Rabbit At Rest | 
| Author: John Updike
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  43 reviews
Sales Rank: 366131
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 528
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.8 x 1.8
ISBN: 0394588150
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780394588155
ASIN: 0394588150
Publication Date: September 26, 1990
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Shipped to over one million happy customers! Your purchase benefits world literacy!
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Amazon.com
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
Product Description
2 cassettes / 3 hours
Read by the Author
John Updike, a genius at creating uncannily vivid mirror images of American life, is at his best in this final episode of the extraordinary "Rabbit" saga.
Here is a last look at a character followed by millions through four decades of his existence - a story that reflects the complexities of contemporary experience , told by the Pulitzer prize winning master of modern fiction.
Download Description
Rabbit at Rest is the fourth of five John Updike Rabbit novels, all of which focus on their central character Harry Angstrom. In Rabbit at Rest, Harry Angstrom has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild. His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending out mixed signals; and his wife, Janice, decides in mid-life to become a working girl. As, though the winter, spring, and summer of 1989, Reagan's debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 38 more reviews...
 rabbit at rest by john updike May 28, 2008
the book arrived in great condition. the story on the other hand was ok. This was a gift for my husband. he collects pulitzer prize winners
 It does not end with 'They all lived happily ever after' September 23, 2007
I suppose I am a sentimental soul. But I wanted a different kind of ending, one in which everything is brought together and in which the hero looks back at his life with a sense of satisfaction- leaving us the wisdom of what he has learned in it.
But what I want is irrelevant to what Updike provides.
Instead of Harry Angstrom being in some way set in life as a semi- retired fifty- five year old we see him a snowbird still unable to make a real peace with his wife Janice. We witness his going towards death in graphic description of his two - heart- attacks. We feel his disappointment at his son's Nelson going off the rails with his coke habit- ruining the family business in the process. We see then something of the same kind of 'screwed-up-ness' that has characterized Harry's life throughout. We also get as with Updike usually exact descriptions of time, place, the American world as a liberal might read it towards the end of the Reagan years. America seems to be falling apart with Harry.
There are moments of grace as when Harry having his first attack while sailing manages to get his granddaughter safely back to shore. And if anyone wishes to know what a heart- attack feels like this work might really be of help. But somehow the whole sense of Harry's not having grown into a larger character than he was at the outset disturbs. Perhaps Updike is too exact here, too realistic, too mercilessly accurate. But I would have liked to see Harry become something more like Updike himself a hero who has grown with the years , and leaves the world much wiser than when he first became conscious he was in it.
 The end of a great series April 25, 2007
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
The fourth and last of the Rabbit novels. Still another ten years have gone by, and the happiness that Harry felt throughout most of the previous volume now means that the piper must be paid - and Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom pays with his health: the old ticker is about ready to give out. The Toyota dealership that has brought him wealth and good times is about to be lost, thanks to his son Nelson's embezzling the company to pay for his drug addiction; only his wife Janice's financing scheme saves the agency. Much in this novel parallels things in the first in the series (RABBIT, RUN), thus giving the series a circular format with all the loose ends tied up. Harry runs away again, twice, in fact, this time making it all the way to Florida as he'd hoped to do in the first book. This time he makes it only to die after playing in a pick-up basketball game, Harry's sport that made him a hero in high school. Harry's last words to his troubled and troublesome son, spoken only in his mind as he drifts in and out of consciousness are, "Maybe. Enough." The Rabbit tetralogy is a major contribution in modern American literature. I'm convinced that a hundred years from now anyone wanting to learn what middle-class life was like during the last half of the 20th century will do no better than read John Updike's four Rabbit novels for the answer. A truly amazing accomplishment.
Shallow Harry November 23, 2006
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
So you want to know how others see us? Why the rest of the world thinks we're ready for the pickin'? Have we passed our prime---- hey, when did the lights go out on that shinning city on the hill-----why are all our cars foreign? Like some space-age implant that can read your thoughts, John Updike chronicles the minute by minute thoughts of an ordinary, 56 year old white American man living in small town USA in 1989. To the extent that his character is representative---you talkin' to me--- these musings go a long way to explain the American condition. It's not a pretty picture. Fortunately, it is one that is constantly changing.
The Harry of 1989 is not someone you'll like; but he is someone you'll recognize. He is a TV watching, sports talking, women abusing, fast food eating, scene stealing, over-the hill, over-weight, foul mouthed, ex-high-school-jock, who plays golf because he can't play tennis, can't run, thinks Frank Sinatra can't sing, and most children, especially his, are more or less disposable. Harry's rueful meanderings may sometimes skew but never derail an amazing investigation as it negotiates a dizzying web of issues with subtlety and polish, not to mention prescience. This is John Updike at his very best. His sense of the ridiculous ---recommended equipment for any serious seer----co-exits with the certitude that however you may view the world today, time marches on, people die, babies are born, perspectives change.
Brilliant -- But Not Always Enjoyable October 29, 2006
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
As a woman a couple of generations younger than Updike, Roth, et al, I've always avoided the Big Boys, assuming (with some paranoia) that they intended to exclude me from their audience. Having recently been astonished by Roth's Everyman, I decided to give Updike a try, and started with the last novel in his famous quartet.
There is no denying that this is a brilliant novel. Updike places his reader squarely in the head of Rabbit Angstrom, and there is not a single false note in the book. And the clarity of the prose is breathtaking -- you get the sense that every word was perfectly chosen to communicate precisely what Updike wanted to communicate.
But, for this reader at least, the first 300 pages or so often filled me with an uncomfortable icky-ness. I could understand Rabbit, but I didn't identify with him. In fact, the character I identified most with was his ten year old granddaughter. Rabbit's causal references to his wife-swapping in the Carribean thirty years ago, or to the tingle in his a--hole caused by his heart medication, made me squirm. I just didn't want to know that much about Dear Old Dad, or Grandpa, or whatever.
The last 100 pages, however, were so luminous, so pure, that the squirmy-icky feeling fell away, and the distance I felt from the character receeded. I suddenly understood all of those facile book jacket accollades -- "Crowning Achievement" and "Great American Novel" and the rest. I'd been converted, despite all my resistance.
There are some other things about the book that are simply amazing. The book was set in 1989 and published in 1990, and Updike captures that time with unbelievable precision. Throughout the book, however, I had a strong feeling that Updike was foreshadowing 9/11 -- it's almost as if Rabbit could see it coming. In fact, if this book had been written after 9/11 instead of twelve years before, I almost would have found the foreshadowing a little too heavy handed. I'd love to ask Updike about that -- or, more precisely, I'd love to listen in on someone else's conversation with Updike on that subject, because, quite frankly, in his brilliance and judgmentalism and dismissiveness toward women, he still scares me.
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