![]() ![]() It was 1959, and Updike remembers that "Kerouac's 'On the Road' was in the air, and a decade of 'dropping out' about to arrive, and the price society pays for unrestrained motion was on my mind." Updike kept returning to Rabbit to explore America's "unease." Furthermore, Updike's timing causes them to be seen as summations of decades. But the mingling makes it reasonable for the readers who have made these books bestsellers to ransack them for social diagnoses. ![]() ![]() Updike is not a novelist of ideas but of mingled domestic atmospheres and social intimations. The preceding installments in this unique literary genre - this epic of the mundane - were "Rabbit, Run" (1960), "Rabbit Redux" (1971) and "Rabbit Is Rich" (1981). The book ends, many such surrenders later, with Rabbit hospitalized, sagging toward a death that might have been forestalled by sensible habits or serious surgery, which he rejected. Rabbit, 55 years old and 40 pounds overweight, is simultaneously suffering intimations of his terminal illness - chest pains - and an irresistible craving for a candy bar. ![]() "Rabbit at Rest," John Updike's fourth and very final novel about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, begins at a Florida airline terminal. Rabbit has come to rest as he should have, from heart failure at an early age, a death brought on by his undisciplined surrender to the temptation of petty indulgences. ![]()
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