Rabbit at Rest

Zusatztext “Rich and rewarding . . . Updike is working at the full height of his powers.”— The New York Times   “Brilliant . . . It must be read. It is the best novel about America to come out of America for a very! very long time.” —The Washington Post Book World   “Powerful . . . John Updike with his precisian’s prose and his intimately attentive yet cold eye is a master.”—Joyce Carol Oates! The New York Times Book Review Informationen zum Autor John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker . His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009. Klappentext Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Howells Medal, and the National Book Critics Circle Award In John Updike's fourth and final novel about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the hero has acquired a Florida condo, a second grandchild, and a troubled, overworked heart. His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending him mixed signals; and his wife, Janice, decides in midlife to return to the world of work. As, through the year of 1989, Reagan's debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of the first George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live and opportunities to make peace with a remorselessly accumulating past.I.   FL   Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what’s floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane. The sensation chills him, above and beyond the terminal air-conditioning. But, then, facing Nelson has made him feel uneasy for thirty years.   The airport is relatively new. You drive to it off Exit 21 of Interstate 75 down three miles of divided highway that for all the skinny palms in rows and groomed too-green flat-bladed grass at its sides seems to lead nowhere. There are no billboards or self-advertising roadside enterprises or those low houses with cooling white-tile roofs that are built by the acre down here. You think you’ve made a mistake. An anxious red Camaro convertible is pushing in the rearview mirror.   “Harry, there’s no need to speed. We’re early if anything.”   Janice, Rabbit’s wife, said this to him on the way in. What rankled was the tolerant, careful tone she has lately adopted, as if he’s prematurely senile. He looked over and watched her tuck back a stubborn fluttering wisp of half-gray hair from her sun-toughened little brown nut of a face. “Honey, I’m being tailgated,” he explained, and eased back into the right lane and let the speedometer needle quiver back below sixty-five. The Camaro convertible passed in a rush, a cocoa-brown black chick in a gray felt stewardess’s cap at the wheel, her chin and lips pushing forward, not giving him so much as a sideways glance. This rankled, too. From the back, the way they’ve designed the trunk and bumper, a Camaro seems to have a mouth, two fat metal lips parted as if to hiss. So maybe Harry’s being spooked began then.   The terminal when it shows up at last is a long low white building like a bigger version of the sunstruck clinics—dental, chiropractic, arthritic, cardiac, legal, legal-medical—that line the boulevards of this state dedicated to the old. Yo...

Product details

• Authors: John Updike
• Publisher: Random House USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 27.08.1996
• EAN: 9780449911945
• ISBN: 978-0-449-91194-5
• No. of pages: 608
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 210 mm x 30 mm
• Series: Rabbit; Rabbit
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature