Rabbit At Rest

July 29, 1991
Harry ``Rabbit'' Angstrom, morbidly depressed, overweight and living with wife Janice in a Florida retirement community, recovers from a heart attack and is led astray by his libido one last time. ``Updike is razor-sharp and mordantly funny,'' said PW. ``If this novel is in some respects an elegy to Rabbit's bewildered existence, it is also a poignant, humorous, instructive guidebook to the aborted American dream.'' The book took a Pulitzer Prize.

Few novels are more suited to the listening experience than those of the late John Updike, whose gifts as a storyteller were unsurpassed. Arthur Morey narrates the fourth and final volume of Updike's novels about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom with an almost-incantatory style that perfectly suits the large canvas of its setting--America in 1989. Morey's nuanced reading makes Rabbit real--vulnerable yet hopeful. The story fixes a time in our history through the eyes of a flawed but memorable character whose indulgences mimic the "Me Decade." His glory as a high school basketball star gone, his carnal appetite reduced by heart disease, his business brought to chaos, and his relationships diminished by time, Rabbit Angstrom comes to an end in Florida, the country's geriatric purgatory. A.D.M. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine