Middle-age suits Rabbit well, as it suited Updike well. (However, Too Far To Go does the same thing, though not to the same length.)Īs for Rabbit is Rich itself, the voice here has mellowed as the character has matured. This is probably the best thing about the Rabbit books. I now understand some of the enthusiasm many feel for the Rabbit series, and I am also starting to see how enjoyable it is to follow a single set of characters - a family, an ever-shifting gang of friends, a very funny son who keeps crashing cars into things - over the course of several decades. I’ve now read it and completely agree that this is the best one so far, much better than Rabbit Run or the confused Rabbit Redux. With that said: I got a lot of feedback the last time I wrote something like this, and more than one Updike fan said I shouldn’t judge the Rabbit foursome on the basis of the first two, but must read the third volume, Rabbit is Rich. But the novels should never be the entry point for Updike’s career. For some early Updike, read Of The Farm and a few short stories for later Updike, try Gertrude and Claudius, and at some point take a break with Nicholson Baker’s U and I. If you want to discover John Updike and haven’t yet, I suggest you read Couples first, and then Too Far To Go, followed by any of those bricks of collected criticism, Odd Jobs or Hugging the Shore or any other, it doesn’t matter which, that you can pick up in a used bookstore cheap. So is John Updike in these four books, and the experiment produces interesting results, but no masterpiece. Updike’s voice flies in other books - when Piet Hanema watches a woman walk by a church, when Richard Maple stares up at a falling Boston skyscraper. Updike’s prose will follow his character’s thought patterns in any book, of course, and Rabbit’s thoughts are stubby, ungrammatical, tepid. The greatest problem, though, is the absence of Updike’s soaring voice. His political views and opinions are earthy, humorous in the same way that Archie Bunker’s were, but ultimately there is always the sense that Updike is studying this Suburban Man, this Joe the Plumber, as a social prototype. Rabbit Angstrom is a small town basketball former-hotshot, people-smart but not book-smart, with no aspirations that can’t be satisfied in a kitchen or a bedroom. Updike was famous for his “impersonation” novels - the Bech books, Brazil, Terrorist - and I insist (though I seem to be alone in this opinion) that the Rabbit books were among his impersonation novels. Updike’s gracefully high-minded intellect was his single greatest gift as a writer, but he was deliberately subverting his intellect in these books, and that’s too great a loss. In fact, I believe Updike adopted a deliberately dull voice when writing as Rabbit Angstrom. But I object to the idea that they are his masterpiece because I’m worried people who’ve never read Updike will pick up Rabbit Run and give up on him forever after reading twenty pages of that chewy, stale narrative. I would never deny other readers the right to crow about their favorites, and I do think these books have some value. Jack Eccles, and Henry Jones and Josephine Hutchinson as Rabbit's parents.I’ve been peeved, and I’ve said so, about the high percentage of John Updike memorial articles citing his Rabbit novels (1960’s Rabbit Run, 1971’s Rabbit Redux, 1981’s Rabbit is Rich, 1990’s Rabbit at Rest) as his masterpiece. The movie co-starred Jack Albertson as Coach Marty Tothero, Arthur Hill as Rev. Rabbit, Run was the basis for the 1970 film directed by Jack Smight starring James Caan as Rabbit Angstrom, Carrie Snodgress as Rabbit's wife Janice, and Anjanette Comer as his girlfriend Ruth. into the uncertainties of the 80s" (The New York Times). The books have also created a Kodachrome-sharp picture of American life. "Taken together, this quartet of novels has given its readers a wonderfully vivid portrait of one Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom. ![]() ![]() "Updikes choice of Rabbit Angstrom, in Rabbit, Run, was inspired, one of those happy, instinctive accidents that so often shape a literary career" (Books of the Century, 450). Each volume is near fine to fine in near fine dust jackets. $3,000.00 Item Number: 121353įirst editions of each volume in the Rabbit quartet. ![]() Rabbit, Run Rabbit Redux Rabbit Is Rich Rabbit At Rest Licks of Love.
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