Word: rabbit
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...Rabbit at Rest by John Updike. Rumors of his death have been greatly exaggerated; Harold C. ("Rabbit") Angstrom is in awful shape at the end of this novel, the victim of piggy habits and a massive coronary, but Updike has left himself free to have a second opinion. If Rabbit really is finished, in this fourth book, then so too is a luminous, encyclopedic saga of postwar America...
...products. Nowadays, almost no customers are seen there during peak afternoon shopping hours. No wonder. Refrigerator cases offer bottles of a sour apple-grape drink instead of butter and cheese. In a touch of the absurd, otherwise barren shelves display seltzer-water dispensers and brightly colored plastic Little Drummer Rabbit dolls, presumably for toddlers who will have to do without fresh milk...
...RABBIT AT REST by John Updike (Knopf; $21.95). Harold ("Rabbit") Angstrom is 56 and ailing in what the author says is his farewell to the character whose life, from high school basketball star to successful Toyota dealer, mirrors middle-class America of the past four decades...
Updike unobtrusively inserts hundreds of such interlinked references into the record of Rabbit's thoughts. The cumulative result is not only a character more interesting than any of his family or friends can imagine but also an interior life richer than even its owner recognizes. Rabbit's undiscriminating curiosity takes in everything, from old songs on the car radio to the crammed titles on a cineplex marquee: HONEY I SHRUNK BATMAN GHOSTBUST II KARATE KID III DEAD POETS GREAT BALLS. These are the fragments he innocently shores against his ruin, the kind of details that historians millenniums hence will cherish...
Updike has certainly never lacked praise or recognition, but his productive career has also prompted a steady drone of cavils: too precious, too self- indulgent, too Waspish, too preoccupied with sex, religion and guilt. If any contradictory argument were needed, Rabbit at Rest provides it. Capping the Rabbit Quartet, this novel completes the most authoritative and most magical portrait yet written of the past four decades of American life...