Rabbit Redux

Literary fiction

Print length: 353 pagesFawcett Columbine, 1996

Description

Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, once a high-school basketball star, now works an unfulfilling printing-plant job in declining Brewer, Pennsylvania, and feels middle age closing around him. When his wife leaves, Harry must care for their thirteen-year-old son, Nelson, while struggling to give either of them direction. Their home soon expands into an unstable household that includes a Black Vietnam veteran who deals drugs and a runaway teenager who becomes an object of desire for both father and son. Drugs, sex, religion, race, and politics turn domestic life into a battleground, while hostile neighbors threaten the household from outside. The novel places Harry’s fear of obsolescence against the social upheavals dividing American families as the 1960s give way to the 1970s.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Dense · Descriptive · Lyrical

Pace

Measured

Tone

Dark · Reflective · Tense · Unsettling

Structure

Linear

Focus

Character · Ideas · Relationships

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 4 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 2 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

AgingClassFamilyPolitics and ideologyRace and racismSexuality

About John Updike

John Updike was an American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and critic whose work ranged across fiction, verse, book reviewing, and art criticism. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker who also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books, he brought a critic’s alertness and a remarkably attentive eye to ordinary American life. His fiction is especially concerned with the pressures within marriage, family, faith, sexuality, and middle-class aspiration. The Rabbit sequence, following Harry Angstrom across several decades, gave these interests an unusually sustained form, registering personal change alongside shifts in American society. Elsewhere, novels such as Couples and The Witches of Eastwick use satire and dark comedy to examine desire, social convention, and the instability beneath prosperous communities. Updike’s characteristic method joins close description and rich imagery to a strong interest in character and relationships. His body of work is distinguished by its breadth and by the intensity with which it renders familiar settings, private compromises, and moral unease.