When I finished reading these Rabbit books I wondered why I had persisted.

There are books that have a reputation, that many people seem to enjoy, but with which you can find no connection at all. As I closed the book cover a final time, yesterday evening, I got the distinct impression that despite all his flaws, I would miss Harry. There’s tenderness in here, there’s wit, there’s beautiful writing to render Rabbit’s inner thoughts and there’s a sharp sense of reality. No one in there is dramatically evil, and no one is a saint this is not your run-of-the-mill, clichéd read, which I do my best to avoid. Updike uses the anecdotal with rare skill and in fact to such masterful effect that at this point, some 1,500 pages later, many characters populating the four novels feel like I’ve known them personally. While I can see how the protagonist can rub off people the wrong way, at the same time I can’t imagine how a reader wouldn’t feel privileged to gain so clear and clever an insight into the mind of your average middle-class neighbor in America. Other reviewers on Goodreads have complained about Rabbit’s lack of morals. This small tome contains books 1 to 4 of the Rabbit series and I spent half a year with John Updike’s characters, reading other novels between each instalment and eventually coming back to Harry Angstrom and his family. This Rabbit Angstrom volume is composed of the following novels: Rabbit, Run Rabbit Redux Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest. He has given us our representative American story. 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. 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. 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.

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.

Updike novel rabbit