Reviews for Rabbit Redux

The average rating for Rabbit Redux based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-01-04 00:00:00 JOHN DANIELSON "'That may be your mistake, Harry. You've taken Janice for granted ever since - the time.' The time he left her. The time the baby died. The time she took him back. 'Ten years ago,' his father needlessly adds. Harry is beginning, here in this cold bar with cactuses in plastic pots on the shelves beneath the mirrors and the little Schlitz spinner doing its polychrome parabola over and over, to feel the world turn. A hopeful coldness inside him grows, grips his wrists inside his cuffs. The news isn't all in, a new combination might break it open, this stale peace… 'Harry, the malice of people surpasses human understanding in my book, and the poor soul has no defenses against it, there she lies and has to listen. Ten years ago, wouldn't she have laid them out? Wouldn't her tongue have cut them down? They've told [your mother] that Janice is running around. With one certain man, Harry. Nobody claims she's playing the field…'" - John Updike, Rabbit Redux When last we met Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, faded high school basketball star turned aimless young adult, he was doing what he did best: run from his problems. In Rabbit, Run, set during the twilight of the Eisenhower administration, author John Updike closed with a bit of a cliffhanger, leaving us uncertain whether Rabbit would ever stop running, whether he would return to his wife and child and home and responsibilities, and whether she would take him back if he did. In Updike's sequel, Rabbit Redux, those questions are answered casually, in the first few pages. Instead of picking up where the first book left off, Updike instead skips ahead a decade, leaping over John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to plop us right into the upheavals of the late 1960s. Up in space, Neil Armstrong is setting foot on the Moon, while down on earth, Rabbit is a Linotype operator, a thirty-six year-old man in a dying profession that he's not really good at, growing fat and irrelevant as the universe changes drastically around him. In the larger world, America is fighting a controversial war in Vietnam, there are riots in the streets, and the underpinnings of his country are being challenged. At home, Rabbit's mother is suffering from a progressive, dementia-like illness, his father is nagging him constantly to visit, and his son doesn't like sports. Also, Janice - Rabbit's wife - has just left him for a car salesman. With Janice suddenly absent, Rabbit gradually gathers around him an ad hoc family of sorts, comprised of Nelson, his son; Jill, a young white runaway from a rich family; and Skeeter, a black Vietnam vet who introduces Rabbit to drugs and a wider perspective. To say more would be to give away too much, and would also serve little purpose. Like its predecessor, Rabbit Redux is not overly concerned with plot points. For much of its 350 pages, it just sort of drifts along, a series of conversations between Rabbit and various people. These talks are interspersed with a hefty helping of Updike's famed (or infamous) sex scenes. Instead of summarizing, it's perhaps more worthwhile to mention a few observations. The first has to do with Updike's treatment of race. Mostly kept to the background in Rabbit, Run - which made sense for the time period and the character - race is at the forefront of Rabbit Redux. At first, Updike handles the issue relatively well, keenly highlighting Rabbit's racial panic as something outdated and buffoonish. The farther along we get in the book, however, the more problematic things become. After finishing Rabbit Redux, I read about an interview Updike once gave, in which he said that he did not write historical fiction because he had never "used a spittoon." The point he was making, of course, is that he was most comfortable writing what he knew. The limits of Updike's personal knowledge are on display here. The issue arises from the character of Skeeter, who is not really a character at all. He is a mouthpiece, mostly dedicated to delivering long harangues to Rabbit. While what he says is not necessarily offensive, this particular trope - leading an ignorant white man to enlightenment - is outdated, to say the least. Moreover, Skeeter's message is impossibly overwhelmed by his utter outrageousness, including a sequence in such glorious bad taste that I had to recheck to make sure I had read it correctly. Indeed, Skeeter is such a preposterous addition to Rabbit Redux that he might have worked, if only Updike had made a fractional attempt to give him human dimensions. The second point worth mentioning is the sex. During his lifetime, Updike "won" many awards for delivering bad sex in fiction, and this aspect of his writing has almost subsumed his reputation. Rabbit Redux is chock full of bawdy scenes and minutely detailed bedtime bits. I will be honest. In the past, I have gently mocked the graphic couplings narrated by authors such as Ken Follett. Now, I'm at the point where I'm a bit exhausted by the snark - my own included - mainly because there are so few examples of "good sex" in fiction. That is, any author who attempts a sex scene, whether it's D.H. Lawrence or Updike, is going to get roasted by somebody, since there is no remotely objective framework for judging these things. The upshot is that sex - one of the fundamental aspects of humanity - is often left out of fiction altogether. This is all a long way of saying that I respect Updike for his effort. At least he does not pretend that once the bedroom door closes, there is a bright light, angels singing, and a harmonious union too perfect for words. Simply labeling something a "bad sex scene" may say as much about the reader's own discomfort as about what has been written. That doesn't mean that Updike is good at writing women, though. Here, I thought that Janice - in the rare times he focuses on her - is the most sympathetic character in Rabbit Redux. Of all the inexplicable actions taken in this book, hers are the most based in reason. Updike's treatment of the other female characters, however, is marked by delusional male fantasies. I'm thinking especially of young Jill, who inexplicably decides to worship at the altar of the out-of-shape, early middle-aged Rabbit Angstrom. The final point to be made is that Rabbit Redux, for all its literary qualities - and it is extremely well written, with marvelous prose and beautiful details - is nothing more than a reflection of Rabbit Run. The two are almost the same, with a few inversions. In terms of action, pacing, and structure, the sequel hits the exact same beats as the first entry. There is a marital conflict that ruptures the nuclear family, followed by the creation of a new, informal family, and then a late third act plot twist that has become predictably unpredictable. The additions that Updike made - his musing on race in America during the time of Nixon; his views on Vietnam and the counterculture; a lot more sexual activity - might make this a more ambitious novel, but not a better one. Rabbit Redux is the second of four novels concerning its eponymous everyman. At the time the books were released, they were hailed as classics. Based on what I've read so far, I have some doubts that they will retain their prevalence or status into the future, though they may survive as markers of a specific type of person at a specific time in history. Nevertheless, even though Rabbit Redux was the opposite of seamless, it kept me turning the pages, from first to last, without any thought of quitting. It may be a small sign of Updike's true genius that he got me to care about an unexceptional, unattractive, narrow-minded schlub like Rabbit Angstrom, to the point where I cannot imagine not seeing his story through to the end

Review # 2 was written on 2017-06-03 00:00:00 Joseph Smetanka DISCLAIMER: Rabbit, Run made me a John Updike fan-girl. If Rabbit, Run was Updike's anti-1950's-American-suburbia book, then Rabbit Redux is definitely his rage against the 60's. Set in 1969 around the time of the moon landing, we find Rabbit, a little over a decade older, and he's not running. You could say that karma has caught up to him. Rumour has it that Janice (who has sobered up and is working at one of her father's car dealerships) is giving Rabbit a little taste of his own medicine, and has a lover on the sly. Though, not too sly, since everyone seems to know about it, including Rabbit's sickly mother who never leaves the house. There are some pretty kick-ass scenes leading up to a big confrontation between Rabbit and Janice that confirmed to me how ingenious John Updike is. Then, Rabbit's life disintegrates into nothing less than a psychedelic shitstorm. The guy creates his own kooky commune when he takes home a teenage runaway and an unstable, kinda shifty black man who escaped probation from a recent drug charge. Don't ask me why he does this. The whole entire book, Rabbit is SO PASSIVE. Shit just happens to him, he allows it, with a truly laissez faire attitude, and of course, disastrous consequences. What takes place during the time of supposed love and peace and grooviness is anything but. Updike shows the ugliest possible view of the 1960's: rotten and shallow relationships, selfish, unlikable people, racism, violence, almost constant drug use, and tons of unappealing sex. Or, should I say, nasty sex. It was so icky to be a fly on the wall for pretty much each and every copulation (failed or otherwise) that takes place in this book. It's so dark, and each participant is really so alone, it's beyond disturbing. And while there was still much prose to swoon over........... We contains chords someone else must strike. The woman is old and wrinkled and smokes a yellow cigarette that requires much sucking in and holding down and closing of the eyes and sighing. The universe is unsleeping, neither ants nor stars sleep, to die will be to be forever wide awake. ...........this book spiralled down to a level where even this fan-girl was appalled, I was ready for the book to END already. I couldn't stand a single soul. I was sick of the political ranting. I was sick of the nymphomaniacal activity. I didn't care who was cheating on who. It was so down in the gutter. I was also completely bewildered at and frankly sick to death with the constant use of the word 'cunt' throughout the book. I should have started a count, because it must be at least a hundred or more times. Does it have some meaning, like the repetition of the phrase "So it goes" in Slaughterhouse-Five? I doubt it. It feels like another type of violence that is hard to take, a misogyny that gets real old, real quick. It highlights the utter distain the male characters have towards women - and the moral reprehensibility of pretty much all the women in this book. They are all 'slutty', or are prostitutes, including Mim, Rabbit's own sister. I was warned that this is the nadir of the Rabbit series and I concur with that assessment. Despite my misgivings with this instalment, I fully intend to read the rest. Because, John Updike.