eBook Rabbit Redux epub

This is an excellent work of literary fiction. Updike was one of America's greatest authors of the last century and in a world enamored with crime novels, thrillers and fantasy tales, proves again and again the value of fine literature. The plot of the book is thin--young Harry Angstrom's efforts to leave his pregnant wife--but Updike's detailed look at Harry, his family and friends makes for an engaging read and offers thoughtful insights into the human condition that are as valid today as they were when the novel came out in 1960. Highly recommended.

John Updike's troubling novel Rabbit, Run is of very uneven quality. Fortunately, the farther the reader gets into it, the better it is. Throughout the book, Updike demonstrates that he is a master of descriptive detail, something that his command of language enables him to apply to just about anything that life has to offer in the small, not particularly interesting city, where his story is located.

Too often, however, especially in the first half of the book, Updike becomes so intricately involved in finely nuanced descriptions that one loses sight of the context and wholeness of whatever it is that's caught the author's interest. There is a good deal of sex in Rabbit, Run, but Updike's disposition to capture every shadow, reflection, curve, ringlet, twitch, thrust, vocalization, shift in the position of an elbow ... sometimes disassembles it until it's almost unrecognizable and decidedly lacking in eroticism. No, Updike has no obligation to write in a way that his readers find titillating, but there should be a reason for his determination to capture every discrete part of every performance, and sometimes there is none. His lengthy visual deliberation on the scene when Rabbit Angstrom, his protagonist, first makes love to Ruth is so thoroughly dissected that the whole is almost unrecognizable. Yes, it's really clever of him to be able to accomplish this transformation, but what's the point.

On the other hand, when Updike brings his remarkable linguistic and descriptive skills to bear with purpose, as on pages 245 to 250, we see vividly, in just a few paragraphs, the oneness of Rabbit's wife with his suckling baby daughter, the uncharacteristically joyous religious fervor prompted by Rabbit's momentary gratitude for his familial good fortune, and the excitement roused by brief glimpses of the partial profile of the Episcopal minister's wife as shielded-and-revealed by the brim of her straw hat. Updike uses words masterfully, sometimes to good purpose and sometimes as if he were engaged in an exercise, complex combinations as ends in themselves, a virtuoso who wants to make sure that the reader knows he's a virtuoso.

But perhaps I'm misinterpreting Updike. Rabbit Angstrom is engaged in a never-ending search for meaning, purpose, a foundation that won't wobble, tumbling him into a void of meaninglessness where nothing really counts and any sense of permanence is chimerical. Maybe this explains why Updike sometime overdoes his descriptive detail, deconstructing commonplace activities: both he and Rabbit want to see if there is anything durably consequential to be found. In short, this is the author's search and his protagonist is his instrument. One can think and explore with fictional characters, even with their own needs and limitations, and that may be what Updike is doing. The world he is creating, after all, is one in which even some clergymen are not convinced that there is a God or a hereafter, with some actively rejecting both. Others, however, remain rigidly, even angrily steadfast in what we are told is their faith. Whatever the makeup of the clergymen, however, their congregations are dutifully respectable and publicly obedient. Deconstruction does seem to be in order.

Updike enables us to see and feel the uncertainty, uneasiness, and discomfort of his characters, as well as their inability to reliably understand those around them, He does not, however give us much of anything or anyone to like. Ruth the prostitute is honest, forgiving, though not to the point of self-destruction, and she doesn't go out of her way to hurt anyone, nor does she hold grudges over trivial matters. She is the closest thing to a whole, rational, and compassionate person that we find in Rabbit, Run.

Ruth's willingness to risk pregnancy and degradation while unmarried and without prospects are things she does for Rabbit, though only in response to his quirks and silly selfishness. Evidently, for a time, she really is afraid of losing him, though she's smart and experienced enough to see him for the lost, self-serving soul that he is. Still, in spite of this lapse in self regard, she remains the only character worth caring about in this small-city menagerie taken from the 1950's.

The last thirty or so pages of Rabbit, Run are a linguistic tour de force. Again, however, they lead to nothing but a road that Rabbit has traveled before. Rabbit is free, and for the moment his lack of fetters gives him joy. He has achieved an existential coward's victory, and it suits him quite well. The reader can only ruminate over the damage he will do and the prices he will refuse to pay in the future. As for his sense of emptiness, perhaps he will accept it and turn it to his advantage, construing the cruelty and the harm he inflicts on others as just transient epiphenomena in a world devoid of meaning and purpose, a place where nothing really counts.

This is not the sort of book I would seek out. Updike sometimes writes like an established and deserving master, but other times like a marvelously precocious amateur, someone too short on life experience to give his characters substance, someone whose talent lets him stumble unharmed from one literary misadventure to another. He's a lot like his creation, Rabbit Angstrom, except that Angstrom plays with people's lives. Perhaps that's Rabbit's answer to the Babbitry of life in America of the 1950's and to eternal existential emptyness: manifest one's concrete reality as an individual by manipulating others into outcomes they would never choose.

John Updike is a 20th Century author, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for two books in the "Rabbit" series, "Rabbit is Rich" and "Rabbit at Rest." "Rabbit Run" and "Rabbit Redux" are first two in the series and one should read "Rabbit Run" before reading "Rabbit Redux." They are an intimate portrait of the life and times of Harry Angstrom (nick-named Rabbit), who lives in the the early to mid-20th Century. 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 ordinary surroundings is captivating. I felt very involved in Harry's life and the lives of his family and friends and couldn't wait to get back to it after having to put it down for a while. I really enjoyed it and think you will, too.

This book was written by John Updike in the late 1950s while he was still in touch with his plebeian roots in small town Pennsylvania. As someone who was a child in this region during this time, this story brought back to life this era and its zeitgeist vividly in a manner whose nuance, insight and maturity is notable, particularly for an author who had not yet reached his 30th year. The novel's protagonist, a high school athletic star of a few years past, approaches his sexual misadventures with unapologetical panache, but a tragedy unexpectedly confronts our young Casanova in the end that he cannot wrap his mind around. An original tale from the era of Mad Men; an R rated Norman Rockwell morality play. Highly recommended.

What I found striking about this book is how 1959 doesn't seem so far away. While there is a sense of time and place, what rings true is the contemporaneousness of the human condition in an America defined by everyday consumerism (from the magi peeler on) and difficulties in defining right and wrong that would not be out of place today. The skill and sensitivity by which many of the secondary characters are described while the actions of the main protagonists remain only partly explained also gives a depth and complexity width to Rabbit's world, which lingers with one even after reading the book. I came to Rabbit in a roundabout way after finishing the Richard Ford quartet and having thought that it would be old hat. How wrong I was.

Love it, love it, love it.
A Babbitt for the 80s.
If you are new to Updike's Rabbit books, do it right and start from the beginning, Rabbit Run (yeah, Eminem can relate to the problems of modern everyman) will get you hooked, Rabbit Redux is not the greatest (the middle, preachy part can practically be skipped) but Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest are both masterpieces. I've read both of these novels more times over the years than I'd like to admit. Read the first two then savor the last two.

There's even a little postscript, addendum, whatever novella that's ok found in Licks of Love short story collection.

Updike creates characters you invest in. Characters who, like us all, represent the best and worst of Americans.