Now with the release of Rabbit Is Rich (Knopf, 467 pp., $13.95), it is fair to say that Updike’s “Rabbit” books are forming an American saga. John Updike is our finest literary celebrant both of human ambiguity and human acceptance.Īt the beginning of this decade and each of the past two, John Updike has published a novel about Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, his prototypical American character who embodies the fears and hopes, the vices and virtues, of our age. The product of Updike’s natural religion is his conviction that God is discovered, if at all, in the irresolvable dialectic of human existence. Current articles and subscription information can be found at This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.

Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation and used by permission. This article appeared in the Christian Century January 20, 1982, p. Wood’s most recent book is The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists (Notre Dame). This Rabbit Angstrom volume is composed of the following novels: Rabbit, Run Rabbit Redux Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest.Ralph C. He has given us our representative American story. In prose that is one of the glories of contemporary literature, Updike has chronicled the frustrations and ambiguous triumphs, the longuers, the loves and frenzies, the betrayals and reconciliations of our era. Updike revisited his hero toward the end of each of the following decades in the second half of this American century and in each of the subsequent novels, as Rabbit, his wife, Janice, his son, Nelson, and the people around them grow, these characters take on the lineaments of our common existence. Athleticism of a different sort is on display throughout these four magnificent novels-the athleticism of an imagination possessed of the ability to lay bare, with a seemingly effortless animal grace, the enchantments and disenchantments of life. When we first met him in Rabbit, Run (1960), the book that established John Updike as a major novelist, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom is playing basketball with some boys in an alley in Pennsylvania during the tail end of the Eisenhower era, reliving for a moment his past as a star high school athlete.

John updike rabbit redux