Recent Reading: Rabbit at Rest

 

Rabbit Is Rich ended "a granddaughter. His. Another nail in his coffin. His." Ten years later, Updike's Rabbit Angstrom sees death all around him. The Lockerbie Scotland airplane crash on the news over and over. He meets his mistress Thelma who smells of death and urine who dies of lupus. The three chapters of the book are FL, PA, and MI; the latter stands for myocardial infarction or heart attack. While undergoing a heart catheterization, his nurse, Annabelle, is almost certainly his bastard daughter who he never acknowledges.

Rabbit spends a moderate amount of time thinking about Jews and Judaism. Assuming that since they are people of the book, including the Hebrew books of wisdom, Rabbit asks his Jewish golfing buddies for advice on how to be a better father and grandfather. They play up up their Jewish-ness and even try to insert some humor.

“Here’s a Jewish joke for you. Abe meets Izzy after a long time no see. He asks, ‘How many children do you have?’ Izzy says, ‘None.’ Abe says, ‘None! So what do you do for aggravation?’ ”

These men are, at least in my opinion, symbols of Updike's colleagues in what we now call literary fiction: Bellow, Mailer, Malamud, and Roth.

Page after page is filled with downright poetic prose, especially in the descriptions. One also finds pithy descriptions of popular culture in 1989:

Harry and Janice got lost and wound up at the mall in Maiden Springs, where a six-theater cineplex advertised on its crammed display board HONEY I SHRUNK BATMAN GHOSTBUST II KARATE KID III DEAD POETS GREAT BALLS.

The word masterpiece is used too often. However, I consider Rabbit at Rest to be a one of the great novels of the last half of the twentieth century.