DISCLAIMER: Rabbit, Run made me a John Updike fan-girl.If Rabbit, Run was Updike's anti-1950's-American-suburbia book, then Rabbit Redux is definitely his rage against the 60's. Set in 1969 around the time of the moon landing, we find Rabbit, a little over a decade older, and he's not running. You could say that karma has caught up to him. Rumour has it that Janice (who has sobered up and is working at one of her father's car dealerships) is giving Rabbit a little taste of his own medicine, and

Like the decade of the 60s, “Rabbit Redux” is a bit tricky. Wee complications arise in so liberal a landscape, especially if the everyman in the novel is absurdly conservative. Add then a haze proliferated by drugs (weed and alcohol and pills) in the mix, and what you have left over is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, older but none the wiser. This time around, ten years after the first Rabbit novel, Janice, Harry’s sad, insipid wife runs away, leaving Rabbit with the kid. Add then too the elements that...

You know those “This is how men write!” jokes we make about how sexist and objectifying the narration is by some male writers? That’s what this book is like.Rating: 2 stars. Was I supposed to be blown away by this book, since it is considered one of the best of all time? Because... no thank you.

DNF @49%Sorry Rabbit, you just aren't interesting enough for me to continue.

“‘That may be your mistake, Harry. You’ve taken Janice for granted ever since – the time.’ The time he left her. The time the baby died. The time she took him back. ‘Ten years ago,’ his father needlessly adds. Harry is beginning, here in this cold bar with cactuses in plastic pots on the shelves beneath the mirrors and the little Schlitz spinner doing its polychrome parabola over and over, to feel the world turn. A hopeful coldness inside him grows, grips his wrists inside his cuffs. The news is...

I felt this was the weakest of the Rabbit books. It covers the 60s and has a particularly reprehensible co-star. There is lots of violence and hate in this book - the hideous underside to the sexual revolution. Obviously, Updike was not taken in by all the peace, love and happiness rhetoric and instead looked at the damage that unbridled sexuality and drug use could have on society - here focusing on how it affects Rabbit and his family. Still a great read and a must before finishing the cycle w...

This book is where the Angstroms became the Osbournes, without the cracking heavy metal catalogue. Or, as other reviewers have pointed out, it’s where Updike tackles Big Questions of American politics and culture within his sexy literary soap opera framework. I also see I was wrong in attempting to empathise with Angstrom—he’s clearly being set up as a Great White Dope, where racist and sexist poison accumulates and infects those unfortunate enough to fall under his sway. So we open with Rabbit’...

I reread the first Rabbit book — Rabbit, Run — last year, and loved it; I found its clear-eyed depiction of a pathetically frightened embodiment of toxic masculinity to be incisive and propulsively written. Decades ago, I only ever made it through this, the second, Rabbit book, and I was eager to reread it and finally make it through the rest. I think I still may read the final two novels in this tetralogy, but I found this one to be a wearying disappointment the further I got into it. Rabbit re...

This is actually cut and pasted from a long comment on someone else's review! It focuses primarily on this book, altho there are some sentiments in it I'd apply to all the Rabbit stories.***warning! terribly tl;drBen said:Updike swung for the fences; he wanted to represent the 60s in one novel; but it was like he didn’t really immerse himself in it; like he was trying to write about it from the outside, as an observer. Novels written by the “observer writer” can work, of course; but typically, I...

Weirdly, as I read the last page, it struck me that this book, which is jammed with late-60s turmoil, is at heart a book about the sacredness or, perhaps better, the ongoing bond of marriage. Given all the (graphic) infidelity, that may be surprising, but I was reminded of the theological thread that ran through the earlier Rabbit, Run. In Redux, it's more muted, but early on we get a glimpse of the religious component as Rabbit admits to sometimes praying on the bus. Why not at home? I'm not su...

I wrote this review a few years ago for a different site. I called it Rabbit's A Reactionary Racist. It's been edited a little bit from it's original context. What is the novel about? Well it’s about Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom: a man in his early thirties, with a wife, a son and a job on the verge of being made obsolete by technology. In the first novel, Rabbit ran away from his wife and young child. The novel dealt with the way he is pulled between his freedom and responsibility. In Rabbit’s secon...

Not as strong or striking as the first encounter with Rabbit, but certain familiarly pitiable obtuseness and brazenness about its conduct still - if less compelling, that's quite befitting with the narrative of Rabbit's current point in life. I remain intrigued for the continuation of the series.

From BBC Radio 4 - Book at Bedtime:John Updike's masterful Rabbit quintet established Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom as the quintessential American White middle class male. The first book Rabbit, Run was published in 1960 to critical acclaim. Rabbit Redux is the second in the series, published in 1971 and charting the end of the sixties - featuring, among other things, the first American moon landing and the Vietnam War.Despite its very strong language, sex, and reflection of racist attitudes of the ti...

Or Rabbit Gets Woke, in which Rabbit is turned on to and back off of the hippie movement with the convenient help of a barely legal teenager who shows up like "I love blowjobs, can I live with you?" and a crazy black guy who will not shut up. Rabbit Redux is Updike's Go Ask Alice, a bizarre, racist rant about Vietnam and the dangers of marijuana that culminates with the black guy jerking off as Rabbit reads Frederick Douglass out loud to him. In Rabbit, Run, the plot moved forward largely in sex...

A year ago I vowed to myself (and you, if you had read my review of Rabbit, Run) that I’d read a Rabbit novel annually until I’m done with the four-novel series; the idea being that I could look back and see how I’d changed in the past year, comparing the changes in my life with those incurred by Rabbit. But it’s the same shit different day for me over here, ya hear? And I’m not turning this into some kind of self centered review about me-me-me. Instead, I’m going to (eventually) talk about the

I think the biggest crime this book commits is how silly it seems at times when it tries to say something profound about the state of humanity or the 60s. I've never lived in the 60s, obviously, but if you told me this was written by someone who's only skimmed the wikipedia page of the decade I wouldn't bat an eyelid - it reads like a list was ticked off: race relations, drugs, new ideas about sex, landing on the moon, Vietnam war. But they're all handled really weirdly (sometimes in a "edgy" wa...

As part of the PopSugar Challenge, I opted to listen to #2 in Updike's Rabbit series, which takes place in 1969 while Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is a supposedly responsible adult enjoying the fact that America is fighting the Viet Cong, and lamenting the fact that his wife Janice is leaving him for a guy she works with (and is opposed to the war). Harry is the Everyman in his opinions and lifestyle. It was like a walk down memory lane to hear his arguments about politics and race, and he is very op...

So different from Rabbit, Run. Whereas, I gave the first novel full marks, I have to grade this one down on the enjoyment scale. Updike does not write a simple sentence. He challenges the reader with idea-rich contexts for his melodramatic characters. There was a lot of fun to be had in the first segment. Less so here.Jumping right into the second part, we are confronted with an entirely different beast. It retreads some tried and true themes: the corruption of youth, interracial relations, godl...

These days I wouldn’t bother to read Rabbit Redux at all but I remember then I even liked it in a way.The novel is too artificial and I believe John Updike simply wanted to catch some zeitgeist in just to be in the running… “Stavros takes it up quickly. ‘She on anything?’‘Who?’‘This nympho of yours.’‘On something?’‘You know. Pills. Acid. She can't be on horse or you wouldn't have any furniture left.’‘Jill? No, she's kicked that stuff.’‘Don't you believe it. They never do. These flower babies dop...

For the second book in his Rabbit Angstrom series, John Updike revisits Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom ten years down the road, in the summer and early fall of 1969. Rabbit is no longer running. In fact, he reflects that no one calls him “Rabbit” anymore. For the past ten years, he’s been working with his father in a printing plant. His wife, Janice, works at her father’s car dealership. Harry and Janice are now living with their son Nelson, now 12 years old, in a house in the nice Penn Vista neighborh...