Rabbit at Rest - by John Updike (Paperback)

About the Book

A haunting novel that completes Updike's extraordinary tetralogy chronicling four decades of life in America. In the final novel about ex-basketball player Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the hero has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild while exploring the bleak terrain of late middle age and looking for reasons to live.

Book Synopsis

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER - One of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century brings back ex-basketball player Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the late middle-aged hero of Rabbit, Run, who has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild, and is looking for reasons to live.

"Brilliant . . . the best novel about America to come out of America for a very, very long time."--The Washington Post Book World

Rabbit's son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending out mixed signals; and his wife, Janice, decides in midlife to become a working girl. As, through the winter, spring, and summer of 1989, Reagan's debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live. The geographical locale is divided between Brewer, in southestern Pennyslvania, and Deleon, in southwestern Florida.

Review Quotes

"Rich and rewarding . . . Updike is working at the full height of his powers."--The New York Times

"Brilliant . . . It must be read. It is the best novel about America to come out of America for a very, very long time."--The Washington Post Book World

"Powerful . . . John Updike with his precisian's prose and his intimately attentive yet cold eye is a master."--Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.