Rabbit at Rest – John Updike (1990)
The fourth and final novel in John Updike’s celebrated Rabbit Angstrom series, Rabbit at Rest follows the aging Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom—now a semi-retired, overweight Florida snowbird—as he confronts mortality, familial discord, and the fading American Dream in the twilight of the Reagan era.
Weary and disillusioned, Rabbit grapples with heart disease, his strained marriage to Janice, and his troubled son Nelson’s cocaine addiction and mismanagement of the family car dealership. A brief, reckless affair with his daughter-in-law Pru and a symbolic return to his hometown of Brewer, Pennsylvania, underscore his lifelong pattern of escapism and self-sabotage.
The novel crescendos with Rabbit’s fatal heart attack during a pickup basketball game—a poignant, if ironic, end for a man who once defined himself through physical prowess. Updike’s prose, lush with detail and dark humor, dissects American consumerism, generational decline, and the body’s betrayals with unflinching precision.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize (1991), Rabbit at Rest is a masterful elegy for a flawed everyman and the postwar America he embodied.
“Rabbit runs no more—but Updike’s words make even his surrender a kind of victory.”
