Word: rabbiting
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...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...
...that Rabbit is doing much of the laughing. During the time covered in the novel -- from the 1988 Christmas season to September 1989 -- he turns 56 and feels even older. His former job of running his wife Janice's inherited Toyota dealership has been given, by Janice, to their son Nelson, whom Rabbit still does not much like. The elder Angstroms winter in a Florida condo and spend the summers back home in southeastern Pennsylvania. Rabbit is restless, watching too much TV and packing in junk food; he now carries well over...
These shocks generate most of the novel's plot. But what happens to Rabbit pales before what his jumpy, unpredictable consciousness makes of the experiences. His mind understandably roams as he tours a Florida theme park with his wife and two grandchildren: "Rabbit wonders how the Dalai Lama is doing, after all that exile. Do you still believe in God, if people keep telling you you are God?" The Dalai Lama has been in the news, and Rabbit, force-feeding himself at the tube, has become through sheer couch-potatodom a current-events buff. But the Tibetan religious leader continues...
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...