Rabbit at Rest is a 1990 novel by John Updike. It's the fourth and final novel in his series about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, first introduced in Rabbit, Run in 1960.
The story opens in late 1988. Harry, now in his mid-50s, is semi-retired, having left the family Toyota dealership to his son Nelson to run, while Harry and his wife Janice now spend their winters in Florida. Harry is bored, discontented with the life of a Florida retiree. He is also preoccupied with mortality, after suffering a heart attack while he was out sailing with his granddaughter Judy.
When Harry and Janice return to Pennsylvania for the summer, they find the family in crisis. Nelson has an out-of-control addiction to cocaine, and has been embezzling funds from the dealership in order to feed his habit. Harry and Janice have to put him in a rehab facility. Meanwhile, Harry has to go in for an angioplasty after his heart attack. In the hospital he meets a nurse, Annabelle, who may be his illegitimate daughter by his old girlfriend Ruth.
Although this was the last book in the "Rabbit" series proper, Updike later wrote a novella called "Rabbit, Remembered", which appeared in short story collection Licks of Love, and carried on the story of the rest of the Angstrom clan ten years later.
Tropes:
- Alliterative Title: An alliterative title using the letter R, a habit John Updike used with every novel in his "Rabbit" series.
- All Take and No Give: Harry, or at least he's accused of this by Thelma's husband Ronnie. Harry and Thelma had an affair for years, and Ronnie says that what really bothers him was not that Harry was bonking his wife, but that Thelma loved Harry and he didn't really care about her outside of the sex. A defiant Harry says that Thelma was "a fantastic lay."
- Bookends:
- For the whole Rabbit Angstrom series. At the beginning of the first novel, Rabbit, Run, Harry impulsively joins a pickup basketball game. Near the end of this novel, Harry plays another pickup basketball game, suffers a heart attack, and dies.
- Within this novel, at the beginning Harry is preoccupied with Pan Am Flight 103, a plane blown up by a terrorist bomb. At the end he's reading about UTA Flight 772, another plane blown up by a terrorist bomb.
- The Cassandra: Harry's Florida doctor tells him that angioplasty won't cut it, that it's only a temporary fix and that he needs a coronary bypass. Harry refuses to get the scary bypass surgery, and as a consequences has another heart attack and dies.
- Cigarette of Anxiety: The tension of confronting Nelson about his coke habit leads Janice to bum a cigarette off him."You don't smoke,", he tells her.
"I don't, except when I'm around you and your wife." - Death of a Child: In the backstory. Harry continues to be haunted by the death of his infant daughter Rebecca, decades ago. When he manages to save his granddaughter Judy from drowning despite suffering a heart attack, he's reminded of that loss.
- Double-Meaning Title: The first part of the book, Harry's unsatisfactory life as a Florida semi-retiree, is titled "FL". Part II, where he comes back home to Pennsylvania to straighten out Nelson, is titled "PA". Part III is titled "MI". Does he go to Michigan? No, "MI" stands for myocardial infarction—heart attack. Harry has another heart attack and dies.
- Dreaming of Things to Come: On the night before his fatal heart attack, Harry dreams of his little grandson Roy as a grown man, tall and handsome.
- Drugs Are Bad: Nelson has a cocaine addiction which causes him to embezzle large sums from the family Toyota dealership and, in one scene, leads to Nelson hitting his wife. After that he goes to rehab.
- Foreshadowing: The very first sentence of the book has Harry, waiting for Nelson and his family to arrive at the airport, get a feeling like he is waiting for his own death. At the end of the novel, he does in fact die.
- Gaussian Girl: Discussed Trope. As his granddaughter flips channels on the TV, Harry sees Greer Garson "looking gently out of focus in black and white."
- Intro Dump: Nelson, Nelson's wife Pru, and their children Judy and Roy are all introduced in the same paragraph at the beginning of the book, when Harry and Janice meet them at the airport.
- Japanese Ranguage: A little bit of unalloyed racism in a 1990 novel, as Mr. Shimada, the Toyota exec who comes to the dealership, says stuff like "froor pran" (floor plan) and addresses Elvira the saleswoman as "Rovely rady!".
- Japan Takes Over the World:
- This book is firmly marked as a product of the '80s when Nelson muses of the Japanese, "Ten more years and they'll have bought the whole country."
- The theme is further brought home when Mr. Shimada from Toyota comes in the wake of Nelson's Stealing from the Till coming to light. He basically says that Americans have gotten fat and lazy and the Japanese are outcompeting them, and that Toyota is pulling its dealership from Springer Motors.
- Limited Animation: Discussed Trope, in the context of crappy animation of 1989 Saturday morning cartoons. Roy watches cartoon superheroes "who move just one body art at a time and talk only with their lower lips."
- Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Harry thinks it highly likely that Annabelle Byer is his daughter. He can't quite work up the nerve to tell her.
- Present Tense Narrative: The entire novel is told in the present tense.
- Romantic Rain: "Rain whips at the screen" when Harry finally winds up having sex with his daughter-in-law Pru, the woman he's been lusting for the whole book. There's even a "crack and splintering of thunder" as Pru pulls off her nightie and jumps into bed.
- Shout-Out: Many; there are a lot of references to late-80s pop culture. Harry hates Roseanne, and Janice likes Unsolved Mysteries.
- Stealing from the Till: The Toyota dealership is in the red because Nelson has been stealing huge amounts of money to feed his cocaine habit.
- A Storm Is Coming: Near the end, as Harry is alone in the condo in Florida, his neighbor says "Terrible thing...the thing coming." She is talking about Hurricane Hugo, then bearing down on the southeast US, but of course the exchange is symbolic of Harry's death at the end of the novel.
- Switching P.O.V.: Most of the book is told from Harry's POV but occasionally the narrative switches to Janice, like in the scene where Janice confronts Nelson about his cocaine addiction.
- Tragic AIDS Story: Subverted with Lyle, the accountant at the Toyota dealership, who has AIDS and isn't doing very well. Not only is Lyle an obnoxious a-hole, he's also helping Nelson to embezzle from the dealership. When Harry sends his lawyers after Lyle, Lyle says he's dying and blows them off.
