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Rabbit Redux Kindle Edition

by John Updike (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.2 575 ratings

Book 2 of 5: Rabbit

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In this sequel to Rabbit, Run, John Updike resumes the spiritual quest of his anxious Everyman, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Ten years have passed; the impulsive former athlete has become a paunchy thirty-six-year-old conservative, and Eisenhower’s becalmed America has become 1969’s lurid turmoil of technology, fantasy, drugs, and violence. Rabbit is abandoned by his family, his home invaded by a runaway and a radical, his past reduced to a ruined inner landscape; still he clings to semblances of decency and responsibility, and yearns to belong and to believe.

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WARNING: California’s Proposition 65

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A superb performance, all grace and dazzle...a brilliant portrait of middle America." -- Life

The assumptions and obsessions that control our daily lives are explored in tantalizing detail by master novelist John Updike in this wise, witty, 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.

"Updike owns a rare verbal genius, a gifted intelligence and a sense of tragedy made bearable by wit....A masterpiece." -- Time

"An awesomely accomplished writer...For God's sake, read the book. It may even -- will probably change your life." -- Anatole Broyard

"Dazzling." -- The Washington Post

"A triumph." -- Newsday

From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the Publisher

10 1.5-hour cassettes

From the Inside Flap

"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.

From the Back Cover

"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.

About the Author

John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. 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. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I.

POP/MOM/MOON

Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them. In winter, Pine Street at this hour is dark, darkness presses down early from the mountain that hangs above the stagnant city of Brewer; but now in summer the granite curbs starred with mica and the row houses differentiated by speckled bastard sidings and the hopeful small porches with their jigsaw brackets and gray milk-bottle boxes and the sooty ginkgo trees and the baking curbside cars wince beneath a brilliance like a frozen explosion. The city, attempting to revive its dying downtown, has torn away blocks of buildings to create parking lots, so that a desolate openness, weedy and rubbled, spills through the once-packed streets, exposing church façades never seen from a distance and generating new perspectives of rear entryways and half-alleys and intensifying the cruel breadth of the light. The sky is cloudless yet colorless, hovering blanched humidity, in the way of these Pennsylvania summers, good for nothing but to make green things grow. Men don’t even tan; filmed by sweat, they turn yellow.

A man and his son, Earl Angstrom and Harry, are among the printers released from work. The father is near retirement, a thin man with no excess left to him, his face washed empty by grievances and caved in above the protruding slippage of bad false teeth. The son is five inches taller and fatter; his prime is soft, somehow pale and sour. The small nose and slightly lifted upper lip that once made the nickname Rabbit fit now seem, along with the thick waist and cautious stoop bred into him by a decade of the Linotyper’s trade, clues to weakness, a weakness verging on anonymity. Though his height, his bulk, and a remnant alertness in the way he moves his head continue to distinguish him on the street, years have passed since anyone has called him Rabbit.

“Harry, how about a quick one?” his father asks. At the corner where their side street meets Weiser there is a bus stop and a bar, the Phoenix, with a girl nude but for cowboy boots in neon outside and cactuses painted on the dim walls inside. Their buses when they take them go in opposite directions: the old man takes number 16A around the mountain to the town of Mt. Judge, where he has lived his life, and Harry takes number 12 in the opposite direction to Penn Villas, a new development west of the city, ranch houses and quarter-acre lawns contoured as the bulldozer left them and maple saplings tethered to the earth as if otherwise they might fly away. He moved there with Janice and Nelson three years ago. His father still feels the move out of Mt. Judge as a rejection, and so most afternoons they have a drink together to soften the day’s parting. Working together ten years, they have grown into the love they would have had in Harry’s childhood, had not his mother loomed so large between them.

“Make it a Schlitz,” Earl tells the bartender.

“Daiquiri,” Harry says. The air-conditioning is turned so far up he unrolls his shirt cuffs and buttons them for warmth. He always wears a white shirt to work and after, as a way of cancelling the ink. Ritually, he asks his father how his mother is.

But his father declines to make a ritual answer. Usually he says, “As good as can be hoped.” Today he sidles a conspiratorial inch closer at the bar and says, “Not as good as could be hoped, Harry.”

She has had Parkinson’s Disease for years now. Harry’s mind slides away from picturing her, the way she has become, the loosely fluttering knobbed hands, the shuffling sheepish walk, the eyes that study him with vacant amazement though the doctor says her mind is as good as ever in there, and the mouth that wanders open and forgets to close until saliva reminds it. “At nights, you mean?” The very question offers to hide her in darkness.

Again the old man blocks Rabbit’s desire to slide by. “No, the nights are better now. They have her on a new pill and she says she sleeps better now. It’s in her mind, more.”

“What is, Pop?”

“We don’t talk about it, Harry, it isn’t in her nature, it isn’t the type of thing she and I have ever talked about. Your mother and I have just let a certain type of thing go unsaid, it was the way we were brought up, maybe it would have been better if we hadn’t, I don’t know. I mean things now they’ve put into her mind.”

“Who’s this they?” Harry sighs into the Daiquiri foam and thinks, He’s going too, they’re both going. Neither makes enough sense. As his father pushes closer against him to explain, he becomes one of the hundreds of skinny whining codgers in and around this city, men who have sucked this same brick tit for sixty years and have dried up with it.

“Why, the ones who come to visit her now she spends half the day in bed. Mamie Kellog, for one. Julia Arndt’s another. I hate like the Jesus to bother you with it, Harry, but her talk is getting wild and with Mim on the West Coast you’re the only one to help me straighten out my own mind. I hate to bother you but her talk is getting so wild she even talks of telephoning Janice.”

“Janice! Why would she call Janice?”

“Well.” A pull on the Schlitz. A wiping of the wet upper lip with the bony back of the hand, fingers half-clenched in an old man’s clutching way. A loose-toothed grimacing getting set to dive in. “Well the talk is about Janice.”

“My Janice?”

“Now Harry, don’t blow your lid. Don’t blame the bearer of bad tidings. I’m trying to tell you what they say, not what I believe.”

“I’m just surprised there’s anything to say. I hardly see her any more, now that she’s over at Springer’s lot all the time.”

“Well, that’s it. That may be your mistake, Harry. You’ve taken Janice for granted ever since—the time.” The time he left her. The time the baby died. The time she took him back. “Ten years ago,” his father needlessly adds. Harry is beginning, here in this cold bar with cactuses in plastic pots on the shelves beneath the mirrors and the little Schlitz spinner doing its polychrome parabola over and over, to feel the world turn. A hopeful coldness inside him grows, grips his wrists inside his cuffs. The news isn’t all in, a new combination might break it open, this stale peace.

“Harry, the malice of people surpasses human understanding in my book, and the poor soul has no defenses against it, there she lies and has to listen. Ten years ago, wouldn’t she have laid them out? Wouldn’t her tongue have cut them down? They’ve told her that Janice is running around. With one certain man, Harry. Nobody claims she’s playing the field.”

The coldness spreads up Rabbit’s arms to his shoulders, and down the tree of veins toward his stomach. “Do they name the man?”

“Not to my knowledge, Harry. How could they now, when in all likelihood there is no man?”

“Well, if they can make up the idea, they can make up a name.”

The bar television is running, with the sound turned off. For the twentieth time that day the rocket blasts off, the numbers pouring backwards in tenths of seconds faster than the eye until zero is reached: then the white boiling beneath the tall kettle, the lifting so slow it seems certain to tip, the swift diminishment into a retreating speck, a jiggling star. The men dark along the bar murmur among themselves. They have not been lifted, they are left here. Harry’s father mutters at him, prying. “Has she seemed any different to you lately, Harry? Listen, I know in all probability it’s what they call a crock of shit, but—has she seemed any, you know, different lately?”

It offends Rabbit to hear his father swear; he lifts his head fastidiously, as if to watch the television, which has returned to a program where people are trying to guess what sort of prize is hidden behind a curtain and jump and squeal and kiss each other when it turns out to be an eight-foot frozen-food locker. He might be wrong but for a second he could swear this young housewife opens her mouth in mid-kiss and gives the m.c. a taste of her tongue. Anyway, she won’t stop kissing. The m.c.’s eyes roll out to the camera for mercy and they cut to a commercial. In silence images of spaghetti and some opera singer riffle past. “I don’t know,” Rabbit says. “She hits the bottle pretty well sometimes but then so do I.”

“Not you,” the old man tells him, “you’re no drinker, Harry. I’ve seen drinkers all my life, somebody like Boonie over in engraving, there’s a drinker, killing himself with it, and he knows it, he couldn’t stop if they told him he’d die tomorrow. You may have a whisky or two in the evening, you’re no spring chicken anymore, but you’re no drinker.” He hides his loose mouth in his beer and Harry taps the bar for another Daiquiri. The old man nuzzles closer. “Now Harry, forgive me for asking if you don’t want to talk about it, but how about in bed? That goes along pretty well, does it?”

“No,” he answers slowly, disdainful of this prying, “I wouldn’t exactly say well. Tell me about Mom. Has she had any of those breathing fits lately?”

“Not a one that I’ve been woken up for. She sleeps like a baby with those new green pills. This new medicine is a miracle, I must admit—ten more years the only way to kill us’ll be to gas us to death, Hitler had the right idea. Already, you know, there aren’t any more crazy people: just give ’em a pill morning and evening and they’re sensible as Einstein. You wouldn’t exactly say it does, go along O.K., is that what I understood you said?”

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003WUYRAY
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House; Reissue edition (July 23, 2010)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 23, 2010
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1.7 MB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 450 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0449911934

Best Sellers Rank: #441,659 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #834 in Psychological Literary Fiction
- #2,905 in Psychological Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #3,537 in Contemporary Literary Fiction

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4.2 575 ratings

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John Updike

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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.

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Customers find the book engaging and well-written. They praise the writing quality as fantastic and entertaining, with every paragraph conveying more meaning than expected. The artwork is described as beautiful and well-crafted. Readers praise the author as a genius and the best contemporary writer they have read. Opinions differ on the suspenseful elements in the book, with some finding it confronting and underlying story compelling, while others consider it mind-numbing and lacking suspense.

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14 customers mention "Readability"12 positive2 negative

Customers find the book engaging and enjoyable. They describe it as a great read with an accurate look at life and growing older. Readers mention the series is captivating and enjoyable.

"...Nevertheless, the Rabbit books are captivating and they make me feel very small as a writer and author...." Read more

"...a family member, who now loves it as much as I. This is a fantastic series about life and growing old and I just love it...." Read more

"Overall, worth the read...i found myself more concrete in my initial feelings of the characters whereas the first had me flip flopping which i..." Read more

"Rabbit Redux is one of the most important books of last century, one that could easily stand on it's own if it wasn't a part of the "Rabbit"..." Read more

8 customers mention "Writing quality"8 positive0 negative

Customers find the writing quality entertaining and well-done. They appreciate the author's unique ability to put words together that convey depth and beauty. The books are filled with dialog, interaction, and funny situations. They touch on a wide range of subjects, such as marriage without love, approaching, and major psychological and philosophical questions.

"...The books are filled with dialog and interaction and funny situations...." Read more

"...While much of the writing is entertaining and very well done, it must be noted that at times, Updike seems to fly off on wild screeds of florid,..." Read more

"...Arts teacher, I appreciate the tremendous level of craft and mastery of the language as I read again this series...." Read more

"...Why is Harry's life of interest? Because Updike's unique ability to put words together that convey the depth and beauty of ordinary lives and..." Read more

7 customers mention "Art quality"7 positive0 negative

Customers enjoy the book's art quality. They find it a work of art that conveys the depth and beauty of ordinary lives and surroundings. The writing is entertaining and well-done. The entire series is brilliant, with pristine pages.

"...Right now I'm on "Rabbit Is Rich". The entire series is shear brilliance. It's almost like reading poetry if I liked poetry even in the least bit...." Read more

"...While much of the writing is entertaining and very well done, it must be noted that at times, Updike seems to fly off on wild screeds of florid,..." Read more

"...As a Language Arts teacher, I appreciate the tremendous level of craft and mastery of the language as I read again this series...." Read more

"...ability to put words together that convey the depth and beauty of ordinary lives and ordinary surroundings is captivating...." Read more

5 customers mention "Writer quality"5 positive0 negative

Customers praise the author's writing style. They find the prose quality admirable, though some find the plot sad.

"John Updike is the best contemporary writer I have read...." Read more

"...I still admire the quality of Updike's prose but I am struck by the sadness of the plot, which I missed in my youth...." Read more

"Good ole John Updike!" Read more

"...John Updike is a genius novelist." Read more

8 customers mention "Suspenseful"4 positive4 negative

Customers have different views on the book's suspense. Some find it confronting and enjoy the underlying story with major psychological and philosophical questions. Others feel the book is too long with pointless diatribes and pseudo-spiritual content. The plot seems sad to some readers, while others felt the book was mind-numbing and pointless.

"...By and large, I enjoyed not only underlying story, but much of the give and take contained in the political discussions between Harry and his more..." Read more

"...There are very few moments of tense suspense and there are no crimes to be solved. There is little shock and the chase scenes don't last very long...." Read more

"...So beautifully written with simplicity, but very confronting. Hope to read the remaining two novels in the series." Read more

"...Just page after page of mind-numbing, pointless diatribes, and pseudo-spiritual/intellectual nonsense...." Read more

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Charles M. Warady
A Work Of Art
Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2012
Verified Purchase

I am reading the "Rabbit" series by John Updike. I read all the books years ago; I think when I was in high school, and I don't remember them. Right now I'm on "Rabbit Is Rich". The entire series is shear brilliance. It's almost like reading poetry if I liked poetry even in the least bit. If the poem has nothing to do with Nantucket, I'm simply not interested. Nevertheless, the Rabbit books are captivating and they make me feel very small as a writer and author. And I think if those same books came out today...they wouldn't sell. Not only wouldn't they sell, but I don't think Mr. Updike could find a literary agent to represent him.

The Rabbit books are completely character-driven. There are very few moments of tense suspense and there are no crimes to be solved. There is little shock and the chase scenes don't last very long. There isn't a werewolf or wizard in any of the volumes. John Updike concentrates on the characters and there is no one who can do it better. However, people don't want that today.

When I finished writing "5ive Speed" I was asked to send the manuscript to several well known agents. I had high hopes of a large publishing house scooping it up and I'd be on my way. Mind you, "5ive Speed" was not the first book I had written; but it was the first book I truly loved and believed the public would love it as well.

The public has loved it. Read the reviews on the Amazon page. However, the agents felt differently. Don't get me wrong. The agents loved it, also. One agent in particular told me that if I had submitted the same exact book twenty years ago, she would have no problem selling it in a minute. But the market isn't there anymore. The market today wants thrillers, suspense, mysteries, and things they don't have to pay attention to for more than three minutes at a time. Welcome to the MTV world. Even in the humor books, they need to have a background of intrigue and plot. There is no market for completely character driven books like the Donald Roth Series of "5ive Speed" and its sequel "Making God Laugh".

I don't believe the agents, so I went through Amazon Kindle's self-publishing and I have proved them wrong. Readers love the characters of Donald Roth and his gang. The readers are the reason why I had to put aside what I was writing and write the sequel to "5ive Speed". It was literally by popular demand. There is no mystery in the Donald Roth series. No crime scene investigations. And not one single character has translucent skin (although Emily is a bit pale).

The books are filled with dialog and interaction and funny situations. The reader will never know the pattern of the wallpaper on anyone's kitchen walls. I believe the reader has an imagination. Let them decide how they want to decorate the novel.

I believe novels like those written by John Updike still have an incredible audience. It is to those people for whom I write. I thought about writing what the agents want, and then I didn't want to write. You don't need anything to blow up to captivate an audience. You need characters who you want to hang around with. That niche is not dead. It's just been sleeping for a while.

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Steven M. Anthony
Worthy Sequel to Rabbit, Run
Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2013
Verified Purchase
Rabbit Redux is the sequel to the novel Rabbit, Run written by John Updike, featuring as its protagonist, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. When we left Rabbit at the conclusion of Rabbit Run, he had just suffered the loss of his infant daughter through the negligence of his estranged, alcoholic wife.

Rabbit Redux finds Angstrom ten years later, reconciled with his wife Janice, living a mundane existence with his wife and teen aged son in a dead end job. Things soon spice up, however, as Harry's wife leaves him and he falls in with two interesting characters, an eighteen year old runaway hippie chick from Connecticut named Jill, and a twenty something year old African-American Vietnam veteran and radical fugitive from the law named Skeeter. Needless to say, the combination makes for quite an explosive household, even more so given Harry's mainstream conservative political and social outlook.

The time frame of the story is 1969. The moon landing is in progress and the Vietnam War is in full swing. The Civil Rights movement is active and social unrest is ever present. Harry supports the War and the Nixon administration. He is uncomfortable around African-Americans and views them as largely leeches and lazy hangers on. The conversations between Harry and his new housemates are enlightening both to Harry and likely to the reader. Harry's poor fourteen year old son is not only a witness, but an active participant in much that goes on.

While much of the writing is entertaining and very well done, it must be noted that at times, Updike seems to fly off on wild screeds of florid, almost unintelligible prose that leave the reader simply rolling his eyes. Nevertheless, the characters contained in the story are well presented and fleshed out beautifully, even some of the more peripheral players. By and large, I enjoyed not only underlying story, but much of the give and take contained in the political discussions between Harry and his more radical new friends. I look forward to the third Rabbit installment, Rabbit is Rich.

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Stefanie2530
What a Wonderful Series!
Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2019
Verified Purchase
I've read thousands of books throughout my life. The Rabbit Angstrom series by the one and only John Updike is my all time favorite book. I love it so much, I bought the series for a family member, who now loves it as much as I. This is a fantastic series about life and growing old and I just love it. I read the entire series every 4 or so years because I love it so much. Its an honor to say that I am from the same town as John Updike. My mom was even in the Rabbit Run movie filmed here in town many, many years ago!

This is a wonderful and accurate look at life and growing older. A MUST read for all!

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6 people found this helpful

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Covacha Quauhtlatoa
The best contemporary writer
Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2015
Verified Purchase
John Updike is the best contemporary writer I have read. As a Language Arts teacher, I appreciate the tremendous level of craft and mastery of the language as I read again this series. After forty years, it still stands up nicely. The characters are still relatable and coherent, given the times and the currents running through it.
Page after page, I am amazed at the skill that Updike shows for the plot and the characters in it. Over the years, I loaned my hard-cover copies of the Rabbit series and I never got them back. Now I have the resources so I can get those books back. It is with extreme pleasure that I read this book again.

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cheyenne goff
Good...but not as good as the first in the series
Reviewed in the United States on June 25, 2017
Verified Purchase
Overall, worth the read...i found myself more concrete in my initial feelings of the characters whereas the first had me flip flopping which i usually will credit to a more dynamic story. Perhaps the next will change my opinion, but currently I'm finding it hard to sympathise with ol' Rabbit.

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Helena
Amazon nota 10
Reviewed in Brazil on September 27, 2020
Verified Purchase

Chegou logo , bem acondicionado. Gostei muito

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Moreton W. E. Horsley
Classic Updike
Reviewed in France on April 30, 2018
Verified Purchase
One of my favourite authors, Updike really gets into the nitty gritty of modern America in this episode of the Rabbit series. Some of the "Teachin" scenes take a bit of wading through (especially as a non-American) but full of insight and wit. The writing is his usual standard- simply brilliant. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

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brilliantly uncomfortable
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 20, 2012
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Compared to 'Rabbit, Run', the second book in the Rabbit tetralogy is a lot harder to love. For a start, it's infused with casual misogyny and racism, which probably reflects the time it was written as much as the time in which it was set. The character of Rabbit is morally ambiguous to a much greater extent than in the first book, although as the story develops this moral ambiguity becomes more or less the point - he's a weak character as well as a product of his time, yet he does manage to transcend these limitations, at least part way.

I loved this book, found it utterly absorbing, and lived inside it in a way I haven't with a novel for some time (I've probably been reading too much science fiction recently). John Updike was an incredible writer, even if his sexual politics can appear suspect to your average, 21st century Guardian-reading liberal. There are just so many unforgettable characters and vividly drawn scenes in this book - the politics, sexual or otherwise, are beside the point. In summary, an intense, sometimes disturbing, but unforgettable read. Highly recommended, and then some.

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João Cardeira Jorge
Rabbit stopped running!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 3, 2013
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The second in the Updike novels following the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, "Rabbit Redux" is a flawed masterpiece. Rabbit continues an amazingly compelling character, a kind of car crash, a disaster that fascinates you in the beauty of its tragedy. Ten years after "Rabbit Runs", we meet Harry living a quiet and dull life with his wife and child. Yes, Harry chose the "honorable" road, living the American dream, fulfilling his responsibilities just like moral orders, just like a "good man" should. Only now, Rabbit is a man out of his time. The world betrayed him, the values by which he was told to act have changed and a horrible truth has come out. It was all a lie. Nothing matters. In a way Rabbit was the first rebel, ten years before, but his character flaw prevented him from going all the way. He was too coward to fight "the power" and went back and followed the rules. Only now, the rules are gone and Rabbit is a sad little man, with a lousy job, a loveless family and all the fight and spirit gone from him. He's cynical and bitter, refusing as always to accept any guilt. Its the world, you see, not him! He could have been a "contender" but he had to be the family man. The sad and pathetic truth is that Rabbit is just too weak to live life.
In the first book, no matter how despicable and self centered he was, at least he took a shot, tried to reach that "something" worth living for, even if he didn't quite know what it was or where he would find it.
In "Rabbit Redux", Rabbit is dead and Harry is a sad, pathetic monster, afraid to leave his shell, a shadow of his former self, devoid of joy or will, going through the motions and letting others, "the world" take charge of his destiny. He's already dead.
When his wife leaves him for another man and he's left to care for their son, he's happy enough to let her go. He has no fight left in him. A man in a world with no rules and no reason to live for. He uses his own son as an excuse to stay "dead", immovable is his pitiful excuse of existence.
Its Jill, a white teenager who ran away from a "rich" home and "Skeeter", a young black man, back from Vietnam and filled with hate and insurgency against "the system" that provide the spark of life that Harry so desperately needed. Along with Nelson, his 12 year old son, Harry and Jill and Skeeter form their own microcosm of their time. The black fighting oppression through any means necessary, the rich white kid rebelling against the status quo and trying to change the world, the next generation that would live in the world being created at that very moment and the white guy completely out of touch, left behind, needing lessons to adapt to the new values or worse, to the lack of them.
The man at the center of it all is not so much Rabbit Angstrom but John Updike. Updike is more than ever, Rabbit. You sense, through his writing, his effort to make sense of what is happening outside his pages. You sense his perplexity and more than anything a bitterness and disapproval. Skeeter, as a spokesperson for his "movement" is exaggerated in his hatred and lack of any redeeming quality to the point of almost being cartoonish. Jill, as an avatar of the young privileged is portrayed as misguided, innocent and naive and a victim of "the movement". Clearly Updike had taken a side in the conflict and he does his best to show why! What happens is that the novel is far too preachy and as a result less "human". As a picture of its time it fails because its so far from impartial you start to question its message. Rabbit's life suddenly takes a back seat and the book starts to drag with page after page about race and sex and its all too pretentious and tiresome and so very tedious. Updike's writing style doesn't help of course. He's far too "wordy" and pedantic and drags in more than a few pages, over complicating to the point of being obtuse.
Fortunately he can write some truly raw, compelling characters, when he's not busy sharing his doctrine. Janice, Harry's wife is an excellent character, with her constant search for love and acceptance. Harry's mother, old and sick, waiting for death is a triumph for Updike, as is his father, a painfully average man, with hate and bitterness creeping out from behind his servile demeanor. And of course we have Rabbit. He's so easy to hate as he is to pity. Either way, no reader can ever be indifferent to this big, pathetic, useless man. That is Updike's feat! Its with his characters and human nature and emotion that Updike shines and if you can get past his attempt to make sense of the world he lived in, there is a tale here that will push you, annoy you, and make you mad and sad and think about life and death. That is the mark of a truly great book.

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Mark
It’s filthy, a sort of antidote to the politically correct society we find ourselves within.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 4, 2021
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Updike’s Rabbit series is like crack cocaine; addictive, naughty and socially unacceptable. I love it, can’t get enough. It strikes me as something that couldn’t be written, or should I say published, nowadays.

Read it now before the woke crowd ban or worse still, burn, all books that don’t support the safe, watered down stuff that presently passes for risqué.

If you’re interested in the Rabbit series, start from the beginning (Rabbit Runs), let the characters evolve and grow. There are certain references to the first book in Rabbit Redux that would go over your head if you hadn't read the first.

Set amongst the tumultuous 60’s; Free love, the moon landing, the Vietnam War, racial tension. The story follows Rabbit through the next era of his seemingly mundane life. However, the book is littered with stream of consciousness outbursts, a sort of Freudian inner speak, which we all have, but are either too afraid to speak of or can’t produce the words to describe.

It’s filthy, a sort of antidote to the politically correct society we find ourselves within.

I’m ordering the next book in the series right now!

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5.0 out of 5 stars A Work Of Art

4.0 out of 5 stars Worthy Sequel to Rabbit, Run

5.0 out of 5 stars What a Wonderful Series!

5.0 out of 5 stars The best contemporary writer

3.0 out of 5 stars Good...but not as good as the first in the series

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5.0 out of 5 stars Amazon nota 10

4.0 out of 5 stars Classic Updike

5.0 out of 5 stars brilliantly uncomfortable

4.0 out of 5 stars Rabbit stopped running!

5.0 out of 5 stars It’s filthy, a sort of antidote to the politically correct society we find ourselves within.

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A Work Of Art

Worthy Sequel to Rabbit, Run

What a Wonderful Series!

The best contemporary writer

Good...but not as good as the first in the series

Amazon nota 10

Classic Updike

brilliantly uncomfortable

Rabbit stopped running!

It’s filthy, a sort of antidote to the politically correct society we find ourselves within.