Rabbit Redux | 
| Author: John Updike
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  36 reviews
Sales Rank: 398157
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0449911934
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780449911938
ASIN: 0449911934
Publication Date: August 27, 1996
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Condition: Standard used condition.
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Product Description
"A triumph."
NEWSDAY
The assumptions and obsessions that control our daily lives are explored in tantalizing detail by master novelist John Updike in this wise, witty, and sexy story. Harry Angstrom--known to all as Rabbit, one of America's most famous literary characters--finds his dreary life shattered by the infidelity of his wife, Janice. How he resolves or further complicates his problems makes for a novel of the first order.
From the Paperback edition.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 31 more reviews...
 Down the Rabbit hole of the Sixties March 2, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Time has not been kind to the second of Updike's "Rabbit" novels. One could generously say that it captures the turmoil of a particularly volatile period in American history; one could also argue that it has dated more than Updike's other works. Free love, race riots, drugs, the moon landing, Vietnam--a lot has changed in the decade since Harry Angstrom abandoned his wife. And Rabbit has mellowed a bit, but he's as square and apathetic as ever and sees as "one of my G.d. precious American rights, not to think about politics."
Aside from the typically brilliant depiction of Updike's American anti-hero, the other characters exist primarily to challenge Rabbit's complacency. His wife, Janice, is off-stage for most of the book, having left him to have an affair with another man--which is presented almost as if it were delayed payback for Rabbit's earlier adultery. His son, Nelson, is the ever-impressionable youngster, testing Rabbit's parental skills (or lack thereof). Two homeless hangers-on join father and son to form a bizarre mini-commune. The first, a runaway, Jill, is a naive hippie-chick, a rich kid transplanted from the suburbs of Connecticut, whose manner alternates between peppy and pliable. But the most uncomfortable failure of the book is the character of Skeeter, an angry, platitude-spouting, militant, violent (even criminal) black man.
There are three Skeeters here. The most authentic version is the man seen warily by a simultaneously fascinated and repulsed Rabbit, whose racism takes a familiar form. The second Skeeter is the threat--a specter, really--feared by Rabbit's white suburban neighbors. The third Skeeter, however, in his actions and his dialogue, is "African American" only in Updike's mind; he is a cynical and occasionally cruel caricature of a Sixties black activist, and it's often difficult to see much that's recognizably human in this portrayal. (The critic Anatole Broyard, who ironically spent his life hiding his own black ancestry, patronizingly praised this Skeeter, who "goes beyond the familiar anger and rhetoric into the wild humor blacks no longer seem to allow themselves.") From this third angle, Skeeter is Updike's most memorable failure; here we see starkly more of the author than of an interloper, a Black Panther cartoon created almost solely to play devil's advocate to Rabbit's Everyman.
Of all the novels by Updike I've read, "Rabbit Redux" is far and away my least favorite. It suffers not only by comparison with the two novels that preceded ("Rabbit, Run") and succeeded it ("Rabbit Is Rich") but also on its own merits; Updike can't seem to decide if he is writing a realist drama or a surrealist parody. What keeps it from being a complete disappointment is Rabbit himself--he will always be Updike's most powerful creation, regardless of the company he keeps.
 Updike's most forceful novel April 16, 2007
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
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.
Rabbit depression April 1, 2007
Middle age doesn't suit Harry Angstrom. Just when the erstwhile high school basketball star settles into a comfortable blue-collar life, things come unglued. His wife leaves him, drifters move in, and everything goes up in flames in a hurry. Harry takes his setbacks in stride, frustratingly so, and he seems to have little passion for anything. Except, perhaps, for defending America's role in the Vietnam War.
"Rabbit Redux" is an unsettling book to read. You want to grab the Rabbit by the collar and shake some sense into him. What happened to that wide-eyed youngster who could do no wrong? That's probably the message of this well written book. Youthful potential often doesn't blossom into later-day success. And the dream of mid-life Americana sometimes isn't all that it's cracked up to be.
Apathetic Harry is jolted June 27, 2006
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
At the start of REDUX, Harry finds himself in a dead-end job and a failed marriage with no prospects for a turnaround. Yet the times, 1969, are rife with social turbulence, mainly from Vietnam and racial disturbances. Most of that escapes ex local basketball star Harry; he has never been much of a thinker and is vaguely pro-military and racially prejudiced.
But Harry's life gets a bit of a jolt when co-worker Buchanan, sensing his apathy, invites him to a bar mostly frequented by blacks. There, Harry meets run-away, hippie, rich-girl Jill and a militant back dude Skeeter. Both take up residence with Harry and his son Nelson, Jill playing the role of wife/daughter/lover and Skeeter providing biting commentary on race relations both past and present, capitalism, war, etc. Harry, recast as "Chuck" by Skeeter, gradually becomes receptive to the changes in thought and life-style introduced by Jill and Skeeter, even fending off nosey neighbors.
Harry is an interesting character. He really cannot be cast as a reactionary, NASCAR dad. He seems to have great equanimity, although it may be lethargy, concerning developments in his life. He can even be civil to his wife's lover.
The book definitely should not be subtitled "the enlightenment of Harry"; the outcomes for the main characters are too ambiguous and even very costly in some cases. It is fair to say that the author does use the voices of his characters for social and political commentary, though that is consistent with the setting. It is interesting to consider: a dull, middle-class existence in the context of militant social times and whether there is any connection in salvaging a moribund life.
This book grows on you. June 26, 2006
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
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.
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