Rabbit at Rest
by John Updike
Summary
Harry Angstrom is fifty five and spends half the year in a Florida condominium, eating salted nuts he has been told to avoid, watching his heart fail in real time. It is 1989. His son Nelson is running the Toyota dealership back in Pennsylvania and quietly emptying it to pay for cocaine. His daughter in law Pru is unhappy. His granddaughter nearly drowns in a boating accident that Harry, briefly, is a hero of.
What follows is a stent, a heart attack, a fight over the business, and an act of Harry's late in the book so destructive of his own family that the novel does not attempt to explain it, only to record what it costs. He then does what he has done since he was eighteen, which is drive south and keep going.
Updike fills it with 1989 the way a newspaper does: the Lockerbie bombing, a country that has stopped believing its own advertising. The prose is dense with observation, at times almost too much so.
Janice, who has spent three books being underestimated by her husband and by the reader, takes an estate agent's course and turns out to be the competent one, which is the quiet revenge the sequence has been setting up since 1960.
It runs to five hundred pages in the present tense and it is the saddest of the four Rabbit books, partly because Harry knows exactly what is wrong with him and eats the nuts anyway. New readers can start here and follow everything, but the last chapter only lands with the weight of the earlier three behind it.
Be warned that Updike's frankness about bodies, appetite and race is unfiltered throughout and dates badly in places. Best for readers who want the whole arc of an unremarkable American life closed out honestly, without a redemption anyone has earned.
Historical Context & Significance
Rabbit at Rest won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1990 National Book Critics Circle Award. It was John Updike's second fiction Pulitzer after Rabbit Is Rich, and only four writers have taken the fiction prize twice: Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, Updike and Colson Whitehead.
Updike wrote one Rabbit novel per decade, in 1960, 1971, 1981 and 1990, deliberately checking in on the same limited man at roughly ten year intervals, which turned the sequence into the most sustained running portrait of postwar American middle class life any novelist attempted.
He added a coda in 2001, the novella Rabbit Remembered, set ten years after Harry's death and following the family he left, including the daughter the earlier books only speculated about. Updike published more than sixty books across every form, including the criticism collected in Hugging the Shore, and died in 2009.