“Rabbit basks above that old remembered world, rich, at rest” –Rabbit is Rich (epigraph).
At long last, one of the more miserable, repulsive figures in all of American literature is finally put to “rest.” The fourth and mercifully final novel in John Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom series, Rabbit at Rest presents three major scenes in the slow, self-loathing demise of our unpleasant protagonist. It takes place in the late 1980s: an age of cocaine, computers, mass consumerism, and the end of the Cold War. There is a looming sense of doom in the air, as if Harry’s life (as well as the United States itself) has run its course. Everywhere Harry sees death, from the death of Max Robinson, the nation’s only black national anchorman, to the death of Roy Orbison, and the charred bodies from the Lockerbie bombing. Despite being somewhat fond of President Ronald Reagan, Harry Angstrom haphazardly feels as if “Everything [is] falling apart, airplanes, bridges, eight years under Reagan of nobody minding the store, making money out of nothing, running up debt, trusting in God” (10) and Harry complains about the yuppies moving across the mountain from northeast Brewer County into his (fictional) hometown of Mt. Judge, Pennsylvania “to take advantage of the empty factories, the skilled but depressed laboring force, and the old-fashionedly cheap living.” The whole of America has become a “mass-produced paradise” as the country grows fat and satiated with cheap goods and the old industrial base is quietly entombed. Meanwhile, as one of Harry’s friends puts it, “Face it: the bulk of this country is scared to death of the blacks.”
In this troubled climate, Harry and Janice have handed over the keys to their four-acre Toyota dealership off Route III, Springer Motors, to their wayward son Nelson. Janice’s mother died seven years ago, leaving to her Springer Motors (one of only two Toyota agencies in the Brewer, Pennsylvania area). Now, selling cars is not what it was ten years ago, “…people now need more things than your father did. That was a simpler world. I remember it, I was there too,” Janice reminds Harry. With Nelson running the lot, Harry and Janice now spend half the year at a retirement condo they purchased in Deleon, Florida “named after some Spanish explorer killed for all his shining black breastplate by the poisoned arrow of a Seminole in 1521 near here or a place like it, and pronounced Deelyun by the locals, as if they are offering to deal you in” (50). At fifty-five years old, Harry has run into some health problems –he is overweight and cannot stop eating salty junk food. “His doctor down here keeps telling him to cut out the beer and munchies and each night after brushing his teeth he vows to but in the sunshine of the next day he’s hungry again, for anything salty and easy to chew” (7).
The novel begins with the Angstrom’s lightly balding son Nelson (“a real sore spot”) and his wife Teresa “Pru” as they travel down to Florida for a visit along with their two children, eight-year-old precocious Judy and four-year-old chaotic Roy. But the trip quickly goes awry as Harry and Nelson constantly bicker, yelling and swearing in front of the children. Harry is shown to be a grumpier person, not a “laid-back hombre” anymore, and Nelson seems remarkably thin, suspicious, and easily agitated. Pru later reveals that she can hardly stomach their marriage anymore as we slowly learn that Nelson has become a coke (and occasionally crack) addict, running the family ragged and running off by himself at night.
Shortly thereafter, Harry takes his granddaughter Judy out on the water for an afternoon of sunfishing, until a sudden breeze suddenly bursts forth and knocks over their vessel. After resurfacing in the waves, Harry starts to panic, fearing Judy has drowned just like his infant daughter at the end of the first book in the series Rabbit, Run. He finds her trapped under the sail and rescues her (though we later learn she may have been merely playfully teasing her grandfather through this traumatic experience).
“A puff comes from an unexpected direction, from the low pirate islands instead of directly offshore, and instead of the Sunfish settling at a fixed heel in a straight line at a narrow angle to the direction they have been moving in, it heels and it won’t stop heeling, it loses its grip on the water, on the blue air. The mast passes a certain point up under the sun and as unstoppably as if pushed by a giant malevolent hand topples sideways into the Gulf. Rabbit feels his big body together with Judy’s little lithe one pitch downward feet-first into the abyss of water, his fist still gripping the line in a panic and his shin scraped again, by an edge of Fiberglas. A murderous dense cold element encloses his head in an unbreathable dark green that clamps shut his mouth and eyes and then pales and releases him to air, to sun, and to the eerie silence of halted motion… But something feels odd, heart-suckingly wrong. Judy. Where is she? ‘Judy?’ he calls, his voice not his out here between horizons, nothing solid under him and waves slapping his face with teasing malice and the hull of the Sunfish resting towering on its edge casting a narrow shade and the striped sail spread flat on the water like a many-colored scum. ‘Judy!’ Now his voice belongs entirely to the hollow air, to the heights of terror; he shouts so loud he swallows water, his immersed body offering no platform for him to shout from; a bitter molten lead pours instead of breath into his throat and his heart’s pumping merges with the tugs and swellings of the sea. He coughs and coughs and his eyes take on tears. She is not here. There are only the dirty-green waves, kicking water, jade where the sun shines through, layered over bile” (152).
As a result of the accident, Harry struggles to breathe and suffers a heart attack for which he must undergo an angioplasty procedure (which is thoroughly described with almost medical precision). On one of his many trips to the hospital, his nurse looks strangely familiar to him. Of course, Harry cannot resist commenting on her physique: “a bit overweight but it’s packed on firm.” As it turns out, she is Annabelle Byer LPN, the presumed daughter he had with the “plump” prostitute Ruth all those years ago. Ruth never directly admitted his paternity, though as Annabelle talks to Harry, she blushes coyly, as if she possesses secret knowledge that Harry is secretly her father. She tries to convince Harry to speak with her mother Ruth again. But he never does. Their final interaction remains Harry’s visit out to Ruth’s farm (which she has since sold) at the end of Rabbit is Rich.
“Even if this girl is his daughter, it’s an old story, going on and on, like a radio nobody’s listening to” (320).
The novel ventures back northward as Harry and Janice return to Pennsylvania. Here, it becomes clear that Nelson is out of control, abusive toward his family, snorting cocaine and smoking crack on the side, having sex and sharing needles with “cheap coke whores,” and going into debt to pay for his addiction. Harry begins receiving odd phone calls from sinister drug dealers threatening him and demanding money. Then Janice discovers Nelson has been stealing money from Springer Motors and encouraging clients to write him personal checks in exchange for discount vehicles. He has also been giving money to his co-worker and accomplice Lyle, a gay man who is dying of AIDS. This leads Harry to wonder if Nelson might be a “queer” and Pru seems to suggest as much, though it is never explicitly confirmed.
At any rate, Janice takes control of the situation and whisks her son off to a rehabilitation program, while at the same time she decides to get herself a job, earning her real estate license. But, of course, while she is away during the evening Harry returns home from the hospital, Harry and his daughter-in-law stay up late together, bemoaning their lives, before suddenly hopping into bed and shockingly having sex:
“Her hand has come to rest on his bare chest, where the button is unbuttoned. He pictures her hands with their pink-knuckled vulnerable raw look. She is left-handed, he remembers. The oddity of this excited him further. Not waiting too long to think about it, he with his free hand lifts hers from his chest and places it lower, where an erection has surprisingly sprouted from his half-shaved groin. His gesture has the pre-sexual quality of one child sharing with another an interesting discovery –a stone that moves, or a remarkably thick-bodied butterfly. The eyes widen in the dim face inches from his on the pillow. Tiny points of light are caught in her lashes. He lets his face drift, on the tide of blood risen within him, across those inches to set their mouths together, carefully testing for the angle, while her fingers caress him in a rhythm slower than that of his thudding heart, his accomplice in sin. Their kiss tastes to him to him of the fish she so nicely prepared, its lemon and chives, and of asparagus” (397-398).
Indeed, unsurprisingly there is quite a bit of outrageous and grotesque behavior by Harry in this novel. As this racist curmudgeonly dirty old man reconnects with people from his past, such as Charlie Stavros (who once had an extended with Harry’s wife), Harry also revisits his on-and-off fling with Thelma “Thel” (who is married to his arch-nemesis Ronnie). Consider the following vomit-inducing passage of Harry’s inner monologue when an ailing Thelma stops by the hospital to see him:
“He [Harry] may imagine it, but Thelma’s pale cool departing face, swiftly pressed against his, their lips meeting a bit askew, gives off a faint far tang of urine. When he is alone in his room again he remembers how sometimes when he kissed Thelma goodbye at her house her mouth would be flavored by the sour-milk taste of his prick, the cheesy smegma-secreted beneath his foreskin. She would be still all soft and blurred by their lovemaking and unaware, and he would try to conceal his revulsion, a revulsion at his own smell on her lips” (354).
Thelma later succumbs to her ailment (lupus) in the final section of the book and at her funeral Rabbit falls into a bitter, heated argument with her widower Ronnie when he expresses ambivalence over loss but casually remarks “she was a fantastic lay” –a reminder that Harry seems to know no limit to his classlessness and lechery. As another example, consider the following early passage of Harry pondering whether or not to purchase a porn rag in the airport while picking up his family members: “He pauses to glance at the magazines on the rack. The top row holds the skin mags, sealed in plastic, pieces of printed paper hiding details of the open-mouthed girls, open-mouthed as if perpetually astonished by their own tangible assets, Hustler, Gallery, Club, Penthouse, Oui, Live, Fox. He imagines himself buying one, braving the Haitian woman’s disapproval [the cashier] –all these Caribbean types are evangelical fundamentalists, tin-roofed churches where they shout for the world to end now—and sneaking the magazine home while Janice is asleep or cooking or out with one of her groups studying to satiety the spread shots and pink labia and boosted tits and buttocks tipped up from behind so the shaved cunt shows, with its sad little anatomy like some oyster, and sadly foreseeing that he will not be enough aroused, boredom will become his main feeling, and embarrassment at the expenditure. Four dollars twenty-five they are asking these days, promising Sexy Sirens in the Sauna and Cara Lott Gets Hot, and Oral Sex: A Gourmet’s Guide. How disgusting we are, when you think about it –disposable meat, but hell-bent on gratification” (20-21).
Anyway, Rabbit at Rest comes to a close as Nelson returns home from rehabilitation having been pumped full of an insufferable newfound religious perspective, he now claims to answer to a “higher power” and so on. When Toyota threatens criminal action against the Angstroms if Springer Motors does not pay Nelson’s drug debt by the end of August, Nelson comes up with newfangled ideas for kickstarting sales (including selling Yamaha products, like motorcycles, ATVs, and jet skis, he also suggests turning the lot into a drug treatment facility) but ultimately these never materialize and the family is forced to take out a private loan to pay back Toyota. Then, with Nelson and Pru deciding to repair their marriage and contemplating having a third child, Pru tells Janice and Nelson about the night she slept with her father-in-law Harry, a confession which understandably horrifies and angers the family. Janice confronts Harry over the phone, in tears repeating a refrain that this is the worst thing he’s ever done (which is quite a statement).
Mirroring Harry’s earlier act of rebellion in Rabbit, Run, instead of apologizing to his family and making amends, he abruptly hops into his car and flees southward to his condo in Florida, claiming he felt too “claustrophobic.” As always, he runs from his problems. In these lengthy descriptive passages, the novel transforms into a rich travelogue of the American countryside as Harry crosses state lines, stopping to sleep in motels where he never fails to remind us of his nastiness: “the trouble with these softcore porn movies on hotel circuits, in case some four-year-old with lawyers for parents happens to hit the right buttons they show tits and ass and even some pubic hair but no real cunt and no pricks, no pricks hard or soft at all. It’s very frustrating. It turns out pricks are what we care about, you have to see them maybe we’re all queer… In bed at last in the dark he jerks off picturing himself with a pair of coffee-colored hookers from old Fayetteville, to show himself he’s still alive” (515).
Once he arrives in Florida, there are no phone calls from his wife and so Harry mills around town playing golf and watching The Cosby Show and Cheers for a string of days. Eventually, Nelson calls him to say that Janice wants to sell the Penn Park house in order to pay off the lingering business debt, but she needs Harry’s signature. Naturally, Harry refuses to acquiesce, leaving his family in the lurch. One day, he finds a basketball court and plays an informal pickup game with a group of kids (hearkening back to his glory days in high school) but he soon grows short of breath and suffers another massive heart attack before being rushed to the hospital. The stopping of his heart is compared to the barely-beating heart of America. When his family arrives, Janice tries to utter an empty little prayer for him, and Harry tries to tell Nelson that the young man has a sister out there (Annabelle) but Harry cannot muster the strength. He perhaps somewhat imaginatively ends his life with:
“‘Well, Nelson,’ he says, ‘all I can tell you is, it isn’t so bad.’ Rabbit thinks he should maybe say more, the kids look wildly expectant, but enough. Maybe. Enough” (590).
Thus ends the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a misanthropic, debauched caricature of the American middle class whose story spans four decades – the 1950s (Rabbit, Run), the 1960s (Rabbit Redux), the 1970s (Rabbit is Rich), and the 1980s (Rabbit at Rest). Amusingly, I picked up on a funny little inside joke in Rabbit at Rest when Harry spots an advertisement in the Sarasota paper for “Circus Redux” and he says “he hates that word, you see it everywhere, and he doesn’t know how to pronounce it” (57) –a nice little nod to the often-confused pronunciation of the second book in the series Rabbit Redux (which Updike pronounced as “ray-ducks”).
If you can overlook the sheer disgust of reading hundreds of pages about a lewd old man lusting after his own daughter-in-law (and eventually consummating that unholy desire), Rabbit at Rest does provide dense sections to display Updike’s lush, abundant prose coupled with little pearls of vivid commentary on late 20th century American culture. In one instance Harry plays the role of Uncle Sam in a Fourth of July parade and in another particularly memorable passage, as Harry goes to meet with Mr. Shimada of the Toyota Company to essentially beg forgiveness for Nelson’s cocaine debt incurred against the business, Mr. Shimada rejects his pleas and expresses dislike over the outrageous chaos, dysfunction, and excessive freedom and disorder he sees everywhere in the United States. Perhaps there is no greater representative of this cultural disarray than the character of Rabbit Angstrom.
While I very much appreciate Updike’s mastery of English prose, I, for one, am only all-too delighted to set this book aside, hoping never again to return to the parodic, indulgent, joyless world of Rabbit Angstrom. I’m sure a graduate-level seminar would improve my overall understanding and praise for this series, but then again, if only a year of cloistered academic study will yield the true hidden fruits of a novel, is it still even worthwhile? Writing in The New York Times in 1990, Joyce Carol Oates offered a fond reflection of Rabbit Angstrom, warts and all: “‘Rabbit at Rest’ is certainly the most brooding, the most demanding, the most concentrated of John Updike’s longer novels. Its courageous theme – the blossoming and fruition of the seed of death we all carry inside us – is struck in the first sentence, as Harry Angstrom, Rabbit, now 55 years old, more than 40 pounds overweight, waits for the plane that is bringing his son, Nelson, and Nelson’s family to visit him and his wife in their semiretirement in Florida: he senses that it is his own death arriving, ‘shaped vaguely like an airplane’… The Rabbit novels, for all their grittiness, constitute John Updike’s surpassingly eloquent valentine to his country, as viewed from the unique perspective of a corner of Pennsylvania.”
Equally worthy is James Wood’s review of Rabbit at Rest published in The Guardian in 1990 in which he likens Harry Angstrom to a “beast” – “Floating in a nimbus of greed and deceit, Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is America’s cloudy barometer (the needle always pointing to bad) and John Updike its lofty rain-maker, deluging his hero and his country in a shower of words. This disjunction Updike and Rabbit at their different work has always been one of the satisfactions of the Rabbit series: Harry, with his vulgarity, his crude simplicities, his clumsy yearning, placed and propelled by Updike’s rich prose, its elastic brilliance. Rabbit is the swine before which Updike casts his pearls: beauty and the beast… The Rabbit series has become something of a joke, an enterprise that teeters (deliberately) on the edge of parody. It is a kind of jokey balancing act: to what extent can the writer meet America on its own terms the food, the Toyota garage, the soap opera triviality of it and still produce art? Is it possible to turn the trivial into something significant, and still leave the triviality untouched, naked and for all to see? Updike’s Rabbit books aim for the unremarkable density of film, and yet a film with Updike’s gorgeous verbal wrappings, the miraculous openings of his prose.”
Notable Quotations
“Rabbit basks above that old remembered world, rich, at rest” –Rabbit is Rich (epigraph).
“Food to the indolent is poison, not sustenance” –Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (epigraph).
“Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what’s floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane. The sensation chills him, above and beyond the terminal air-conditioning. But, then, facing Nelson has made him feel uneasy for thirty years” (3).
“He touches Janice at his side, the sweated white cotton of her tennis dress at the waist, to relieve his sudden sense of doom. Her waist is thicker, has less of a dip, as she grows into that barrel body of women in late middle age, their legs getting skinny, their arms getting loose like cooked chicken coming off the bone. She wears over the sweaty tennis an open-weave yellow cardigan hung unbuttoned over her shoulders against the chill of airport air-conditioning. He is innocently proud that she looks, in her dress and tan, even to the rings of pallor that sunglasses have left around her eyes, like these other American grandmothers who can afford to be here in this land of constant sunshine and eternal youth” (4-5).
“And he has never forgot how, thirty years ago it will be this June, his baby daughter Rebecca June drowned and when he went back to the apartment alone there was still this tubful of tepid gray water that had killed her. God hadn’t pulled the plug. It would have been so easy for Him, Who set the stars in place. To have it unhappen” (11).
“Actually Nelson has, unwittingly or not, a sore point, for Harry and Janice did have two children. Their dead child lives on with them as a silent glue of guilt and shame, an inexpungable sourness at the bottom of things. And Rabbit suspects himself of having an illegitimate daughter, three years younger than Nelson, by a woman called Ruth, who wouldn’t admit it last time Harry saw her” (31).
“Where these towers arise had once been nothing but sand and mangrove swamp and snaky tidal inlets slipping among the nets of roots and dimpling where an alligator or a water moccasin glided; and then a scattering of white-painted houses and unpainted shacks in feeble imitation of the South to the north, scratching out some cotton and grazing some cattle on the sandy soil, sending north shuffling herds of beef on the hoof to the starving rebel troops in the Civil War; and then houses closer together, some of brick and wrought iron and of limestone and granite barged in from Alabama quarries. Then, in the era after Reconstruction, to this appendage of the South came the railroads and the rich and the sick and the hopeful misfits, this being frontier in an unexpected direction. Busts followed booms; optimism kept washing in. Now, with the jets and Social Security and the national sunworship, they can’t built onto it fast enough, this city called Deleon, named after some Spanish explorer killed for all his shining black breastplate by the poisoned arrow of a Seminole in 1521 near here or a place like it, and pronounced Deelyun by the locals, as if they are offering to deal you in. The past glimmers like a dream at the back of Harry’s mind as he awakes; in his semiretirement he has taken to reading history” (50).
“Anyway he basically had but the one child, Nelson, one lousy child, though he was reading somewhere the other day that a human male produces enough sperm to populate not just the planet Earth but Mars and Venus as well, if they could support life. It’s a depressing thought, too planetary, like the unreachable round object in his dream, that the whole point of his earthly existence has been to produce little Nellie Angstrom, so he in turn could produce Judy and Roy, and so on until the sun burns out” (54-55).
“There is something hot and disastrous about Nelson and Pru that scares the rest of them. Young couples give off this heat; they’re still at the heart of the world’s business, making babies. Old couples like him and Janice give off the musty smell of dead flower stalk, rotting in the vase” (116).
“The way I figure, if one thing doesn’t kill you, another will” (131).
“His collapse twenty-six hours ago did have its blissful aspect: his sense, beginning as he lay helpless and jellyfishlike under a sky of red, of being in the hands of others, of being the blind, pained, focal point of a world of concern and expertise, at some depth was a coming back home, after a life of ill-advised journeying. Sinking, he perceived the world around him as gaseous and rising, the grave and affectionate faces of paramedics and doctors and nurses released by his emergency like a cloud of holiday balloons” (187).
“Brewer was his boyhood city, the only city he knew. It still excites him to be among its plain flowerpot-colored blocks, its brick factories and row housing and great grim churches all mixed together, everything heavy and solid and built with an outmoded decorative zeal. The all but abandoned downtown, wide Weiser Street which he can remember lit up and as crowded as a fairgrounds in Christmas season, has become a patchwork of rubble and parking lots and a few new glass-skinned buildings, stabs at renewal mostly occupied by banks and government agencies, the stores refusing to come back in from the malls on Brewer’s outskirts” (212).
“We’re turning into mad dogs –the human race is one big swamp of viruses” (213).
“He wakes around six with a little start and ever since his heart attack there is a gnawing in his stomach whose cause he can’t locate until he realizes it is the terror of being trapped inside his perishing body, like being in a prison cell with a madman who might decide to kill him at any moment” (256).
“‘I have no use for him any more. I’m scared to fuck him, I’m scared to be legally associated with him. I’ve wasted my life. You don’t know what it’s like. You’re a man, you’re free, you can do what you want in life, until you’re sixty at least you’re a buyer. A woman’s a seller. She has to be. And she better not haggle too long. I’m thirty-three. I’ve had my shot, Harry. I wasted it on Nelson. I had my little hand of cards and played them and now I’m folded, I’m through. My husband hates me and I hate him and we don’t even have any money to split up! I’m scared –so scared. And my kids are scared, too. I’m trash and they’re trash and they know it’” (395-396, Pru explaining to Harry the situation of her failing marriage).
“The whole town he knew has been swallowed up, by the decades, but another has taken its place, younger, more naked, less fearful, better. And it still loves him, as it did when he would score forty-two points for them in a single home game. He is a legend, a walking cloud. Inside him a droplet of explosive has opened his veins like flower petals uncurling in the sun. His eyes are burning with sweat or something allergic… Harry’s eyes burn and the impression giddily –as if he has been lifted up to survey all human history—grows upon him, making his heart thump worse and worse, that all in all this is the happiest fucking country the world has ever seen” (426).
“One thing he knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing he’d give back is the fucking…” (542).
The 1991 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The three-person Fiction jury consisted of the following members, including two previous winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction:
- Chair: Richard Eder (1932-2014) was an American film reviewer and a drama critic who spent nearly three decades working for The New York Times in various jobs, including as foreign correspondent in Latin America, film reviewer, and the drama critic. In later life, he was a book critic for The Los Angeles Times, winning a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and the National Book Critics Circle annual citation for an entry consisting of reviews of John Updike’s Roger’s Version, Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, and Robert Stone’s Children of Light. He died in 2014 at the age of 82 of pneumonia as a result of post-polio syndrome (a childhood disease he contracted before the advent of the polio vaccine).
- N. Scott Momaday (1934-2024) was the first Native American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969 for House Made of Dawn. He also previously served on the Pulitzer fiction jury in 1986 when Lonesome Dove won and 1982 when John Updike won his first Pulitzer for Rabbit is Rich. Click here for my brief biography on N. Scott Momaday.
- Anne Tyler (1941-present) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1989 for her novel Breathing Lessons. She was also a runner-up in 1986 for her novel The Accidental Tourist, and in 1983 for her novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Additionally, her novel Earthly Possessions was mentioned in the jury report in 1978. She previously served on the fiction in 1985 when Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie won. Click here for my brief biography on Anne Tyler.
Per the jury report, which was sent to administrator Robert C. Christopher in December 1990, the jury elevated three choices for the prize without making a top preference known, and presumably the board made the final selection of Rabbit at Rest.
The three choices were: Mean Spirits by Linda Hogan, a “novel about an Indian community overwhelmed and exploited after oil was struck on their Oklahoma lands in the 1920s is an equation of tragedy and truth on the one hand, hop and endurance on the other –that most universal of tensions in literature”; The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien “these stories are pieces in a mosaic that it has taken O’Brien –25 years after the Vietnam War—to assemble. The wait has been worth it”; and Rabbit At Rest by John Updike “Aware that the previous ‘Rabbit’ was given a Pulitzer, the jury would not recommend this one if it did not feel that it has gone far beyond the others and provided a climactic finish to the four-volume life history of a particular class and generation of Americans. It represents the work of an artist who has arrived at the very peak of his powers. It is not just beautifully written; it is complicated and sad and unsparing, in ways that only the most seasoned could have managed” [note that the jury report was not particularly well-written this year].
Upon the announcement of John Updike’s second Pulitzer Prize, The New York Times telephoned him at his home in Beverly, Massachusetts. Updike apparently remarked: “It’s a great surprise. I didn’t expect to get it two times for a ‘Rabbit’ book. If I were one of the judges, I’m not sure I would have done that.” At the time, there were only two other two-time winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner. More recently Colson Whitehead has also become a two-time winner.
Who is John Updike?
I typically include a brief biography of the author in each of my Pulitzer Prize reviews, however since John Updike previously won the Pulitzer for Rabbit is Rich in 1982, click here to read my brief biography.
Film Adaptations
- None, though there was a 1970 film adaptation of Rabbit, Run directed by Jack Smight and starring James Caan.
Further Reading
- The complete Rabbit Angstrom series:
- Rabbit, Run (1960)
- Rabbit Redux (1971)
- Rabbit Is Rich (1981)
- Rabbit at Rest (1990)
- Rabbit Remembered (2001), a novella
- Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1962), an early short story collection
- The Centaur (1963), a novel which won the National Book Award
- Collected Poems: 1953-1993 (1993), poetry collection
- Updike (2014) by Adam Begley – a biography of John Updike
Literary Context 1990-1991
- 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature: was awarded to the Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz (1914–1998) “for impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity.” To date, he is the only recipient from Mexico.
- 1990 National Book Award Winner: Middle Passage by Charles Johnson
- 1990 Booker Prize Winner: Possession: A Romance by A. S. Byatt
- Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1990 was The Plains of Passage by Jean M. Auel. Other notable bestsellers include: Four Past Midnight by Stephen King, The Bourne Ultimatum by Robert Ludlum, and The Stand by Stephen King.
- 1990 was the year J.K. Rowling first developed the idea for Harry Potter while on a train from Manchester to London. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was later completed in 1995 and published in 1997.
- Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks was published.
- Heads and Queen of Angels by Greg Bear was published.
- A Graveyard for Lunatics by Ray Bradbury was published.
- Possession by A.S. Byatt was published.
- Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy was published.
- Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton was published.
- L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy was published.
- The Sandman: The Doll’s House (volume 2 of “The Sandman” series) by Neil Gaiman was published.
- Brokenclaw by John Gardner was published.
- Middle Passage by Charles Johnson was published.
- The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan was published.
- Four Past Midnight and The Stand by Stephen King were published (the latter being the “The Complete & Uncut Edition”).
- The Bourne Ultimatum by Robert Ludlum was published.
- The Innocent by Ian McEwan was published.
- Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s graphic novel V for Vendetta was published.
- The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien was published.
- The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk was published.
- Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland was published.
- Kurt Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
It should come as no surprise that I found the Rabbit Angstrom quadrilogy to be a self-indulgent, distasteful series wrapped in bouts of shimmering, ornate prose, but ultimately containing little deeper meaning. In my view, this series will likely continue to decline in popularity and influence as time goes by. It continues to baffle me as to how scholars and critics of the late 20th century found John Updike to be worthy of not one, but two Pulitzer Prizes. If it were up to me, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1990 would have very likely gone to The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien instead.
Updike, John. Rabbit At Rest. Random House Trade Paperbacks, New York, New York, 1990.