Word: angstroms
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...artful compressions, alluding to past events, when necessary, through a vivid present. Sometimes their titles make this focus clear: A Month of Sundays, Memories of the Ford Administration (which lasted, for those who missed or have forgotten it, about 30 months). Even the tetralogy of books that portray Rabbit Angstrom concentrates on spasms of activity set at 10-year intervals of his life. It is therefore surprising to learn that In the Beauty of the Lilies (Knopf; 491 pages; $25.95) covers a whopping 80 years and four generations of a single American family. In his mid-60s, Updike...
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...
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...
...booksellers in June. Some of his market- minded listeners may have wondered if they could find some way that the book could be pitched as anything but . . . depressing. There was no need to worry. This fourth, and presumably final, installment of the life and times of Harold C. Angstrom -- Rabbit Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981) -- is far more upbeat than its subject matter would seem to warrant. And in the bargain it manages to be both poignant and excruciatingly funny...
John Updike '54 makes powerful statements about modern American life in his final segment of the Angstrom family chronicles, Rabbit at Rest. As powerful, certainly, as any made by social critics like Barbara Erhenreich. But Updike's fiction lacks the tone of condemnation of his contemporaries. Rabbit does fall prey to the pitfalls of technology and culture, but he never looses his sense...