- Unknown Binding
- Publisher: London,Andre Deutsch,1972 (1972)
- ASIN: B002BFZGBA
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
Rabbit Redux (Penguin Modern Classics)
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First Sentence
MEN emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
MEN emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Rabbit is back and it's 1969. Set against the backdrop of the first moon landing and the Vietnam war Harry Angstrom is once again thrown into personal turmoil. His wife leaves him for a co-worker, his mother is slowly dying, and his job is none too secure. Harry repopulates his house, and his life, with an itinerant 18-year-old rich girl and a black messianic veteran. His son Nelson remains at home with his father and has to come to terms with this new bohemian lifestyle. It's all sex and drugs and rock and roll (well, the blues anyway) for Harry and chums, but the breakdown of his marriage and the death of his first child haunt him throughout.
Rabbit is as flawed and conflicted as ever. At once open-minded and bigoted, he remains patriotic, even jingoistic, as he continues his struggles to grasp the American dream. And, although his behaviour is at times little short of incredulous, he remains a mostly sympathetic protagonist.
And, of course, Updike's prose is as sharp and insightful as ever. An essential read for all lovers of contemporary American literature.
Rabbit is as flawed and conflicted as ever. At once open-minded and bigoted, he remains patriotic, even jingoistic, as he continues his struggles to grasp the American dream. And, although his behaviour is at times little short of incredulous, he remains a mostly sympathetic protagonist.
And, of course, Updike's prose is as sharp and insightful as ever. An essential read for all lovers of contemporary American literature.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
`Rabbit Redux` is the second in Updike's quartet of novels chronicling the life and times of America as seen through the eyes of everyman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Written - as with the other three - at the tale end of one decade (here, the 1960s) and published at the beginning of the next, Redux finds its eponymous anti-hero in suitably chaotic circumstances: his wife has left him for another man, he shacks up with a promiscuous teenage runaway, and her friend, a black radical named Skeeter, moves in with them.
Whereas `Rabbit, Run' was virtually perspiring with dank verisimilitude - all-too queasily human and corporeal - Redux comes across as a kind of maddening metaphorical play. Whereas Rabbit's first adventures concerned intimate, character-driven themes, this second novel is a more representational scenario that reflects the upheaval of the generation. Social dysfunction, free love and black power literally invade Rabbit's smallville suburban address, turning his house into a theatre of the late-1960s psyche.
While Redux doesn't always ring true as a credible study of character, it's air of volatility and hysteria capture the spirit of the period, in which the civil rights movement and the dismantlement of the conservative values of the 1950s were reaching a fever pitch. Whereas `Rabbit, Run' was conspicuously apolitical, Redux is almost all politics, with large sections of the book played out in Rabbit's living room like some kind of deranged allegorical play. Harry Angstrom is still rather passive, buffeted by the events that befall him, but this time he goes along with the trip. Despite losing his job, his house and his wife - albeit temporarily - Rabbit gets a necessary dose of the freedom of the times, hence the redux (from the Latin meaning "brought back, restored") of the title. Profane, provocative and almost pornographic, it is a credit to Updike's writing that this is also intensely imaginative and occasionally beautiful.
Whereas `Rabbit, Run' was virtually perspiring with dank verisimilitude - all-too queasily human and corporeal - Redux comes across as a kind of maddening metaphorical play. Whereas Rabbit's first adventures concerned intimate, character-driven themes, this second novel is a more representational scenario that reflects the upheaval of the generation. Social dysfunction, free love and black power literally invade Rabbit's smallville suburban address, turning his house into a theatre of the late-1960s psyche.
While Redux doesn't always ring true as a credible study of character, it's air of volatility and hysteria capture the spirit of the period, in which the civil rights movement and the dismantlement of the conservative values of the 1950s were reaching a fever pitch. Whereas `Rabbit, Run' was conspicuously apolitical, Redux is almost all politics, with large sections of the book played out in Rabbit's living room like some kind of deranged allegorical play. Harry Angstrom is still rather passive, buffeted by the events that befall him, but this time he goes along with the trip. Despite losing his job, his house and his wife - albeit temporarily - Rabbit gets a necessary dose of the freedom of the times, hence the redux (from the Latin meaning "brought back, restored") of the title. Profane, provocative and almost pornographic, it is a credit to Updike's writing that this is also intensely imaginative and occasionally beautiful.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Updike's evocative language and ghostly narrative style combine with brilliantly drawn characters to unearth the bleak voice of the post industrial silent majority. Its grim reading. The moral of the story is that in this world of adultery, faded dreams and shattered prospects life continues, is relentless and seldom will man, in this case Rabbit strive to achieve or hold on to anything of lasting consequence.
A brilliant look at the pitfalls of the affluent, leisure society.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Rabbit Redux
`Rabbit Redux' sees us return to the world of Harry `Rabbit' Angstrom and this picks up ten years after `Rabbit Run' left off. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Spider Monkey
the first rabbit book is better
It was interesting to discover that the first Updike book (run, rabbit run), was written without one single bad word because the American law prohibited using foul language in... Read more
Published on 25 May 2010 by Daniel Maguire Stevens
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