Book Article

Rabbit's America

John Updike's ''Rabbit'' series -- Check out excerpts from ''Rabbit, Run,'' ''Rabbit Redux,'' ''Rabbit is Rich,'' and ''Rabbit at Rest''

Rabbit, Run (1960)
Growing sleepy, Rabbit stops before midnight at a roadside cafe for coffee. Somehow, though he can't put his finger on the difference, he is unlike the other customers...He had thought, he had read that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I'm outside, or is it all America?

Rabbit Redux (1971)
''I don't follow this racist rap. You can' t turn on television now without some black face spitting at you. Everybody from Richard Nixon down is sitting up nights trying to figure out how to make 'em all rich without putting 'em to the trouble of doing any work....They talk about genocide when they're the ones, the Negroes plus the rich kids, who want to put it all down...''

Rabbit Is Rich (1981)
For the first time since childhood Rabbit is happy, simply, to be alive...''I figure the oil's going to run out about the same time I do, the year two thousand. Seems funny to say it, but I'm glad I lived when I did. These kids coming up, they'll be living on table scraps. We had the meal.''

Rabbit At Rest (1990)
Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny feeling that what he 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.

Originally posted Apr 22, 2008 Published in issue #35 Oct 12, 1990 Order article reprints
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