Rabbit At Rest

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article or replace this tag with a more specific message. This article has been tagged since May 2006. (help, talk)

Rabbit at Rest is a 1990 novel by John Updike. It is the fourth and final novel in a series beginning with Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, and Rabbit Is Rich. There is also a related 2001 novella, Rabbit Remembered. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1991.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

This Pulitzer Prize winning book (the second "Rabbit" novel to garner the Prize) is the fourth in the Rabbit series, which follows the exploits of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom from 1960-1990. Rabbit at Rest finds Harry forty years removed from his glory days as a high school basketball star in a mid-sized Pennsylvania city. Harry, along with his wife of thirty-three years, has retired to sunny Florida during the cold months, where he is depressed, bored, and dangerously overweight. Rabbit cannot stop nibbling corn chips, peanuts, and in one memorable scene bird food by mistake, and thinking about death makes his appetite bottomless. Distraction from his existential plight is provided by the shenanigans of Harry's worthless son Nelson, to whom Harry has very unwisely given control of the family business, a Pennsylvania Toyota dealership. On the bright side, Nelson's blowsy wife flirts with Harry, and Harry finds her marvelous. Updike's recurring themes of guilt, sex, death, and race are given a dazzling treatment in this savory chunk of Americana.

Preceded by: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos	Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1991	Succeeded by: *A Thousand Acres* by Jane Smiley