Describe your new book: This book is the story of my life — the ups, the downs, and the music. If someone were to write your biography, what...
Continue »
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Howells Medal, and the National Book Critics Circle Award
In John Updike’s fourth and final novel about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the hero has acquired a Florida condo, a second grandchild, and a troubled, overworked heart. His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending him mixed signals; and his wife, Janice, decides in midlife to return to the world of work. As, through the year of 1989, Reagan’s debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of the first George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live and opportunities to make peace with a remorselessly accumulating past.
Review:
John Updike's two Pulitzer Prizes were awarded to him for the last two Rabbit novels, and yet only now is the Rabbit tetralogy appearing in audio form (as indeed is its sequel, the novella "Rabbit Remembered"). A long wait, perhaps, but many of the infelicities of the early days of audio books have thus been avoided. The match between reader Arthur Morey and the life and times of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) couldn't be improved upon; in fact, for this reader and listener, the work has been enhanced. Morey's down-to-earth, matte-finished voice complements the novels' intense materiality and dailiness. He shades it in various degrees to reflect the characters, male and female, old and young, their race, their class and even, most entertainingly, the formulaic hack journalism of the Linotype-setting passages in "Rabbit Redux." Morey delivers the general narration with impeccable understatement, conveying the sense of dissatisfaction, the air of moribundity and of "stifled terror," that pervades the work as a whole. His slow pacing allows the reader to savor the precision of Updike's imagery, as — to quote a passage describing Rabbit's existence after his wife leaves him — the "days, pale slices between nights ... blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade." Powers, who reviews audio books for The Washington Post Book World, writes a literary column for the Boston Globe. Reviewed by Katherine A. Powers, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)
Review:
"Brilliant....It must be read. It is the best novel about America to come out of America for a very, very long time." The Washington Post Book World
Review:
"Powerful....John Updike with his precisian's prose and his intimately attentive yet cold eye is a master." The New York Times Book Review
Review:
"The most authoritative and most magical portrait yet written of the past four decades of American life." Time
Review:
"Updike is razor-sharp and mordantly funny....If this novel is in some respects an elegy to Rabbit's bewildered existence, it is also a poignant, humorous, instructive guidebook to the aborted American dream." Publishers Weekly
Review:
"Despite some flaws...the novel measures up well against the rest of the series. This is the saddest and deepest of the 'Rabbit' novels, an aching portrait of America at the end of the Reagan era." Library Journal
Review:
"Rabbit at Rest is certainly the most brooding, the most demanding, the most concentrated of John Updike's longer novels....[M]eticulously recorded by one of our most gifted American realists." Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times
John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Howell's Medal.
"Review"
by The Washington Post Book World,
"Brilliant....It must be read. It is the best novel about America to come out of America for a very, very long time."
"Review"
by The New York Times Book Review,
"Powerful....John Updike with his precisian's prose and his intimately attentive yet cold eye is a master."
"Review"
by Time,
"The most authoritative and most magical portrait yet written of the past four decades of American life."
"Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"Updike is razor-sharp and mordantly funny....If this novel is in some respects an elegy to Rabbit's bewildered existence, it is also a poignant, humorous, instructive guidebook to the aborted American dream."
"Review"
by Library Journal,
"Despite some flaws...the novel measures up well against the rest of the series. This is the saddest and deepest of the 'Rabbit' novels, an aching portrait of America at the end of the Reagan era."
"Review"
by Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times,
"Rabbit at Rest is certainly the most brooding, the most demanding, the most concentrated of John Updike's longer novels....[M]eticulously recorded by one of our most gifted American realists."
Powell's City of Books is an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, that fills a whole city block with more than a million new, used, and out of print books. Shop those shelves — plus literally millions more books, DVDs, and eBooks — here at Powells.com.
Don't Miss
