Book Reviews
Taken together, this quartet of novels has given readers a wonderfully vivid portrait of one Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom.... The books have also created a Kodachrome-sharp picture of American life...from the somnolent 50s...into the uncertainties of the 80s. (Refers to all four Rabbit Angstrom novels.)
New York Times
The being that most illuminates the Rabbit quartet is not finally Harry Angstrom himself but the world through which he moves in his slow downward slide, meticulously recorded by one of the most gifted American realists.... The Rabbit novels, for all their grittiness, constitute John Updike's surpassingly eloquent valentine to his country. (Refers to all four Rabbit Angstrom novels.)
Joyce Carol Oates - New York Times Book Review
Rabbit at Rest is certainly the most brooding, the most demanding, the most concentrated of John Updike's longer novels.... One begins virtually to share, with the doomed Harry Angstrom, a panicky sense of the body's terrible finitude, and of its place in a world of other, competing bodies: ''You fill a slot for a time and then move out; that's the decent thing to do: make room.''
Joyce Carol Oates - New York Times Book Review
Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, morbidly depressed, overweight and living with wife Janice in a Florida retirement community, recovers from a heart attack and is led astray by his libido one last time. Updike is razor-sharp and mordantly funny. If this novel is in some respects an elegy to Rabbit's bewildered existence, it is also a poignant, humorous, instructive guidebook to the aborted American dream. The book took a Pulitzer Prize.
Publishers Weekly
Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is back in this final installment of Updike's four-decade chronicle. Now 55 and semi-retired, Harry spends half the year in Florida with wife Janice while Nelson, their son, runs the family business. Yet Harry's "golden years" are far from happy: he has ballooned to 230 pounds and suffers from angina. Janice is becoming increasingly independent. Nelson's cocaine habit is bankrupting Springer Motors. Harry sees decline on all sides, and the novel's great strength is how Updike links Harry's decline to that of his country, giving his sense of loss an elegiac feel. Despite some flaws—excessive length, a weak characterization of Nelson—the novel measures up well against the rest of the series. This is the saddest and deepest of the "Rabbit" novels, an aching portrait of America at the end of the Reagan era. —Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free Public Library, MA
Library Journal
Updike is one of the most exquisite masters of prose style produced by 20th century America. Yet, his novels have been faulted for lacking any sense of action or character development. It appears at times that his ability to spin lovely phrases of delicate beauty and nuance overwhelm his desire to tell a simple, important story in the lives of his characters. Updike's novels raise the question of whether beauty of expression, the lyrical telling of a captured moment of human time is, itself, enough to justify a great work of art. In contrast, his short stories are seen by many as masterful in every respect, both for their prose style that approaches poetic expression and for the stories they convey. Some critics believe that had Updike produced only short stories and poems, his role in American letters would be even more celebrated. But it is Updike's novels that have brought him the greatest fame and attention and which resulted in his appearance on the covers of Time magazine two times during his career.
Wikipedia.