wealthy. Father-son conflicts are heightened as Nelson becomes a cocaine addict
and then experiences a religious conversion. Rabbit also spends a great deal of
time trying to find out whether Ruth gave birth to a child by him. The novel ends
with Rabbit’s newborn granddaughter, Judy, being placed in his arms, replacing
the real daughter lost in Rabbit, Run and the symbolic one lost in Rabbit Redux.
Family issues, economics and class, and consumerism have been major topics in
the criticism on the third novel. As Rabbit at Rest begins, the news reports the
bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on 21 December 1988,
ushering in a new awareness of terrorism in American consciousness and casting a
shadow of looming death over the novel. Continuing to experience conflicts with
Nelson, whose irresponsibility and cocaine addiction are destroying the Toyota
dealership Janice has handed over to him, Rabbit commits perhaps the ultimate
betrayal of his family and his relationships to daughter figures by sleeping with
his daughter-in-law. Kerry Ahearn’s “Family and Adultery: Images and Ideas in
Updike’s Rabbit Novels” (1988) was published before the appearance of Rabbit
at Rest, but students might adopt its analytic strategies to examine these family
dynamics in the final novel.
In addition to a plethora of articles, students will find not only a great number
of books of literary criticism of Updike’s works in general but also at least nine book-
length studies devoted to the Rabbit novels. The thirty-four essays and reviews in
Jack De Bellis’s John Updike: The Critical Responses to the “Rabbit” Saga (2005) offer
a historical overview of the reception of the Rabbit novels and an invaluable guide
to the major critical debates about them; it will help students to focus on a topic
and to narrow down the resources to consult. The essays in Lawrence R. Broer’s
Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike’s Rabbit Novels (1998) will provide
a similar entrée to the novels. Marshall Boswell’s John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy:
Mastered Irony in Motion (2001) is a good starting place for its close readings of the
novels and for its accessible explication of Updike’s religious vision, which Boswell
describes as “a complex matrix of ethical precepts, theological beliefs, and aesthetic
principles that governs nearly all of his literary output.” The New York Times main-
tains a website with links to essays by Updike, reviews of his works, transcripts of
interviews, and audio clips at http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/06/lifetimes/
updike.html?_r=1; free registration is required [accessed 4 March 2010].
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH
- Rabbit, Run begins with Rabbit joining a pickup basketball game on his way
home from work; the penultimate scene of Rabbit at Rest has Rabbit winning
a game of twenty-one against a black youth he encounters while walking the
streets of his Florida retirement town, but his victory results in a fatal heart
attack. In all of the novels Rabbit remembers scenes from his glory days as a
high-school basketball star. He learns to play golf in the first novel and plays the
game in each of the others. Students could explore the role of sports in any or all
of the novels, particularly as it relates to the idea of the American dream. Jack B.
Moore’s “Sports, Basketball, and Fortunate Failure in the Rabbit Tetralogy” in
Broer’s Rabbit Tales provides a helpful starting place for this topic.