Rabbit at Rest

I finished this novel last night around the time I usually go to sleep and I was pondering whether I should write my review then and there, of if I should wait until those sleepy cobwebs would've vanished. I chose the latter and here I am trying to gather my thoughts while Amélie is trying to get my attention and it seems it's going to be a very dreary Sunday. Not the best condition in which to write a collection of thoughts Rabbit at rest invoked while reading it.

It was quite a lenghty novel, ranging somewhat around 500 pages and its content wasn't the kind that puts you in the fast lane. It was like shoveling snow, slow and draining work, but worth it none the less.

Rabbit at rest is the last installment in a series of four books, all revolving around Harry, Rabbit, Angstrom.
It has been a while since I began reading about Harry's life, but every book made its point. It are novels that pack a punch, which you don't see coming. Our main character isn't someone to look up to, since he makes his shares of mistakes throughout life, but it does make him as real as you and me.

John Updike explores in his Rabbit series just how selfish and stubborn human nature can be. It's grasp of each era in which we follow the predicaments of Harry are spot on. I didn't experience the 60's or the 70's but I still felt like I knew what he meant. A beautiful grasp of his surrounding makes this novel come alive as few others are able to.
His latest novel is set in the last decade before the new century, where everything changed and you needed to get with it or be gone. Since I was still a child in nineties, I didn't see the metamorphosis as strongly as Rabbit did, but in hind sight it must have felt like being uprooted.

Harry is still head strong in his decisions, almost above feeling anything resembling guilt, because as he has done in the previous three novels, he still believes he can do what he wants without any repercussions.
He's in his fifties and his exuberant life style of the previous decades is being to catch up to him and his heart is giving him trouble.
He's still not on the right terms with his son, who has taken over the Toyota lot and is trying to make a living, while Harry and his wife Janice are in Florida for the winter to give Nelson the freedom he needs.

Ultimately Nelson spirals into a bad episode when he gets addicted to cocaine and Janice is forced to help him. Although Harry had made his fair share of mistakes, he resents his son making his own mistakes and can't stop badgering the boy about them. Since no one takes his side in this argument he becomes more resentful. His fading invulnerability and his dependency upon Janice, puts him in a dangerous state of mind, which ultimately ends up in his sleeping with Pru, his daughter-in-law, while Nelson is being treated for his addiction.

What seems to be the downfall of Harry is his lack of control. Janice has the money and she favours their son above him. Since it's taking place last century you must take into account that it wasn't common for men to succumb to women, although it is what Harry has done his entire life.
He's never had to take responsibility. He's never been the man of the house. He's never had to come to terms with any of the mistakes he made, which ultimately make him a weak man. Someone who rather runs than face the music.

I'll miss Harry and his world. I'd like to know whether he will have a third grand child. Whether he and Janice could reconcile. But maybe it's better not knowing, because knowing Harry, he'll find a way to fuck things up again.

Rabbit is Rich

The third part of a five-book series by John Updike..

Rabbit Run

Rabbit Redux

Rabbit is Rich

Rabbit at Rest
Rabbit Remembered

I've read the previous ones, still need to read the last part, but going to of course. 

John Updike writes from a manly point of view, you experience the life of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom as he finally has some luck in his life. 

As the previous novel (Rabbit Redux) ends with him back with his wife, this novel starts off with him doing quite well selling Toyota's while the oil crisis is rampaging through the seventies. 

His son, Nelson, is of an age to almost graduate from college, but he's making mistakes, coming back home to shelter from the harsh reality of adult life. To Harry this is an unwelcome change in his routine, not happy with his son back from Ohio. He's trying to make the boy see that the world is out there ready to explore, but Nelson is too frustrated to grab the chances given him. 

In the end he makes the same mistakes that Harry made at that age, and Harry has no idea how to respond. 

While this goes on, he is still sort of happy with his wife Janice, all the while fantasising about the daughter he thinks he has with Ruth (Rabbit Run). One time he thinks he's spotted her and wants to be sure, ending in a very down to earth conversation. 

He's made new friends too and his old wayward ways haven't entirely disappeared. He's got too much eyes for the wife of a friend, not enough for another and the wrong kind for his own wife, which tend to cause emotionally a lot of strain on his relationships.

In the end, you can sum up the Rabbit books as being part of the male psychology and all the insecurities, abnormalities and quirks it comes with.

Being female myself last time I checked, I found John Updike his novels very refreshing. I can actually picture men thinking like this. Possibly not all men, I hope not anyway, but a good percentage of them out there, really are that superficial from time to time and they really don't mind us getting older, as long as we don't let ourselves go in the process. 

I'm still a fan!

Review of Rabbit Redux

In this sequel to Rabbit, Run, John Updike resumes the spiritual quest of his anxious Everyman, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Ten years have passed; the impulsive former athlete has become a paunchy thirty-six-year-old conservative, and Eisenhower’s becalmed America has become 1969’s lurid turmoil of technology, fantasy, drugs, and violence. Rabbit is abandoned by his family, his home invaded by a runaway and a radical, his past reduced to a ruined inner landscape; still he clings to semblances of decency and responsibility, and yearns to belong and to believe. (www.goodreads.com)


Rabbit Redux wasn't as good a novel as Rabbit, Run was, but I wasn't completely bad either. I've enjoyed catching up with Harry Angstrom again, learning how his life has turned out after his shenanagans in the first novel. Seeing that he's still together with Janice (which I unconsciously give the same look and voice as the Janice from Friends) and their raising Nelson together. They start out being a fairly normal unhappy married couple, living together but next to each other.
The novel shanges abdruptly when Harry's father hints at the possibility that Janice is seeing someone else. He confronts her and she confesses. She intimately wants him to fight for her but he lets her go to live with her lover. He and their son stay in their home and he lives his life further without really thinking about it, without realising life is passing him by and he's not doing anything worth while.

Then, through a co-worker, a young girl comes to live with him. A troubled teen who's only way of surviving  in life is to provide sexual acts. Harry is declining at first, not really interested in such a young body and also afraid of some conspiracy to blackmail him. As time goes by they do become sexual partners, but when she brings in a fugitive, Skeeter, to harbour for a few days, things begin to go rapidly downhill.
Jill is being introduced to drugs again and spends more and more time high or wanting to get high. Harry and Skeeter, a black man who's been in Vietnam and who thinks he's the black Jesus come to rescue us all from temptation and to learn the 'Chucks' of the world that you don't mess with the black man. He and Harry read stories to each other while they're high on marihuana, which changes the way Harry thinks.
In the meantime his neighbourhood is not happy with him giving shelter to a black man, which in the end comes to a menacing event.

Harry seems to me to be a person who doesn't live life, but let's other people live it for him. He never makes choices but leaves them to others . His wife leaving him, the girl being harboured with him through his co-worker, Skeeter living with him because of the girl, even small things like him sleeping with the mother of Nelson's best friend is not because he wants to, but because she wants to.
He's living the life someone else is providing him, never doing anything to set things to his mind, just wandering through.
It was very much the same thing in Rabbit, Run. Although he's ten years older, and he's not running this time, he's running away from everything just by doing nothing. Time passes him by and he stands still.

John Updike does a hell of a job to write a story about a man I truly dislike and making it so that I'm inclined to read further until the end. To be able to accomplish that, is very rare indeed. Thumbs up, I'd say.

Personal score: 3,5 stars

Review of Rabbit, Run

Author: John Updike
First published in 1960
Thickness: 272 pages
Personal rating: 3 stars

In short

Harry Angstrom was a star basketball player in high school and that was the best time of his life. Now in his mid-20s, his work is unfulfilling, his marriage is moribund, and he tries to find happiness with another woman. But happiness is more elusive than a medal, and Harry must continue to run—from his wife, his life, and from himself, until he reaches the end of the road and has to turn back.... (www.goodreads.com)

My two cents 

I'm not sure how to classify Rabbit Run. Clearly written from the perspective of the selfish 'Rabbit' Angstrom, it points out flaws in his character which I couldn't place in this time anymore.
But since it has been written in the early 60's, a time where women were inclined to follow a man's lead more than in this day and age, I could see this being a very realistic view of marriage in that time.

Of course, Harry is an extreme model of this outdated model of life between man and woman, him being selfishly involved with someone else, abandoning his wife who is expecting their second child. I see in that a reluctance to accept that he isn't the star basket ball player he used to be. He wants to be the best, and he isn't that being a husband and a father.

The part in which they lose their daughter, I shivered, expecting myself and it would be the worst thing that could ever happen to me.
But it seemed like neither he or his wife truly realised what had happened, and just used the circumstances to find pity and compassion.

Clearly the novel invokes a strong reaction, either positive or negative, although I don't see it being positive in many cases, at least not with female readers.
Even in being dreadfully longwinded at times, I couldn't put it down, wanting to know if he would make the right decision in the end, and when the end came he surprised me in a way I couldn't have forseen.
Being so damnfully seflish, throughout his youth and carrying that on in adulthood, Harry Angstrom is a man caught in the glory years of his highshool basketball years, dreaming of a girl that has moved on while he was away, and he got himself caught with a women he doesn't love or care about in the least.

This century, 50 years after the novel published, we've got a lot of those men walking around, but I think that the women of our day and age are more capable to put it to a stop. We aren't the pavements we used to be, we don't take it when some try to walk all over us.
This novel is just a horrific view into the past, and makes me feel proud that for most of us, it is definitely a thing in the past.