Rabbit Redux [Mass Market Paperback]

John Updike (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 12, 1982

The year is 1969, the end of a revolutionary decade, when men walked the moon and controversies raged over the Vietnam War, civil rights, women's liberation, morality and its decline. A liberated Rabbit Angstrom loses his wife to a hotshot used car salesman dripping with Vitalis and acquires a menage that includes his teenage son, a spaced-out white chick, and an evangelical black man. Rabbit lives a life that is bent, a normal life refracted in a funhouse mirror. He courts complications, all the more bizarre for their believability.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A masterpiece . . . Updike owns a rare verbal genius, a gifted intelligence and a sense of tragedy made bearable by wit.”—Time
 
“An awesomely accomplished writer . . . For God’s sake, read the book. It may even—will probably change your life.”—Anatole Broyard
 
“A superb performance, all grace and dazzle . . . a brilliant portrait of middle America.”—Life

From the Trade Paperback edition. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From the Publisher

10 1.5-hour cassettes --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback
• Publisher: Fawcett (January 12, 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0449240878
• ISBN-13: 978-0449240878
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (49 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,732,733 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 lived in Massachusetts. He was the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. John Updike died on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Further Adventures of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, January 24, 2005

By 

Antoinette Klein (Hoover, Alabama USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rabbit Redux (Paperback)

When I finished "Rabbit, Run" I was so engrossed in the life of Harry Angstrom I could hardly wait to begin this one. He remains the perfect anti-hero, not very likeable yet someone the reader cannot help pulling for. This book takes up 10 years after the first, and if you are expecting Rabbit to have straightened up and be living a good life, you will be sorely disappointed.

He is living the humdrum existence of a printer, sharing drinks with his dad after work, watching his wife leave and begin an affair with a co-worker, and generally letting life come at him without showing much emotion or spunk. His sister Mim, now a California call girl, quite succinctly tells him, "Everybody else has a life they try to fence in with some rules. You just do what you feel like and then when it blows up or runs down you sit there and pout."

Rabbit loses most everything possible in this book---wife, home, job, lover---but seems complacent as ever and does not noticeably grieve. If fact, he seems quite content to be curled up in his parent's home, eating peanut butter sandwiches, and wearing his old high school letterman's jacket.

The book incorporates the real-life events of the time---the VietNam War, Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon, the racial riots that swept across America---and makes strong political and racial statements. However, this is the part of the book that dragged due to the verbosity of Skeeter, the angry black character who insinuates himself into Rabbit's life. Also present is Jill, an eighteen-year-old hippie who has run away from her wealthy parents and becomes daughter/lover to Rabbit.

As in "Rabbit, Run," a bizarre tragedy occurs three-quarters into the book. Rabbit, however, emerges relatively unscathed and plods along in his everyman's life.

Ruth and Jack Eccles make cameo appearances and there is a more in-depth look at Rabbit's parents, his sister, and Nelson. This is a great character-driven novel as the aimless and almost pathetic Rabbit moves through middle age. With all lost at novel's end, he has nowhere to go but up. Therefore, I am definitely looking forward to the next installment in this tetralogy.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Bit Better, December 29, 2000

By 

Tom Adair - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rabbit Redux (Paperback)

I think Rabbit Redux is a more accomplished book than Rabbit, Run, and a stronger novel. What looked new and experimental in Rabbit, Run (e.g. the present tense narration) seems in this novel more established - less self-conscious and posturing. The cast of characters also comes across as more solid. Rabbit's parents and his son, Nelson, are in particular well-realised - so that one gets a stronger sense here of Rabbit's role within a family than one did in the first novel. (Who, by the way, portrays adolescents as well as Updike?) And Rabbit Redux is also more of a social history than the more literary Rabbit, Run, faithfully reflecting the racial and political climate of 1960s America. I would read Rabbit, Run first, but I would certainly then recommend reading this one.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Skeeter is Jar Jar Binks, March 17, 2006

By 

Todd A. Gray "TAG" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rabbit Redux (Paperback)

Rabbit Redux is by far the worst of the Rabbit series and for one reason - the character of Skeeter. Never have I read a book where the author allowed such an annoying character to hijack his story. What Jar Jar Binks (that annoying character who never shut up)was to Star Wars-The Phantom Menace, Skeeter was to Redux. After a while of putting up with the boring and endless rantings of this character, I began skipping pages. I hate doing that but I had no choice. I found that it didn't matter much anyway - nothing Skeeter said brought anything to this story, nor does it to the following two Rabbit books

The book was good overall, but why did Updike have to devote so much of the story to Skeeter and his mindless rantings.