What do You think about Rabbit At Rest (1996)?
I read this book very slowly, and not because I wasn't interested or I found it difficult. I really just enjoyed Updike's words and wanted to savor it. I had grown quite attached to the Angstroms and enjoyed checking in on what they were up to everyday. I appreciated how Harry's loneliness in this book parallels the loneliness in the first book and remained impressed with Updike's ability to create sympathy for such a flawed character. Harry's Big Horrible Mistake in this one, might be the worst of all, but it is hard not to feel bad for him.I also have to admit that the page & half long sentences that deterred me in the beginning, had really grown on me and it was difficult to read something else after this.
—Heather
"In the condo, the phone is silent. The evening news is all Hugo and looting in St. Croix and St. Thomas in the wake of the devastation and a catastrophic health-plan repeal in Washington that gets big play down here because of all the elderly and a report on that French airliner that disappeared on the way from Chad to Paris. The wreckage has been found, scattered over a large area of the Sahara desert. From the wide distribution of debris it would appear to have been a bomb. Just like that plane over Lockerbie, Rabbit thinks. His cockiness ebbs. Every plane had a bomb ticking away in its belly. We can explode any second."t--from John Updike's Rabbit at Rest, 449tThe death of Harry Angstrom comes as no surprise in Rabbit at Rest; after all, Rabbit's outcome in the novel is none-too-obliquely referenced in the title. The signs of Harry's demise are planted early and often, and even Rabbit himself, while never outright addressing it, seems to possess a subconscious knowledge to live in and of the moment, squeezing all he can from life, for he and his ultimate fate will be intersecting sooner rather than later. The novel carries an undercurrent of personal entropy for Harry Angstrom; the systems of his life--social, emotional, and physical--are all slouching towards a terminal point, and he decides his best option is to ride out the growing discord with a sardonic wit, an almost-gleeful disregard for consequence, and the occasional plateful of bacon-wrapped scallops. This refusal of self-limitation in spite of the potential disastrous repercussions upon his life allows Harry a modicum of the control he so dearly seeks, but it also leaves him poorly equipped to face the harsh realities that come about when this control can no longer be held. In the above passage, Updike shows the effects of the accumulated chaotic debris from this onslaught of upheaval upon Harry's psyche, and the inherent fatalism that drives Rabbit to the rash behavior that inevitably kills him. Harry sees systems breaking down all around him, and the selfish joy he feels at his attempts to escape the degradation of his life dissolves into a lonely recognition of his own imminent mortality and the ultimate powerlessness he has over his situation.The solitude in which Harry finds himself at the condo does nothing for his state of mind. "The phone is silent" serves to reinforce this loneliness; not only does he have no one in town to invite him to a social call or round of golf, but he's greeted with complete silence from the enraged Janice (446). Harry's active imagination can't simply allow her reticence to be from mixed emotions of anger and betrayal; in his first few days of hiding out in the condo, he sees her refusal to talk as a "definite statement. I'll never forgive you," and then his chaotic imagination takes over, giving images of her having "some accident…slipping in the bathtub or driving the Camry off the road….Police frogmen finding her drowned in the back seat" (426). Lack of communication leaves no chance of gaining control, and for Harry, who constantly focuses on the disarray and failures of the world around him, not knowing how his wife feels, whether she's rife with castigation or leaning towards reconciliation, leaves his psyche vulnerable to the deleterious effects of the bad news he can't seem to escape. Thus it's no surprise when "his cockiness ebbs," and he's left contemplating the sudden inescapable doom all men could be privy to, whether it come in the form of a bomb in a luggage hold or diseased and dying heart muscle. Updike presents him with a stream of the uncontrollable--hurricane Hugo and its aftermath, governmental failure over health-care (which has greater importance to him now more than ever,) and the ever-present aviation disaster--that eviscerates the spurious confidence he holds following his ill-advised basketball game. And, true to his nature, Harry meets this loss of certainty with haphazard defiance, resulting in his second, and fatal, round of hoops.
—Ben Hallman
Just as the first hundred pages of RABBIT, RUN were written in a breathless pace to match their manic tone, the last hundred pages of RABBIT AT REST, which mirror the beginning moments of the series, linger on in a depressingly meaningless manner. Highway billboards, trite pop tunes from past decades, and trivial news headlines about baseball players blur with the names and minutiae of a history book, the snapshot memories of Harry's somewhat uneventful life, and the chronic ups and downs of his erratic family life. Insipid, self-destructive meal follows unhealthy meal, and the sitcoms in getaway Florida are the same idiotic mindlessness that shows on the televisions in Pennsylvania. Rabbit tries, in the last moments of his life, to find a reason for all that living, and it's not so easy to say that he does. As he staggers through bland smalltalk with a Holocaust survivor who's been reduced to a decrepit buffet patron and tries to pack a punch in awkward conversations with his distant grandchildren, one realizes that if life does have some driving purpose, Rabbit Angstrom has never tapped into it. Even the most cherished moment of his last year on earth, a spontaneous and rather scandalous sexual encounter, is reduced to psychological rationalization and neurotic impulses by his frustratingly forgiving family, who whittle even his sex drive down to a few taboo missteps. RABBIT AT REST is a bleakly beautiful book, with razor-sharp prose that begs to be reread and read out loud. One might expect a novel about an intimately familiar protagonist to contain some epiphanies, some poetic truths, or at least some tender moments, yet throughout the series Updike never surrendered to cliches or melodrama and nor does he here. RABBIT AT REST is a slice of reality, and sometimes reality ends in unresolved regrets and pitiful, self-defeating attempts at impossible reconciliations.Updike is also an American historian, an ethnographer of the middle American malaise, and in RABBIT AT REST, just as with previous decades in the previous books, he captures life in the late eighties as though from some well-informed future vantage point. Debt, computers, racism, the wasteland of American industry--Updike envisions and eviscerates all of society's ills with an acuteness that leaves me wishing I could pick up something like RABBIT IN RECESSION, a 2010 novel that could maybe help us all figure out where our troublesome future might lie.RABBIT AT REST is a splendid novel, maybe not quite as powerful and moving as RABBIT, RUN, but then again--to paraphrase Harry--when you get older it gets harder to muster the same enthusiasm you once held for everything.
—Stephen
