is the story of the American experience.

Rabbit at Rest joins Harry at the final juncture of his life. Having spent the previous three novels as a high school basketball star, young...more I hadn't read any of the others in Updike's Rabbit series, the much-acclaimed series documenting the life of a middle-class American everyman through the later half of the twentieth century, but that didn't stop me from instantly recognizing Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom. Because he really is the American everyman, and his is the story of the American experience.

Rabbit at Rest joins Harry at the final juncture of his life. Having spent the previous three novels as a high school basketball star, young husband starting out his life, and then a moderately successful car salesman on the move to suburbia, Rabbit in the last novel is overweight, living half the year in Florida, and grappling with the existential angst that is par for the course with semi-retirement. As world events, such as the Pan Am terrorist attack, conspire with family problems to exacerbate an impending sense of doom, Harry spends his time on the golf course before his son's young family comes to visit. It starts off with constant feuding and ends with Harry in hospital having suffered a heart attack. And his that's just the first section.

Updike truly is an American literary genius, whose characters imply an affection for the American experience that doesn't shy away from its many faults. I was most impressed by his sense of place and its impact on our lives: from the mowed fairways and shoddy condominiums of a Florida retirement community to winding cul-de-sacs of new suburban developments, Updike gives us magnificent portraits of the varied settings for American life, ones which are on the whole unobtrusive yet subtlety influential. If nothing else, read the first few pages of the section section, which is a spectacular description of a small post-industrial city in the northeast, which makes it come so alive you can feel the cracks in the pavement under your feet.

Harry is a miserable old bastard, whose misogynistic and racist outbursts are only tempered by the fact that he really doesn't care much about anyone but himself. His life has been downhill since leaving high school, and working as a car salesman didn't do much to add much vibrancy to his life. Yet to see him as a one-dimensional, boring suburbanite misses the point. There is a majestic complexity in even the most ordinary lives, and Updike serves it up to us in Rabbit at Rest.(less)

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Jul 07, 2009 Stefani rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

As Rabbit heads into his fifth decade, and last as far as the series is concerned, he is retired and living in Florida half the year. Florida being the land of the retiree and somewhat of a cultural wasteland, it is an appropriate setting for Rabbit's descent into semi-inertia. This book reeks of the consumerism, greed, and excess of the 80's to an almost nauseating degree. The near constant references to food, in gluttonous detail, that Rabbit consumes voraciously, despite his clogged arteries...more

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Jan 27, 2009 Stephanie rated it 5 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. January 27, 2009 -- My heart is grieving. John Updike died today.

January 18, 2009 -- I am so relieved to finally finish Rabbit at Rest, by John Updike, the last book in his Rabbit series. I am softened, too, by having read this final book. While I dislike the character of Rabbit Angstrom as much as ever, I have sympathy for the man. And it is a fitting response to a person's death to be able to put aside petty differences and to mourn along with those who loved him -- even if it is a love, like...more January 27, 2009 -- My heart is grieving. John Updike died today.

January 18, 2009 -- I am so relieved to finally finish Rabbit at Rest, by John Updike, the last book in his Rabbit series. I am softened, too, by having read this final book. While I dislike the character of Rabbit Angstrom as much as ever, I have sympathy for the man. And it is a fitting response to a person's death to be able to put aside petty differences and to mourn along with those who loved him -- even if it is a love, like his wife's, Janice's, that seems born out of familiarity and habit than out of a shared sympathy of thought.

Throughout these four books, Updike has done a wonderful job of hearkening back to earlier moments in Rabbit's life, whether they be childhood memories that preceded the action in Rabbit, Run, or whether they are memories of events that transpired within the pages of any of the four book -- that is, events that I myself experienced through reading about them.

Similarly, Updike does a masterful job of closing the circle on Rabbit's life by repeating two significant episodes that began Rabbit, Run and that began my acquaintence with Rabbit. At the very beginning of the first book, Rabbit -- then, a twenty-something ex-high-school basketball star, still in good physical shape -- intrudes on a group of high schoolers playing basketball and bests them in a pick-up game. Disheartened, I think, with the contrast between the promise of his youth and the daily grind of his young adult life, he is prompted to try and escape his pregnant wife, Janice, and their young son, Nelson, and drives south into the night, hoping to reach the Gulf of Florida and dip his toes into the water. He never reaches the Gulf, but turns back -- only to refuse to return to his wife. Instead, he sets up house with Ruth, his prostitute-turned-lover, and sets into motion a disasterous chain of events whose ultimate conclusion -- the death by drowning of his baby daughter -- still has its icy fingers on Rabbit's life and on the lives of Janice and Nelson in the last book, Rabbit at Rest. And it is at the end of the last book that Rabbit, now old and enfeebled by heart disease, tries to escape these icy fingers by driving once again to Florida in a road trip that parallels the first one, now, however, to the condo that he and Janice own on the Gulf. Having finally reached Florida, he plays a last game of basketball -- intruding again on the life of a kid, a stranger to him, that he sees playing basketball. It is during this last game that he suffers what will ultimately be a fatal heart attack.

And herein, I suppose, lies the sympathy that I feel for Rabbit. We all make mistakes and hurt people, and we all will die in the end. And we all avoid learning from our mistakes, meaning that we are then condemned to repeat them. And I also guess that I believe we all have some spark of divinity within us, however minute.

I'll close with a quote. The speaker is Rabbit's heart doctor; Rabbit's answer is silent:

" 'What's wrong with running your blood through a machine? What else you think you are, champ?'

"A God-made one-of-a-kind with an immortal soul breathed in. A vehicle of grace. A battlefield of good and evil. An apprentice angel. All those things they tried to teach you in Sunday school, or really didn't try very hard to teach you, just let them drift in out of the pamphlets, back there in that church basement buried deeper in his mind than an air-raid shelter."

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Mar 08, 2013 Fellini rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: kindle

Кондо во Флориде, внуки, отход от бизнеса, хобби в виде чтения толстой исторической книги... Кажется, Кролик действительно перестал бежать и примирился с жизнью. Жизнь стала предсказуемой, чуть скучноватой, но удобной как старые домашние тапочки. Но расслабиться и наслаждаться ей не получается, родные подкидывают всё новые сюрпризы. /тут могли быть спойлеры/
В финале Кролик совершает самый удачный, наверное, за всю жизнь побег. Достигая цели, недоумевает и снова и снова переосмысливает свои посту...more

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Apr 27, 2009 Shannon rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

My first Updike. I'm kind of hooked now.

I had never read anything by Updike, never really even contemplated it, until his passing this year. Updike was a frequent contributor of short stories to the New Yorker and a few issues featured articles devoted to the literary giant and his work. I was especially moved by the series of poems that he wrote while sick and facing his own mortality. I picked up Rabbit at Rest in a sort of spur of the moment whirl around Half-Priced Books in March.

I was swall...more My first Updike. I'm kind of hooked now.

I had never read anything by Updike, never really even contemplated it, until his passing this year. Updike was a frequent contributor of short stories to the New Yorker and a few issues featured articles devoted to the literary giant and his work. I was especially moved by the series of poems that he wrote while sick and facing his own mortality. I picked up Rabbit at Rest in a sort of spur of the moment whirl around Half-Priced Books in March.

I was swallowed up by the first sentence of the book - always a good sign. "Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane. The sensation chills him, above and beyond the terminal air-conditioning. But, then, facing Nelson has made him feel uneasy for thirty years."

Unbeknownst to me at purchase, "Rabbit at Rest" is the final book in a four tome series spanning the life and death of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom from 1960-1990. The narrative style of the book is one that assumes, but doesn't require, that the reader has read the previous three Rabbit books (luckily for me). In the last book, Rabbit is in his mid-fifties, overweight, depressed and ornery. The book alludes to a life lived outside of perfection - affairs (both he and his wife are guilty), a tense and strained relationship between father and son (the aforementioned Nelson). Despite, or because of his failures and shortcomings, Rabbit is a likeable and relatable main character. He is struggling with heart problems and a failing body. "Sometimes Rabbit's spirit feels as if it might faint from lugging all this body around."

Rabbit is plodding around Florida in retirement, directionless and frustrated now that he has been replaced by his son Nelson in the family car sales business back in Pennsylvania. He is also consumed with thoughts of death, made even more strident by the recent real life tragedy of the bombing of the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland. I really enjoyed the way the news and occurrences of real life filtered it's way into the book. It was not distracting and I liked the sense of realism it brought to the text.

When Rabbit's son, Nelson, and family travel to Florida for a visit, Rabbit immediately notices that his son's nervous and frantic manner has become even more evident and unsettling. It is revealed that he is in the throes of a addiction to cocaine that has led to the devastation of his marriage, and the embezzlement of funds from the family company. While on a boat trip with his young granddaughter, Rabbit suffers a heart attack and ends up in the hospital.

Updike's narrative flows in an wonderful way- the story told in between the covers of this book was both simple and extraordinary. I was reminded of a quote I read in the New Yorker about Updike's attitude about his work. "A form of modesty that, given not just the quality but the heat and shimmer of what was enclosed, passed the edge of modesty to touch the edge of superstition." I loved his descriptions - of a woman's beauty as "limping" or Rabbit's sister as "himself transposed into quite another key, and yet the melody recognizable."

Wikipedia unfortunately spoiled the ending for me, revealing that Rabbit passed away in the end. However, this knowledge allowed me to concentrate on the words on the page before me, rather than worry about what would or would not happen to the main character. Sorry if I just ruined it for you too - although it is not shocking but seems inevitable with the way that Rabbit chooses to lead his life after the first heart attack.

Read For Yourself:

"And he has never forgot how, thirty years ago it will be this June, his baby daughter Rebecca June drowned and when he went back to the apartment alone there was still this tubful of tepid gray water that had killed her. God hadn't pulled the plug. It would have been so easy for Him, Who set the stars in place. To have it unhappen. Or to delete fom the universe whatever it was that exploded that Pan Am 747 over Scotland. Those bodies with hearts pumping tumbling down in the dark. How much did they know as they fell, through air dense like tepid water, tepid gray like this terminal where people blow through like dust in an air duct, to the airline we're all just numbers on the computer, one more or less, who cares? A blip on the screen, then no blip on the screen. Those bodies tumbling down like wet melon seeds."

"There is a lightness, a lightening, that comes along with misery: vast portions of the world are shorn off, suddenly ignorable. You become simply a piece of physical luggage to be delivered into the hands of others."
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Jul 23, 2011 Jo Bennie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

An ironic title for the last Updike's Rabbit quadrology. The last days of 1988, Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is retired, morbidly obese and waiting at the Southwest Florida Regional airport for his son Nelson to arrive with wife Theresa, known as Pru, and his grandchildren Judy and Roy. Pan Am 103 has just exploded over Lockerbie. Rabbit and his wife Janice now retreat to Florida during winters, returning to their home in Brewer, Pennsylvania for summers. Rabbit spends his days on the golf course, Ne...more

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Jun 24, 2011 Jogle rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, pulitzer-winners

The final novel in the series (Updike later wrote a 180 page novella as part of the Licks of Love short story compilation), and Rabbit is semi retired and is living partly in Florida (I think you Yanks call these Snowbirds?). In the late 80’s His wife has found new drive and energy, his son is reborn into a social counsellor career… but Rabbit is still drifting along. His past life is dying all around.

Rabbit is not likeable, but after four books I feel an affinity with him, almost verging on em...more

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Apr 02, 2011 Jee Koh rated it 5 of 5 stars

Rabbit eats and eats to fill the growing emptiness of his life as he ages. The taste of things, the last flickering appetite for life, is vividly described in this final installment of John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, as well as the invasion of medical technology into one's decaying body. Rabbit has an angioplasty, and the scene is humorous, terrifying and unforgettable.

Unlike Ian McEwan, who casts a coolly satirical eye on modern-day consumerism in his novel, Solar, Updike sizes up not just the...more

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Jan 06, 2013 James Boardman rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book marks the end of the saga of the Angstrom family (except for a novella in "Licks of Love"), and, in particular, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. This and one other of the Rabbit series gained for Updike two Pulitzers. It is easy to see why. In the 2000 plus pages of the four books, one becomes attached to the Angstrom Family (friendly attachment?). Harry, in the end, is just like any one of us - a man struggling with the tools, personality and character which he has been given. He lives life i...more

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Jun 16, 2012 Ben rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: pulitizer

Pulitzer 1992 - This is the last of Updike's 4 Rabbit Angstrom Books. I have only read the last two and will now go back and read the first two. In this one taking place in 1989 Rabbit & Janice have retired to a condo in Florida and his son Nelson now has 2 kids with Pru. As the book opens his life has become mundane but of course not for long. He has a small heart attack that sets in motion the theme of growing old. Nelson is running the dealership and has become a drug addict. The people t...more

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Jan 16, 2011 Carole added it

Just purchased this from my Kindle! I almost fell into this book with relief at the seemingly effortless prose, compared with Lisa See, Shanghai Girls. It is tempting to stop everything & read, read, read this. I am very much enjoying it & almost feel back at home with Updike.
Finished this yesterday & would have stopped everything to read if I could. In the end Rabbit comes full circle, running away for the last time to Florida where he comes face to face with the emptiness of life...more

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Oct 05, 2011 Nate rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Kind of a let-down. The dude dies when he's 56? He keeps talking about how old he is, as if being over 55 means your life is over. I felt this was the weakest of the Rabbit series. Things just don't resolve. I guess that's the point. It's supposed to mirror real-life. I was a little bit bothered about how codependent his wife was toward their son Nelson, who bilked the family auto business out of thousands of dollars to feed a cocaine addiction. Then, after a few months in rehab, he's fine? Is t...more

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Aug 28, 2011 Fabian rated it 3 of 5 stars

Q: Where oh where will Rabbit go to rest? Where will it all (all four decades worth of this, an all American life) culminate-- and how? A: In Florida, and boringly.
This is a tremendously slow trek through Harry Angstrom’s last year and we see the guy eat himself to death and burn bridges with family and friends. (Eh… what’s new?) The sick sad life of the American Male: the fourth novel is overkill; while it is nice to revisit some of Rabbit’s highlights and (mostly) lowlights, how can a life be...more

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Mar 07, 2011 Mike rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: children, contemporary, fathers-and-sons, loss, love, marriage, pulitzer-prize-winner, sexuality, 20th-century, addiction, aging

John Updike closes out his quartet of Rabbit novels with what can only be described as a masterpiece. He won his second Pulitzer for "Rabbit at Rest." Only Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner had previously won the Pulitzer more than once.

Rabbit is semi-retired. He has a condo on the Gulf side of Florida. He maintains his historic Pennsylvania home. But things are falling apart, literally and figuratively. HIV has become an epidemic. A jet disintegrates over Lockerbie, Scotland. Cocaine is a p...more

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Apr 06, 2013 Denis Materna rated it 4 of 5 stars

"His consciousness comes and goes, and he marvels that in its gaps the world is being tended to, just as it was in the centuries before he was born."

The story of Harry Rabbit Angstrom finishes in this book. The character stands out as selfish and unfeeling, to people around him. However, they all love him. The basketball star with a careless faith that all works out somehow, never worrying too much about the future, just taking care of his own needs at the moment.

I learnt from Rabbit, that the...more

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Aug 27, 2010 Andrew rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: novel

Start with an embarrassing admission that I had not any Updike until this year. In fact, I started with a short pamphlet size book about Ted Williams.

I decided to start at the end of the Rabbit series. For those familiar with Updike, it comes as no surprise that I found Rabbit to be a vivid, if highly negative character. The funny part is that Updike mananged to create a nacissitic and irritable character that the other characters love. Rabbit ends up isolated more of his own accord that the dec...more

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Sep 21, 2012 Andrew rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: small-town-suburban-malaise, pulitzer-winners

From time to time, I’ll read Pulitzer Prize winning books. Mostly because it is a list of “good” books and it gets me to branch out a little bit. I started the Rabbit series because books 3 and 4 won the prize. It took some time getting to the good stuff here, but this one definitely deserved to win. This volume has what I was waiting for when I started these books. Seeing the end of Rabbit’s life made him a lot more real and engaging. In previous books it was kind of hard to like him, but here...more

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Rabbit at Rest (Rabbit Angstrom #4)

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