Rabbit Redux (Paperback) by John Updike - Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists

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Glens Falls (NY) ...: RIP - John Updike (1932 – 2009)	3	25	01/31/2009 05:17AM

04/25/09

David rated it:

bookshelves: 2009-year-of-american-classics

Read in April, 2009

Having heard the persistent rumors (circa the late 1960s) that there were in fact Negroes in America doing drugs and being fellated by stupid white women, John Updike was apparently itchin' to stage an encounter between one of these undomesticated specimens and his middle class schlub Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. The goal, no doubt, was to commentate on the changing face of race relations in America. Ergo, here in Rabbit Redux, we discover the altered geographies (literal and figurative) o...more Having heard the persistent rumors (circa the late 1960s) that there were in fact Negroes in America doing drugs and being fellated by stupid white women, John Updike was apparently itchin' to stage an encounter between one of these undomesticated specimens and his middle class schlub Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. The goal, no doubt, was to commentate on the changing face of race relations in America. Ergo, here in Rabbit Redux, we discover the altered geographies (literal and figurative) of Middle America: the inner cities are being surrendered to the crazy knife-wielding jigaboos, who, according to the prevailing narrative, spend all their time plotting against Whitey, i.e., coveting his money, his pussy, his nation, his peace of mind, and so on and so on; meanwhile, good ol' red-blooded American honkies in golf shirts retreat to the palliatives of tract housing and manicured lawns in the plastic idylls of the suburbs. Echoing the state of affairs in Vietnam, one might endeavor to claim, at one's own peril surely, that "we" were in danger of losing this (racial) war as well and soon would be subjects to a savage patrimony of monkey kings. At least that opinion wouldn't have been too far a bus trip from Harry Angstrom's terrain of opinion.

The beginning of Rabbit Redux finds Harry, a thirty-six-year-old man committed religiously to his adolescence, confronting his wife Janice's affair with a hairy Greek pinko. By "confronting" I of course mean smacking her and then fucking her. This is, after all, how a child's tantrum would be transliterated into the adult world. At any rate, Harry -- I would suspect -- is less outraged by her mere infidelity than by the fact that (1) she was sullied by the seed of a lefty foreigner and (2) he never managed to get a satisfying blowjob out of Janice before their marriage expired. Maybe I'm too cynical in my conjectures, but I think I know Harry well enough by now...

Janice, a moron in her own right, leaves Harry (with custody of their son Nelson and their house) and moves in with her lover. Harry, essentially left stranded without a plot by Updike, mopes and occasionally glares over at his long-haired, unathletic son with disapproval, as if he senses that Nelson has become or is becoming on of "them." And "them" is defined negatively by what he is not... sensitive, effete, tolerant of the new American status quo.

But surely rumination won't suffice for three-hundred-fifty pages of a novel unless you're Proust. Enter Jill, an eighteen-year-old white hippie runaway from Connecticut, and Skeeter, a drug-dealing, messianic black Vietnam vet. I won't go into the specifics of how this all comes about because you'd assume I was joking anyway, but these two ancestors of a Golden Age Pam Grier film somehow end up living with Harry and Nelson in their aluminum-sided Eden. A new family dynamic is invented. Jill is swapped back-and-forth (as a collection of willing orifices) between Skeeter and Harry, and a large amount of drugs are taken after dinner. All of this, within the perimeter of twelve-year-old Nelson's acute awareness.

Most importantly -- for Updike's purposes anyway -- Skeeter schools Harry in the finer arts of tolerance. It isn't an entirely successful education to be sure, but the moral of the story seems to be that a black man craves pussy too, so gender can trump race. Taking a stupid white bitch from the front and back, in other words, requires no racial distinction. A rock-hard boner speaks Esperanto and is never ever misunderstood.

Yes, of course, Updike isn't trying to create sympathetic characters here. The only one who merits an inkling of our compassion is the unfortunate son Nelson, who is, no doubt, completely and utterly doomed by his circumstances. His parents may not be the worst parents in the world, but no one would laugh at them if they entered the competition. They are selfish, irresponsible, and deficient in seemingly every parental instinct observed even among the lowliest animals.

The problem with Rabbit Redux isn't its unsympathetic characters or its provocative embrace of racial stereotype; the problem is that the story itself is preposterous. Updike, we understand, is concerned in this novel with considering specific aspects of late 1960s American life; he seems to want to illustrate or to comment upon the bigger picture of American race relations and ideology in the microcosm of the middle-sized Pennsylvania city of Brewer and its surroundings, but he fails because the microcosm he has created is absurd and, occasionally, even laughable. The motivations in this novel are dim and unconvincing. Some of the main characters, like Jill and Skeeter, are mechanical and unreal. Rabbit Redux is a novel so self-enamored of its greater ambitions that it has forsaken truth in the particular. Few of these situations and characters ring true, and thus the novel is resigned to its fate -- that of thinly-veiled psychological didacticism. This is disappointing coming from Updike, who managed to fully enliven the implausible in the previous installment Rabbit, Run.(less)

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11/29/08

brian rated it:

xxx

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04/09/07

Greg rated it:

bookshelves: fiction

Read in May, 2003

I wrote this review a few years ago for a different site. I called it Rabbit's A Reactionary Racist. It's been edited a little bit from it's original context.

What is the novel about? Well it’s about Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom: a man in his early thirties, with a wife, a son and a job on the verge of being made obsolete by technology. In the first novel, Rabbit ran away from his wife and young child. The novel dealt with the way he is pulled between his freedom and responsibili...more I wrote this review a few years ago for a different site. I called it Rabbit's A Reactionary Racist. It's been edited a little bit from it's original context.

What is the novel about? Well it’s about Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom: a man in his early thirties, with a wife, a son and a job on the verge of being made obsolete by technology. In the first novel, Rabbit ran away from his wife and young child. The novel dealt with the way he is pulled between his freedom and responsibility. In Rabbit’s second appearance on the literary scene he is at the other end of the estranged spouse paradigm. Rabbit’s wife leaves him to live with her smooth talking car salesman boyfriend. After being cuckold by his wife Rabbit feels sorry for himself, blames his troubles on others, shacks up with an 18 year old hippie, lets an African American criminal on the run move into his house, works through 400 years of racial injustice through his discussions with the hippie and the criminal, has his house burned down by racist neighbors and ultimately gets back together with his wife. This all sounds sort of familiar if you’ve read the first novel. Many of the incidents have just been changed slightly and the novels overly peppered with events from 1969 to make sure the reader never forgets that the action takes place as man first walked on the moon, Laugh-In and the Mod Squad played on the telly and movie-goers were packing theatres to see Kubrick’s cerebral 2001: A Space Odyssey. The actions similar to the first tale of Rabbit but the times are a changing. Poor Rabbit though isn’t changing with the times though. Maybe if Updike could have written Rabbit as adapting better to the turmoil of the 60’s this novel would have been more enjoyable (or at least less offensive).

I might be wrong but I don’t think the word cunt was generally used to describe women in 1969. . I don’t think the word experienced much of a mainstream vogue in America, but if I took Updike’s picture of the cultural terrain of America at this time as an example then I’d believe that good Americans, Conservative Americans at the time believed that women could be reduced to this term. Not just reduced but defined as just being walking cunt’s with interchangeable faults attributed to them. Updike uses this term more often that Irvine Welsch does. The word is used constantly to an annoying degree. Added to the excessive use of this word as catch all for all women (except for poor Rabbit’s mom) is a good healthy dose of racism. Rabbit believes it’s not worth his son caring too much about a girl he likes being dead because there are a few billion more cunt’s in the world. Rabbit doesn’t like blacks on the bus with him because they smell. Rabbit doesn’t like hippies because they don’t love the country. Rabbit likes the idea of bombing Vietnam into the pre-historic age. Rabbit’s a good American trying to raise his son but only thinks twice before joining his counter-culture housemates in smoking dope in front of his kid. Rabbit’s a total hypocrite.

One might try to argue that through his talks with the on the lam criminal, Skeeter, that Updike shows the way that even the close minded archetype of middle America can learn to empathize with Civil Rights. One might if they were ignoring the way that Updike treats all of his minority characters. There are three African American characters. One if a drunk co-worker / part time pimp, the second is a pot smoking alcohol swilling lounge singer / prostitute, and the third is Skeeter a small time pot dealer / irrational revolutionary who thinks his the living incarnation of Jesus Christ. The first two characters are presented for color and for Rabbit to have masturbatory fantasies about. The third argues the case for Black Power in the most schizophrenic, irrational and flat out moronic manner possible who discredits all of Civil Rights leaders in favor of some acid induced logic. Rabbit starts to agree with him at times, which makes no sense except to prove that Rabbit’s a moron. I don’t know what Updike was trying to do with this. Especially because he wastes almost half of the book involved in these discussions between Rabbit and Skeeter.

This novel left me feeling kind of offended. Aside being offended I felt nothing. The prose is nice and clean but I have hundreds of books that are well written. I know that I’m going to read the last two novels with clenched teeth because I am unable to not finish a book or a series no matter how much I hate it. I don’t recommend entering into Rabbit’s world, or if you do read the first novel and then use your imagination about what he would be doing ten years down the road. (less)

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07/23/07

Liz rated it:

(review of isbn 039447273X)

bookshelves: library

Read in July, 2007

recommends it for: people who HAVE to read things through in order

Ugh. I'm committed to reading these through, but this had better be the low point of the series (ahem, tetralogy). Updike is compelled to use the word "cunt" as often as possible, and the Skeeter character is boring and obnoxious. The third section dragged (all those quotes from "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas"?!) and there wasn't enough of Updike actually writing the beautiful descriptions of landscape and feeling that he's capable of.

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03/30/09

Frank rated it:

Read in April, 2009

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

Rabbit Redux is sort of a trainwreck. It's like that episode of Six Feet Under where Dexter smokes crack. There are so many wrong turns that it is almost beautiful. I could not put this thing down.

One of the main characters is Skeeter who is a black Vietnam vet who has moved in with Rabbit and Rabbit's possibly underage hippie girlfriend. They smoke a lot of pot and talk about the war, and I realize that Updike is trying to do something about race, but all of his black characters ar...more

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03/05/09

Drew Cauthorn rated it:

Read in March, 2009

My first Updike. This is not the best introduction to the Rabbit Series. Updike is a wonderful writer. He certainly captured the late '60's in this novel--which I lived through, being only a few years younger than Harry A.

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01/04/09

Dropkin rated it:

Read in January, 2009

This is the second novel in the Rabbit tetraology, written in 1971. John Updike is without a doubt one of the best novelists of the past 50 years. Some authors like Updike and Philip Roth write with such ease it is obvious when you read their prose.

Ten years after the first Rabbit novel, this book is about many things - marital infedilty and the challenges of middle-age, the 1960s, Vietnam and of course the furher development of Harry Angstrom, an anti-hero whose best times seem to b...more

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07/01/09

Hollis rated it:

(review of isbn 0141188545)

bookshelves: literary-fiction

Updike is often mentioned as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and the Rabbit books are described as masterpieces of American literature. Am I missing something? As far as I could tell, it was a soap-opera plot mixed in with some tasteless sex scenes, an excessive amount of detail and descriptive language that is so excessively ornate it frequently becomes tawdry and nonsensical. That seems to impress the critics, but it doesn't impress me.

This book is also an o...more Updike is often mentioned as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and the Rabbit books are described as masterpieces of American literature. Am I missing something? As far as I could tell, it was a soap-opera plot mixed in with some tasteless sex scenes, an excessive amount of detail and descriptive language that is so excessively ornate it frequently becomes tawdry and nonsensical. That seems to impress the critics, but it doesn't impress me.

This book is also an opportunity for Updike to step up his long-running competition with Philip Roth to use the word 'cunt' as many times as possible in a serious work of literature. I would estimate that it is used about sixty times in this novel which is impressive in a juvenile way.

Aside from that, I really don't know what much else there is to this novel. It was just a load of sex scenes held together with some bickering conversations. I mean, Updike really is tasteless when he gets going: by the time the phrase 'salt swamp' was used in one of these scenes, I was starting to feel slightly sick and came pretty close to throwing the book across the room in irritation and boredom. I don't know what it is about Updike's style that irritates me so much: it's just so grotesquely pretentious, so smug and self-conscious, like Martin Amis but even worse. Another thing that is annoying is that Updike keeps throwing in these stupid 'revelations' every time Rabbit finishes sleeping with someone. It really is remarkably pretentious. For example:

''How sad, how strange. We make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation'.

What does that even mean? It's supposed to be a serious revelation and yet it is clearly meaningless. He does this every page. He even does at the end of every review he does. It's really annoying. How about another one?

''We grope on, under bullies and accountants''.

What? What are you talking about? This doesn't impress people. Well, it does unfortunately, but that's their problem.

A critic on the jacket describes this novel as a ''vindication'' of ''essentially realist'' fiction. On the contrary, I would choose this book as a perfect representation of why it is that ''essentially realist'' fiction is self-destructive when it is taken as far as Updike takes it. As the plots become more and more trivial, the language becomes cheaper and ever more tawdry, the sex scenes and depictions of emotion ever more tasteless, the characters ever more repugnant and the core beneath Updike's sweet sugar coating becomes ever more meaningless. I'll still give it 3 stars because I think to be fair the odd section or paragraph is very well-written and Updike does succeed in pulling the novel together as a whole, but it really didn't strike me as a ''modern classic'' and I have yet to find out why it is that Updike is held in such high regard as a writer.(less)

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04/14/09

Geetha rated it:

Read in April, 2009

This is the second in the series of Rabbit books by John Updike. At the start of the book, Rabbit seems to have settled down to a more conventional life, he is living with his wife and son, owns a house, and has a job. His excessive interest in sex in “Rabbit Run” has quietened, he is an active father, does housework – (it is Janice who is running around in “Redux” ) but as the book progresses Rabbit’s life unravels. You see the same inability in Rabbit to take hold of things, to cop...more This is the second in the series of Rabbit books by John Updike. At the start of the book, Rabbit seems to have settled down to a more conventional life, he is living with his wife and son, owns a house, and has a job. His excessive interest in sex in “Rabbit Run” has quietened, he is an active father, does housework – (it is Janice who is running around in “Redux” ) but as the book progresses Rabbit’s life unravels. You see the same inability in Rabbit to take hold of things, to cope and organize his life. Again in “Redux” he is bored with life; it seems to have no meaning, directionless “No belief in an afterlife, no hope for it, too much more of the same thing, already it seems he has lived twice” pg 89.
His wife leaves him; he takes a hippie in to live with him who lets in Skeeter. Skeeter emerges as the most complex character in the novel. Skeeter is full of rage at years of black oppression, resentful of the sudden “equality” afforded to blacks on the battlefields of Vietnam and messed up with his drug habits. The reader can tell that that this setup can lead to nothing but disaster. One marvels at how Rabbit allows his son to be exposed to promiscuous sex, drugs and foul language. In spite of everything there is no doubt that Rabbit is a loving father. Nelson has an unusual sense of morality and responsibility given the circumstances of his upbringing.
In Rabbit, Jill and Skeeter three points of view meet – Rabbit represents middle class white America, Jill represents liberal America and Skeeter is the power of the black movement. Jill the hippie and Skeeter the black activist do manage to change Rabbit’s attitudes about racial equality. However one is not quite sure what Updike wants to say about racial equality. All the black characters in the novel are unsavoury, not a good choice of characters if Updike wanted us to be on the side of racial equality.
As in “Rabbit Run”, there is a tragic event at the end of this book as well. Again as in the first book Rabbit is not present when the event takes place but feels responsible for it and as his wife blamed the event upon him in the first book, his son blames him for the event in this book. These tragic events at the end of the book whet the reader’s appetite and one wants to read the next book to see what happens to the characters in the future.
Overall the book is well written. All major events of the 60s are featured making it interesting- Nixon’s Presidency, Armstrong on the moon, Vietnam War, draft dodging, civil rights movement, race riots, free love and drugs. Some of Skeeter’s long and boring diatribes on racism and Vietnam drag on. Readers who have not read Updike must be warned that his books are full of descriptions of explicit sex. I am not sure why Updike feels this much is necessary. May be he was trying to say that excessive focus on physical pleasures of the body would lead to disappointment and emptiness in our relationships. At the end of “Rabbit Redux” Rabbit ponders on this subject “there must be something else” he tells Janice. If we consider the Rabbit Series as documenting Rabbit’s growth, (his mother tells Rabbit when he regrets his loss of wife, job and house “You’re growing up”) this realization would be part of the growth.
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04/20/09

Gregg rated it:

bookshelves: americanlife, smalltown

Read in March, 2009

Not quite as satisfying as "Rabbit, Run." Too sexually graphic for even my taste. The politics wandered aimlessly, and the characters were way too broad, or even cliched, for any kind of empathy on my part. Yet I kept reading it. So Updike must know something I don't about the meaning of Midwestern life.

Rabbit Angstrom's adventures pick up after the first novel: he's back with his wife, but they separate. He's about to lose his job. He shacks up with a hippie girl of sort...more

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04/07/09

Jim rated it:

Read in April, 2009

recommends it for: Anyone who hasn't seen it in 20+ years

I read this about the time it was published, and a recent mention of Updike prompted me to pick it up again.

When I first read it, Rabbit was older than I was, and frankly it was difficult for me to relate to anything in his life (except maybe the disputes about Vietnam). I could still appreciate Updike's prose, though. His imagery was/is often surprising.

This time -- what a difference 35 years makes. I have a new appreciation of Harry Angstrom's situation and attitudes, a...more

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02/11/09

Stewart rated it:

Read in March, 2009

What makes Rabbit one of the most compelling characters in American literature? By all objective accounts he is scum of the earth, a man who ought to be jailed for spousal abuse and child neglect, not to mention his serial adultery, drug abuse, racial epithets and harboring of a fugitive. Yet Rabbit remains a sympathetic figure, because through him Updike creates a mirror; Rabbit's considerable flaws do not sink inward, as part of his character, but bounce outward back at the society he chafes...more

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04/13/09

Steven rated it:

I began this book almost immediately after reading "Rabbit, Run" and was disappointed with the obvious change in Updike's writing style. He really turns commercial from the first book to this one, and I am currently reading the third book in the series "Rabbit is Rich" and Updike has gone completely insane. The reader loses sight of the action/plot development because Updike goes off on tangents describing the most insignificant of things. It's sad because you do get attached...more

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03/21/09

Pat Monahan rated it:

Read in March, 2009

The second book in the rabbit series and probably the last one I read. Updike's books are kind of depressing.

In the first book, Rabbit, Run you read as the main character Rabbit, deals with his faultering marriage and dead end life. So, he runs. In this book it's his wifes turn to run.

I had heard that John Updike was a world class author and he recently passed away, so I wanted to read some of his works. I've read two, so now I'm done.

Does he venture into ot...more

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12/07/08

Mike rated it:

Read in November, 2008

So this is what people raved about.

I wasn't blown away by Rabbit, Run. It seemed like a product of the times with a character that wasn't that likable. Woulda been better as a short story.

Rabbit's character and his choices are more interesting, his interactions with others are far more compelling and the story as a whole seems far more complete. Maybe it's that Updike became better as a writer or maybe he had a new editor.

Or maybe I'm just more interested in p...more

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01/15/09

zack rated it:

My parents always loved these books. The first thing they'll say is how well it reflects America "at that time." However, not having lived (consciously) at least through these periods, what strikes me most about the Rabbit books so far is how much they get under my skin. I don't know if that's because the writing is so good or because the characterizations seem so real, familiar even. It's also the kind of funny where you read a bit of it, put the book down, go get a glass of water, an...more

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12/01/08

Stephanie rated it:

Read in November, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

Rabbit has done it again. In Rabbit, Run, his unthinking, unconscious cruelty and his willingless to let trivial events buffet him about directly led to the accidental death by drowning of his infant daughter. In this second Rabbit book, Rabbit Redux, I originally thought that Rabbit had changed. He had, somewhat. From being an essentially good-natured passive person in the first book, he became a bombastically angry man, vitriolically in favor of the Vietnam war and insulting to the people ...more Rabbit has done it again. In Rabbit, Run, his unthinking, unconscious cruelty and his willingless to let trivial events buffet him about directly led to the accidental death by drowning of his infant daughter. In this second Rabbit book, Rabbit Redux, I originally thought that Rabbit had changed. He had, somewhat. From being an essentially good-natured passive person in the first book, he became a bombastically angry man, vitriolically in favor of the Vietnam war and insulting to the people around him. Yet as I read further I saw that despite his strong feelings about the war, politics, and civil rights, that Rabbit still possessed the same passivity and willingness to let the events -- not so trivial, this time -- that are transpiring around him control his life and actions. By failing to choose to act, by letting events control him, here, too, his unthinking, unconscious cruelty leads to the death of another young woman, this time by fire.

In reading these four books (two down, two to go), I am reminded of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, likewise a series of four books. While each Rabbit book ostensibly stands on its own as a discrete novel, it is not so much my supposition as it is my hope that the books are in fact not discrete, and that I will find some solace and some resolution in the last book, Rabbit at Rest. I am starting to suspect that I will find no solace and no resolution, unless it is the solace of seeing a deserving character get what's coming to him. I am starting to suspect that the oracular predictions of Ruth, Rabbit's prostitute-turned-lover in the first book, and of Babe, the black cabaret singer in the second book whose music, if not whose character, reminds me of Nina Simone's, that Rabbit is death will prove to be true.

One way in which these first two books absolutely beg to be read separately, and not merely as two parts of a very long novel, is very much to John Updike's credit. The first book was set in the innocent times of the late fifties and very early sixties, when the vast majority of Americans were snugly cocooned in a nice insular nest. The second book is set in 1969 -- smack in the middle of the Vietnam war, the moon landing, and race riots. Updike does an excellent job in the second novel of showing how these gut-wrenching events shook even the residents of Rabbit's fictional town of Brewer, Pennsylvania, while keeping national and world events entirely at bay in the first novel. And this observation begs the question: what is the difference between four novels like these, that are linked but separate, and a very long novel like Tolstoy's War and Peace, which is an indivisible whole (though sometimes published in two or more volumns, for the sake of the reader's arm muscles more than anything else, I suspect)? Why does a novelist choose to write one but not the other?

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10/29/08

Lawrence rated it:

Read in November, 2008

There are parts of this book that make you want to jump off a bridge and maybe even slit your wrists on the way down--but in a good way. I think.

Rabbit Redux is an intense, microscopic view of the disintegration of marriage and other institutions and values in 1969 as white men go to the moon, black men riot in the cities, and both die by the thousands in Vietnam. The main character, a blue-collar worker in a dying industrial Pennsylvania town, tries like hell to understand the chaos...more

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09/01/08

Steve rated it:

Read in September, 2008

Compared to the beginning of Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux starts off with a bleaker tone. I don't know if I can really add anything else to the earlier reviewers except that it really leaves a bad taste in your mouth. I think the reason for that is because Harry is hard to sympathize with. He really treats a lot of people in his life pretty badly. What's interesting, though, is that he doesn't totally start that way in the novel. In the beginning, he's trying to conform to society by holding a regu...more

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08/16/08

Dorothy rated it:

bookshelves: contemporary-literature

Read in March, 2009

Second in the series of the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, this entry is fully as mesmerizing as the first. After the first few pages, I found it very hard to put down. Updike was just such an incredible writer. Here, he takes us deeper still into the life and psyche of Rabbit.

Much of what we see there is pretty ugly. Rabbit is racist. Rabbit is misogynist. He sees women as having only one purpose really. But then he is a man of his times - a man of the '50s. We f...more Second in the series of the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, this entry is fully as mesmerizing as the first. After the first few pages, I found it very hard to put down. Updike was just such an incredible writer. Here, he takes us deeper still into the life and psyche of Rabbit.

Much of what we see there is pretty ugly. Rabbit is racist. Rabbit is misogynist. He sees women as having only one purpose really. But then he is a man of his times - a man of the '50s. We find him here in 1969, but it seems that he has slept through the '60s. His emotional development is stuck still in 1959.

Janice, the wife that he thinks of as a "mutt" with no value, leaves him and takes up with Charlie, a car salesman at her father's place of business. Why did she stick with him so long?

For the first time, she finds herself valued and appreciated by a man. She finds sexual ecstacy, finds herself fulfilled by this relationship. And yet, she seems unable to fully break away from Rabbit. Of course, there is the ramaining child that they have together - the son.

That son continues to live with Harry but visits the mother and her lover. Harry goes to work every day as a linotypist at the same shop where his father has worked so many years. His mother is slowly dying of Parkinson's Disease. Life settles into a routine.

Into that routine comes Jill, an 18-year-old runaway from a rich family, who has already seen too much of life. She moves in with Rabbit and son and forms a loving older sister type bond with the son. For Harry, she is a cunt - nothing more. No woman is really more than that for him.

Then comes Jill's friend, Skeeter - but is he a friend, really? He, too, seems nothing but a user when it comes to women. He is a black veteran of Vietnam and he, too, has seen more of life and death than Harry, in his sheltered world, ever will. He moves into the household and sets out to teach the little group history, specifically the history of the black race in America.

Harry's neighbors, just as racist as he, do not take kindly to this biracial household. You just know that this isn't going to end well. And it doesn't.

The final chapter finds Janice, having left Charlie, back with Rabbit, at least temporarily. Will it last? Perhaps we've find out in "Rabbit is Rich." (less)

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