Book summary

Updike's fourth "Rabbit" novel presents the human condition as personified by Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. The fat, aging, ill Rabbit must also cope with his son's drug addiction, his wife's troubles, a former girlfriend who turns up suffering from lupus, and the world in general, with which Rabbit has always had a love-hate relationship. In this last work of his tetralogy, Updike dissects the horrors and failures of American society, while still managing to find hope, if not for Rabbit, then perhaps for the rest of us. RABBIT AT REST won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1991.

Media reviews

"'Rabbit at Rest' is certainly the most brooding, the most demanding, the most concentrated of John Updike's longer novels. Its courageous theme--the blossoming and fruition of the seed of death we all carry inside us--is struck in the first sentence....This early note, so emphatically struck, reverberates through the length of the novel and invests its domestic-crisis story with an unusual pathos."