Synopsis
In RABBIT REDUX (1971), John Updike's poignant sequel to RABBIT, RUN, he explores the tumultuous transformations of the late '60s as they affect the traditional American values on which Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom--like so many other Americans--believes his life is based. Rabbit trusts the government, supports the Vietnam War, finds blacks ("Negroes") alien and threatening, and is viscerally opposed to drugs. But, in the course of the novel, Rabbit sees his life unravel: his wife, Janice, is having an affair with her boss; his mother is dying; his relationship with his son, Nelson, turns tense; and the rapidly changing world around him becomes incomprehensible. When Janice leaves him, Rabbit opens his house to Jill, a hippie on the run from her upper-crust family, and Skeeter, a black militant Vietnam vet. The skewed family unit that forms is strangely comforting but, finally, disastrous, as Skeeter educates the clueless Rabbit in the ways of the Black Power movement, Jill introduces him to drugs and becomes his lover, and the hapless Nelson is torn between his adulation of his father and the cracks he sees in Rabbit's values system. A seemingly inevitable tragedy leaves Rabbit to face encroaching middle age as a man forever changed. RABBIT REDUX is the second in Updike's groundbreaking tetralogy about his perversely charming bourgeois Everyman, and, as in all the Rabbit books (one per decade from the '60s to the '90s), Updike makes clever use of the events of the times--here, the war, the moon landing, Chappaquiddick, the race riots, and the charged political landscape--as a background to the action of the novel, and a commentary on it.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1991-08-01 | | Edition Description: | Reissue |
| Size | | Height: | 7.0 in | | Width: | 4.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.2 in | | Weight: | 6.4 oz |
Publisher's Note
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.
Industry Reviews
"'Rabbit Redux' is bad in the way that RABBIT, RUN is bad. But it is bad in some different ways as well. It is a tedious album of the most futile monochromes of the 60s America; it is leering, erratic, and gimmicky; it is disingenuous and trite. At best it is dull, at worst a shabby outrage of an imagination damaged by indulgence. Rabbit's importance as a person is trifling: he is too sententious to be credible, too passive and articulate to count."
Book World - Paul Theroux (11/14/1971)
"An awesomely accomplished writer....For God's sake, read the book. It may even--will probably--change your life."
New York Times - Anatole Broyard
"Updike owns a rare verbal genius, a gifted intelligence and a sense of tragedy made bearable by wit....A masterpiece."
McCarthy
"[A] brilliant portrait of middle America."
Broyard
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