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Summary: Rabbit Angstrom And The 1960's
Review: I did not expect to expect to read, much less like "Rabbit Redux," Updike's first sequel to "Rabbit Run." I read the first book about 20 years ago and found it mundane and uninteresting. I felt that the only future that Rabbit had was as a Readers Digest entry. Then the next 2 sequels each won a number of literary prizes. About a year ago I purchased at Strand Book Store in NYC a large, paper-bound edition containing the first 3 Rabbit books. I started to read the "Rabbit Redux" section, but decided to put the volume down after the book's binding ripped (and later split in two). After reading and loving Updike's "Bech: A Book," I decided to purchase two used, hard-bound editions of "Rabbit Redux" and "Rabbit Is Rich."I have just finished reading "Rabbit Redux" and was not only pleasantly suprised, but was greatly moved. The book takes place in 1969. We find Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom sharing many of the views of "the silent majority": he supports the Vietnam War, believes in monogamy, is against hippies, drug use, and is suspicious and mistrustful of "Negroes" (he cannot accept the term "black" which comes into common usage in the late "60s.). However, after his wife leaves him for another man, and after an 18 year old female runaway and then her black miltant friend move in with Rabbit, the 1960's literally come "crashing down" on Rabbit Angstrom. I won't say that Rabbit becomes radicalized, but he is changed forever. I found the book moving, disturbing, and in many ways quite touching. By the time I finished the last page of "Rabbit Redux," I actually found myself liking this new, more mature Rabbit Angstrom very much.
Rating: 
Summary: Sort of not bad
Review: I don't know. I guess it's okay. Rabbit Run is better. The Centaur is much better. Updike sure seems full of love. Not so full of ideas. I don't know what the big deal about him is.
Rating:
Summary: Rabbit Redux is no Rabbit, Run.
Review: I don't see why this book was a national bestseller. Rabbit, Run was a fascinating read, and that is why I felt compelled to read this book. However, I felt it was simply more of the same. Harry is confused, Janice is confused, and everyone else is unhappy. Rabbit Redux is a sad, sad book. How far can Rabbit sink? At first, I thought this book was about how he takes control of his life and refuses to be bullied anymore, but when I got to the end, I realized that he is simply a weak man, with no mind of his own. He cannot think for himself and can only go by what he has heard or seen from commentators on the news. He has been brought up to be close-minded, to think that war is good and that other races are bad. But once he lets a black semi-revolutionary named Skeeter into his life, he starts to change his way of thinking. Ordinarily, this would be good. However, in this situation, Rabbit has no grip on why he thinks the way that he does, and can only combat Skeeter's words with the weakest of arguments. By the end of Skeeter's involvement in the book, the reader is not sure whether Rabbit really believes in what Skeeter says, or if he just doesn't know what he himself thinks anymore. The author goes a bit overboard with Skeeter's constant rantings against the whiteman, for whom he blames all of his troubles. The pages devoted to the black-white debate dragged on far too long to be of any meaningful impact, and could easily have been condensed. Finally, the development of the characters was a bit disappointing. None of their situations was ever brought to any sort of resolution. Mom and Pop Angstrom are left with their drab lives. Sister Mim continues on with her life as the easiest woman in California, after never fulfilling her dream of being an actress. Janice's lover, Charlie Stavros, is merely used as an excuse for Rabbit and Janice to break up and get back together again. Skeeter and Jill could easily have been developed more fully, but instead were exploited for their sexual curiosities and sicknesses, when they could have been used to give Rabbit a backbone and level-headed conviction through their thoughts and ways of acting, even though both are abhorringly disgusting at times. As stated earlier, Rabbit and Janice are just sad. You want to hate them, but in the end, you just pity them. They are the same losers they were in the first book. The only character with some potential is Nelson. Mocked by his grandmother, he has a good heart and is mature enough to take in all that has happened around him without snapping. Updike is still a master wordsmith in my view. His descriptive way of looking at even the simplest of things is unparalleled. He will amaze through mere words. That is why I read his books. But an objective reader would not say that this is a dazzling or brilliant portrait of Middle America, as one of the reviewers on the back cover suggested. Rabbit's average views may be that of Middle America's directionless and automaton-like Everyman, but the situations raised in the book are symptomatic of restless strife and rebellion against the hum-drum existence of everyday living. Then why do I read Updike? Because he has a unique perspective on everything, which he is all too eager to share with readers willing to receive it.
Rating: 
Summary: Slightly less amazing part of an amazing series.
Review: I found Rabbit Redux to be the weakest book in the Rabbit tetrology, though by no means is it a weak book in and of itself. Rabbit Redux's plot takes a detour in the middle and never quite gets back on track, though the writing itself is just as masterful as that of Rabbit, Run. Updike is good with beginnings. In Rabbit, Run, the reader was hooked by the description of Harry heading south from Brewer, Pennsylvania on his first ill-planned quest. In the sequel, the family's conversation with Charlie Stavros in the first part of the book is an excellent mix of sharp dialogue and witty description. We can quickly see how far (or, as it were, NOT far) Rabbit has come since the first book, and it's interesting to watch his wife Janice and son Nelson change along with him. Rabbit Redux introduces a host of supporting characters. Charlie Stavros tends to be the most believable and familiar (with enough quirks to make him stand out in Updike's landscape of idiosyncratic people). Jill and Skeeter, Rabbit and Nelson's two houseguests in the book's middle, are more stereotypical than I would have hoped. Updike seems to descend a little too far into social commentary in the middle of the book as Jill the Poor-Little-Rich-Girl Hippie and Skeeter the Mysterious Black Man exact their influence on both Rabbit and Nelson. Rabbit Redux feels most a part of the Rabbit series when the two aforementioned characters are no longer in the book.
Rating:
Summary: Rabit Redux or Rabbit Reguritated
Review: I found this a very depressing book. Harry is a middle aged man who hides from his wife, his child, his parents and himself. He escapes into an affair with a teenage girl bent on suicide and brings a young revolutionary African American into his house where some very dated explanations of race in America are trotted out. This was my first Updike book, it doesn't make me want to read another. I found none of the characters sympathetic.
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Summary: My favorite of the four
Review: I haven't met anyone else who has felt the same way, but this is my favorite of the four Rabbitt novels. I've heard complaints about the inauthenticity of filtering Updike's nuanced social and cultural observation through the "regular" Rabbitt Angstrom. I, however, like that contrivance. It creates an interesting tension and humor. And the story is the most provacative of the four books, which in turn made me more invested in the characters. The writing was on par with the final two (the first one I think pales in comparison with the other three). The way Updike renders Rabbitt's growing suspcisions of Janice's affair with Stavros, for example, is very tender, some of my favorite Updike. I also like how the moon and ghost imagery was woven through the novel. Updike's prose style, however, makes everything he writes worthwhile. I love the last three novels, though. It's so wonderful to get to know these characters over thirty years. My favorites are Skeeter, Janice, Charlie Stavros, Nelson (esp. in the final two) and Melanie. For the person who wondered why should we care about these characters if they are losers, consider how important, at least among male writers (rebelling against the Hemingway code), the anti-hero was at the time - Invisible Man, Holden Caufield, Binx Boling, Portnoy and other Roth-like personas, Cheever's stories, Humbert Humbert, Herzog, Fred Exley. Oedipa Mass is even somewhat of an anti-hero, that is the hero of an "anti-detective novel."
Rating:
Summary: A Bit Better
Review: I think Rabbit Redux is a more accomplished book than Rabbit, Run, and a stronger novel. What looked new and experimental in Rabbit, Run (e.g. the present tense narration) seems in this novel more established - less self-conscious and posturing. The cast of characters also comes across as more solid. Rabbit's parents and his son, Nelson, are in particular well-realised - so that one gets a stronger sense here of Rabbit's role within a family than one did in the first novel. (Who, by the way, portrays adolescents as well as Updike?) And Rabbit Redux is also more of a social history than the more literary Rabbit, Run, faithfully reflecting the racial and political climate of 1960s America. I would read Rabbit, Run first, but I would certainly then recommend reading this one.
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Summary: True in '69, true in '99
Review: In this additon to the tale of Harry Angstrom, Updike confronts issues that are as true today as they were in Rabbit's 1969. Falling out of love, falling back in love, and losing that love are all timeless fears that the author brings into the reader's consciousness. I personally could empathise with Harry's frustration when the world he accidently thrust himself into in "Rabbit, Run" frays. Somehow, though, he seems to survive every new disaster--even if all he does is survive.
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Summary: A Review of John Updike's Rabbit Redux
Review: John Updike's novel, Rabbit Redux, ridicules the institution of marriage and mocks ideas of human morality. The book is an attempt to explain how one married couple -- Janice and the familiar Rabbit -- go through and finally overcome the experience of adultery. One would think, then, that this is a tale of happy endings, but, unfortunately, the attempt is a sad failure.
Rabbit and his wife Janice are the basic middle class parents of one son. (At least "middle class" in the 1970's in the eyes of Updike.)Rabbit is a factory worker and Janice is a part-time clerk at a car dealership. It is at this car dealership that she begins an affair with the son of the owner, an affair that is ultimately discovered by her husband. Janice's reasons for her affair are the typical one's heard; she is lonely,life is hard, marriage isn't "exciting" enough. The news, however, devestates Rabbit, and, after Janice leaves to live with her lover, Rabbit's life quickly deteriorates into immorality. We watch him take in a run-away girl, who is half his age as well as a criminal, who, since he happens to be black, is subject to racist threats from the small town. They experiment with drugs, wiyh no regard for the child that is stiil there.They all seem to "live for the moment." But one can forgive the indescetions in Rabbit Redux; one is, after all, waiting for the two main characters to realise their mistakes and "rekindle" their love, their marriage, their family. But multiple tragedies strike -- the house burns down(which seems fitting enough)and the run-away girl dies in the fire; Janice's lover decides he likes living the life of the "bachelor." (Indeed it is the life of the bachelor that looks best in this book.)It is when all of these occur that Rabbit and Janice are forced to talk together and make a decision to stay or not to stay married. If they had talked, apologised, told of their love for one another, one could buy Updike's final ending of "togetherness." There are no discussions of memories shared together in a once happier past. Indeed one wonders why the couple married in the first place since they both seem to think that the other is so displeasing in every sense. If Updike had put even one sentence about "staying together" for their child, or just because they were friends, the ending would be saved. Instead, we are left with the sense that Rabbit and Janice might just repeat their history again in the near future. There is a sense that this is acceptable part of being human; you live, you have sex when the mood strikes, and then you die. In Redux, this idea is a sad one, but one that must be accepted. For those who have a tragic outlook on marriage and life in general, Updike's novel will be a good, passionate, fast-paced read. But for those who want to believe in something better, that a couple can not merely "survive" an affair but truly overcome it as friends, Updike's novel is simply a dose of negativity, at least for this reader.
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Summary: RABBIT REDUX GAVE ME MIGRAINES!!!!!
Review: John Updike's Rabbit Redux was sadly dissapointing. Though it is fast paced and an often exciting read, it does not accurately portray "Middle America" as the book cover proclaims. Affairs, drugs, criminals, a runaway girl --this book has it all, except an ending that's believable. One comes away from this book with less faith in morality, and a sad outlook on the institution of marriage. Indeed the character "Rabbit" and his wife "Janice" never seem to rise above their stupidity, which,of course, is what we're waiting for them to do. I can forgive Updike since this was written in the '70's, but it's awful
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