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Title: Rabbit Redux by John Updike ISBN: 0-449-91193-4 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 27 August, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.05 (22 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Weak but not a total loss
Comment: Having moments ago finished reading "Rabbit Redux", my immediate impression is of a highly flawed book that, just barely, saves itself in the end by bringing the two most interesting characters in the series back together. Rabbit IS a rabbit, he twitches his nose and moves wherever it tells him, and even when it takes him through a Disneyland of unbelievably cliched characters like Jill and Skeeter (a deadened teenaged runaway and psychotic black veteran, respectively, who Rabbit takes into his house when his wife leaves him) it's at least worthwhile to follow. Janice, his estranged wife, is generally undeveloped because Updike spends so much more time on Rabbit, but when she enters the book in any form she attracts attention. I hope Updike gives her more "page time" in the next two novels, she deserves it.
What Updike seems to be trying to do is create a condensed Sixties in this book, particularly the middle section: we have the Conservative (Rabbit), who has a lot to learn, we have the radical (Skeeter), who has been driven insane through oppression and needs to vent, we have the searching hippie (Jill), who needs love and understanding because the world has let her down, and we have the child (Nelson), who could go in any of three directions. There's a love-in, a be-in, a history lesson, a fight or two, and a trip through the countryside to see how the nation is faring. And it ends in conflagration, as the real Sixties did; substitute a burning house for Altamont, and there you have it. The problem is, Updike once called the Sixties "a slum of a decade", and his ode to the Sixties is kind of a slum of a novel. Too bad.
Rating: 3
Summary: Over the top, but a decent read
Comment: A good, but not great novel -- the weak link in the chain of the "Rabbit" novels. Still worth reading, though.
The book would have been as good as the others if the supporting characters were not so embarrassingly stereotypical (especially Skeeter, the almost offensively caricatured unpredictable angry black man). Updike sometimes seems to be trying to get into their heads as effectively as he does with Rabbit's own family, but he doesn't succeed -- and the plot goes over the line into unbelievability too, in my opinion.
All that said, this book is full of memorable scenes and characters, and Updike has caught the mood of what a man in Rabbit's situation, and at Rabbit's age, would be feeling. The prose style is also no longer poignant and melancholy like that of "Rabbit, Run," but is more vigorous and sharp--which fits the scene he's setting.
Rating: 4
Summary: Slightly less amazing part of an amazing series.
Comment: I found Rabbit Redux to be the weakest book in the Rabbit tetrology, though by no means is it a weak book in and of itself. Rabbit Redux's plot takes a detour in the middle and never quite gets back on track, though the writing itself is just as masterful as that of Rabbit, Run. Updike is good with beginnings. In Rabbit, Run, the reader was hooked by the description of Harry heading south from Brewer, Pennsylvania on his first ill-planned quest. In the sequel, the family's conversation with Charlie Stavros in the first part of the book is an excellent mix of sharp dialogue and witty description. We can quickly see how far (or, as it were, NOT far) Rabbit has come since the first book, and it's interesting to watch his wife Janice and son Nelson change along with him. Rabbit Redux introduces a host of supporting characters. Charlie Stavros tends to be the most believable and familiar (with enough quirks to make him stand out in Updike's landscape of idiosyncratic people). Jill and Skeeter, Rabbit and Nelson's two houseguests in the book's middle, are more stereotypical than I would have hoped. Updike seems to descend a little too far into social commentary in the middle of the book as Jill the Poor-Little-Rich-Girl Hippie and Skeeter the Mysterious Black Man exact their influence on both Rabbit and Nelson. Rabbit Redux feels most a part of the Rabbit series when the two aforementioned characters are no longer in the book.
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Title: Rabbit, Run by John Updike ISBN: 0449911659 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 27 August, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Rabbit is Rich by John Updike ISBN: 0449911829 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 27 August, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Rabbit at Rest by John Updike ISBN: 0449911942 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 27 August, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Licks of Love : Short Stories and a Sequel, "Rabbit Remembered" by John Updike ISBN: 0345442016 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 27 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Seize the Day by Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick ISBN: 0142437611 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 27 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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