Rabbit Novels, Volume 1

Rabbit Run is a great American novel and the best part is Updike got better as time went on. It shows in Rabbit Redux. He writing is clearer and the story grabs you right away. The rebellious Harry becomes the sad, over-weight man at 36 going on 60. If someone loves to read a good book or is thinking about a career in writing they need to read these novels and see if they can even come close to Updike. If not, keep your day job!

Just took this and the second volume on a beach vacation and consumed all four novels with eager gratefulness. I had read these first two novels when much younger - my take from later years is even more positive, although Updike's sexual obsession - and that is what it is - gets more tiresome more quickly to an older reader. To someone who has lived through the same times, these Rabbit novels are a gift, an illumination. These editions are far better than the one-volume Everyman edition, which is too heavy and can result in serious injury. Go for it. Read them quickly, in succession. You may be annoyed at times but the cumulative effect is to understand more about America, American decline (in particular note the Japanese Toyota executive's comments in Rabbit at Rest) and probably yourself.

I've reread these novels multiple time; each rereading has garnered me more insight into the time in which it evolves. Though ultimately pointing toward the hollowness that directed societal evolution through these times, Updike really catches all/most of the themes of suburban America. Volume 2 has "Rabbit is Rich", my favorite.

Twenty years from now, the Rabbit novels will be one of a host of books read in college gender studies classes to represent the postwar alteration of American marriage and family. It is rather amazing to read of cocktail-swilling couples seeing society dropouts appear on the scene, and then adopting some of the more selfish behaviors for their own. Also, the frank depictions of male-female lives--the various restricting gender roles, is illuminating. I personally found it quite remarkable to read the depictions of life from the early '60s onward--people riding the bus, when divorce was still shocking and far more damaging, how the hippie movement filtered into the middle American lives and tempted men and women to move on. These are classic American novels, capturing the mood and sentiment in the way only the best fiction can: so that it is all "made up" by the author, but feels realer than reality. These novels are models of realist fiction, my favorite kind.