Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990) by John Updike. The fourth and final book in Updike's series about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is the best. Updike exhibits incomparable range and virtuosity in describing Rabbit's final year of life, wherein he fights with his family, has sex with his son's wife, and suffers a heart attack. The central dilemma in the novel is Nelson, Harry's grown son, who has become addicted to cocaine. This directly affects Rabbit, because Nelson has gone deeply into debt, even using assets of the car dealership that they all depend on, to finance his coke habit. But even more gratifying to the reader, Updike has evoked the time and place of the novel with names of stores, snatches of songs off the radio, and other arcana of American pop culture which, regrettably, will probably not be recognizable to future readers of the novel. For those of us who lived through the time in which the novel is set, however, it is a marvelous evocation of a time in our lives. Grade: A