Author: John Updike
Format: Hardcover (in Tetralogy)
Pages: 350
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication Date: October 28, 1995
ISBN-13: 9780679444596
About the Book
When we first met him in Rabbit, Run (1960), the book
that established John Updike as a major novelist, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom is
playing basketball with some boys in an alley in Pennsylvania during the tail
end of the Eisenhower era, reliving for a moment his past as a star high school
athlete. Athleticism of a different sort is on display throughout these four
magnificent novels—the athleticism of an imagination possessed of the ability
to lay bare, with a seemingly effortless animal grace, the enchantments and
disenchantments of life.
Updike
revisited his hero toward the end of each of the following decades in the
second half of this American century; and in each of the subsequent novels, as
Rabbit, his wife, Janice, his son, Nelson, and the people around them grow,
these characters take on the lineaments of our common existence. In prose that
is one of the glories of contemporary literature, Updike has chronicled the
frustrations and ambiguous triumphs, the longuers, the loves and frenzies, the
betrayals and reconciliations of our era. He has given us our representative
American story.This
Rabbit Angstrom volume is comprised of the following novels: Rabbit,
Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich; and Rabbit at Rest.
My Review
With this being the second book in the Rabbit series, I wasn’t
really ready to read this one, but with the time constraint of having to read
it for my college class, I started reading this book. This book picks up about
ten years after the first one ends.
Things that I liked:
I liked that Rabbit seemed more mature in this book, but yet he was still
trying to find a happy balance or a balance that he could live with, with the
people around him. His wife, Janice, his son Nelson, his parents, and even his
wife’s parents, there are definitely some ups and downs that happen with each
and every one of those people. I liked that every time you turned around there
was something happening, or Harry (Rabbit) is talking about something
political. Another sign that Harry is getting older is that he is paying more
attention to the politics of everything around him: who is being elected into
office, the war that is going on, etc.
Things that I didn’t
like: Not much that I didn’t like, I mean the pacing of the book gets to me
after a while but there’s nothing I can do about that, now can I? I’m torn
about all the detail that Updike places throughout the novels. I like having
the detail but something I wonder what the novel would be like if maybe he left
something out and left it to the reader’s imagination to figure out what is
going on or what something would look like.
Overall: I
enjoyed reading this book, it was better than the first. Still with this being
a post modern classic, I will most likely be revisiting it to go back through
it and reread the book to better understand it from the author’s perspective.
Until next time, Happy Reading!
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