Rabbit At Rest

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.

Structure of the finished "mega-novel" echoes the work's thematic rationale." "To help readers who are interested in a particular Rabbit novel. Boswell devotes a chapter to each individual section of the tetralogy. At the same time, he treats each novel as an integral part of the more comprehensive whole." --Book Jacket.

"John Updike's Rabbit at Rest: Appropriating History" is a new historicist reading of Updike's last Rabbit novel. It follows the day-to-day chronology of events, in the novel and in the media, showing how history, with its variety and polyphonic immediacy, is appropriated by the characters, with what criteria, through which tropes, and to what ideological purpose. Although the emphasis of the text falls on Updike's appropriation of American history in the 1980's as it manifests itself in "Rabbit at Rest," significant references are also made to the other Rabbit novels. These novels show how the history of the earlier decades is made into a "motive" for the characters' thoughts, feelings, and actions.

"The first and second novels in John Updike's acclaimed quartet of Rabbit books-now in one marvelous volume. " RABBIT, RUN "Brilliant and poignant . . . By his compassion, clarity of insight, and crystal-bright prose, [Updike] makes Rabbit's sorrow his and out own." -"The Washington Post ""Precise, graceful, stunning, he is an athlete of words and images. He is also an impeccable observer of thoughts and feelings." -"The Village Voice " RABBIT REDUX " 'Great in love, in art, boldness, freedom, wisdom, kindness, exceedingly rich in intelligence, wit, imagination, and feeling-a great and beautiful thing . . .' these hyperboles (quoted from a letter written long ago by Thomas Mann) come to mind after reading John Updike's "Rabbit Redux." -The New York Times Book Review" " ""Updike owns a rare verbal genius, a gifted intelligence and a sense of tragedy made bearable by wit. . . . A masterpiece." -"Time"

Over the last fifteen years of my ministry I have seen both the positives and negatives of technology. For the most part technology has made lives better, but when technology drives humanity and when science defines the human condition, problems arise. Science has the potential for destroying myth. Myth is the thread that holds the human tapestry or narrative together. One role the Church must take on is to keep science and technology in their proper place by saying, "No," when the two overstep their limitations. Currently, there are no checks and balances placed upon science. Science is accountable to no one but itself. Humans are imperfect, and thus, science is imperfect. In this way, the Church brings meaning and purpose to religion, while still affirming science's role of making people's physical lives better. Both science and religion need a level of utilitarian mission, purpose, and vision. The Church and science must be in a friendly, adversarial relationship. Conflict is good and healthy because from out of conflict comes great creativity. Adversity spawns growth. When science and religion are in healthy, amiable conflict, creativity emerges-just as the butterfly struggles to emerge from the cocoon.

"Four novels trace the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom against the changing American society from the sixties to the eighties."--

This book approaches Updike's oeuvre by illuminating its ongoing, pervasive conflict between faith and doubt. Concentrating on a trio of Olinger stories, the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, In the Beauty of the Lilies, and Rabbit Remembered and dramatizing most emphatically Updike's career-spanning dialogue with his complexly fragile religious beliefs, Bailey interprets the Rabbit saga as fictionalized spiritual autobiography in which, through imposing Harry Angstrom's perceptual limitations upon his own stylistic gifts, Updike set himself the toughest trial of his ethical and aesthetic creed of the spirit-affirming capacities of human perception and expression.

The trilogy comprises of Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux and Rabbit is Rich. It is intended as an amusing, sympathetic study of a man, Rabbit Angstron, putting up a fight against the inevitable.

"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.

In the tales of Rabbit Angstrom - Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990 - Updike's Rabbit, the aging high-school basketball star adrift in the century's confusion, is an archetypal American hero, one strikingly real and individual yet emblematic of his class, his country and his era. Updike's achievements in these novels as poet and historian - his weaving of lyric and epic, of art and four decades of American politics - require that the novels be read on a variety of levels, thus lending themselves to the critical approaches represented in Rabbit Tales.

"American Writers focuses on the rich diversity of American novelists

Volume VII of the Cambridge History of American Literature examines a broad range of American literature of the past half-century, revealing complex relations to changes in society. Christopher Bigsby discusses American dramatists from Tennessee Williams to August Wilson, showing how innovations in theatre anticipated a world of emerging countercultures and provided America with an alternative view of contemporary life. Morris Dickstein describes the condition of rebellion in fiction from 1940 to 1970, linking writers as diverse as James Baldwin and John Updike. John Burt examines writers of the American South, describing the tensions between modernization and continued entanglements with the past. Wendy Steiner examines the postmodern fictions since 1970, and shows how the questioning of artistic assumptions has broadened the canon of American literature. Finally, Cyrus Patell highlights the voices of Native American, Asian American, Chicano, gay and lesbian writers, often marginalized but here discussed within and against a broad set of national traditions.

It's 1979 and Rabbit is no longer running. He's walking, and beginning to get out of breath. That's OK, though - it gives him the chance to enjoy the wealth that comes with middle age. It's all in place: he's Chief Sales Representative and co-owner of Springer motors; his wife, at home or in the club, is keeping trim; he wears good suits, and the cash is pouring in. So why is it that he finds it so hard to accept the way that things have turned out? And why, when he looks at his family, is he haunted by regrets about all those lives he'll never live?

It's 1969, and the times are changing. America is about to land a man on the moon, the Vietnamese war is in full swing, and racial tension is on the rise. Things just aren't as simple as they used to be - at least, not for Rabbit Angstrom. His wife has left him with his teenage son, his job is under threat and his mother is dying. Suddenly, into his confused life - and home - comes Jill, an eighteen-year-old runaway who becomes his lover. But when she invites her friend to stay, a young black radical named Skeeter, the pair's fragile harmony soon begins to fail ...

It's 1959 and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, one time high school sports superstar, is going nowhere. At twenty-six he is trapped in a second-rate existence - stuck with a fragile, alcoholic wife, a house full of overflowing ashtrays and discarded glasses, a young son and a futile job. With no way to fix things, he resolves to flee from his family and his home in Pennsylvania, beginning a thousand-mile journey that he hopes will free him from his mediocre life. Because, as he knows only too well, 'after you've been first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate'. Includes an afterword by the author.