Ok, the five-star rating is overall for the four novels.
Rabbit, Run is approximately 300 pages and it is a great read. Indeed, if you analyze a typical Updike novel, not much seems to happen, and this is especially the case with the Rabbit series. However, that's not the reason why anyone reads his books. The prose here slowly creates a nice picture.
Rabbit Redux - I truly hated it. It was far too random and was the strangest and worst book of the series. Unfortunately, it needs to be read to understand the connection to the third and fourth books.
Rabbit is Rich - This is the coolest of the series. Rabbit has some style, yet still resents his wife as always. The Toyota dealership is at its peak.
Rabbit at Rest - It is an interesting book. The end had me guessing and it was definitely a page-turner.
In conclusion, the Rabbit series by John Updike offers a diverse range of reading experiences. Each book has its own unique characteristics, from the slow and beautiful prose of Rabbit, Run to the more complex and sometimes frustrating Rabbit Redux. Rabbit is Rich brings a touch of style and Rabbit at Rest keeps the reader engaged until the very end. Overall, it is a series that is worth exploring for those who enjoy character-driven novels with a focus on the human condition.

Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels by John Updike

Rabbit, Run

A young and immature man, once a hot-shot high school athlete, has a pregnant wife and a 2 ½-year-old son. One night, on a whim, he decides to flee instead of picking up his son from his parents. The world depicted in this novel seems to operate without any morality, where selfishness reigns supreme. The degenerate characters are far from being sympathetic. As I read this book, I felt degraded to the level of the indefensible Rabbit. Maybe it was due to Updike's use of the present tense or his over-reliance on adjectives and adverbs. His characters are as shallow as hoarfrost and thus evoke no sympathy. A sense of hollowness pervades throughout. It doesn't elevate the spirit. So, why should I read it? To be sympathetic to the immoral? A more engrossing read would be a book about how it came to be that Updike had this and successive novels of Rabbit published. That is the great mystery.

Rabbit Redux

Gad, it's more of the same crap. I just can't read anymore Updike. It's horribly boring.

This is one of those books that I firmly believed I had to read in order to be well-versed in literature.

I am by no means an expert on that particular period of literature, yet I can clearly perceive why it is regarded as significant.

The book is written in the first person, presenting a visual prose style that meanders as if it is flowing directly from the random thoughts of our brain, unfiltered by any censor.

Moreover, it is dark and disturbing, featuring characters that I couldn't quite connect with or have any hope for.

Consequently, I have no intentions of reading the sequels.

Perhaps I will explore other works within the same genre to gain a more comprehensive understanding of literature during that era.

However, for now, this particular book has left me with a somewhat uneasy feeling, making me question whether it truly represents the essence of that literary period.

Nonetheless, I am glad that I took the time to read it, as it has expanded my literary horizons and made me more aware of the diverse range of styles and themes that exist within the world of literature.

Probably four of the very best modern novels I have ever read.

These novels have truly left a profound impact on me. Each one has its own unique charm and appeal.

The first novel is a masterpiece that takes the reader on an emotional rollercoaster. The characters are so vividly portrayed that you feel as if you know them personally.

The second novel has a captivating plot that keeps you on the edge of your seat from beginning to end. The twists and turns are unexpected and add to the overall excitement.

The third novel explores deep themes and makes you think about life in a whole new way. It has a beautiful writing style that is both engaging and thought-provoking.

The fourth novel is a heartwarming story that will make you laugh and cry at the same time. It has a message of love and hope that is truly inspiring.

Overall, these four novels are some of the best that modern literature has to offer. I would highly recommend them to anyone who loves to read.

Two of these four novels, which chronicle much of the everyday texture of American life from the 1930s to the 1980s, have won the Pulitzer Prize. In addition, they have received other kudos such as the National Book Award.

As a 70-year-old, I found Rabbit Angstrom's musings on death and mortality to be thought-provoking. However, Rabbit was so disgusting, misogynistic, pathetic, and self-centered that I was glad to finally finish the fourth book.

These novels offer a unique perspective on American society during a specific time period. They explore the lives and experiences of ordinary people, highlighting both the joys and sorrows of everyday life.

The Pulitzer Prize and other awards recognize the literary merit of these works, which have become classics of American literature. Despite my mixed feelings about Rabbit Angstrom, I appreciate the skill and artistry with which these novels were written.

Overall, these four novels are an important part of American literary history and continue to be studied and enjoyed by readers today.

I initially read books 1 and 2 in a different volume. However, I picked up this one because it was used and ended up being $10 cheaper than buying the paperback versions of 3 and 4. After finishing it, I've switched to reading on my new Kindle. The contrast between this 1500-page behemoth and the Kindle makes reading on the Kindle feel almost like cheating.

But perhaps the weight of this novel is a good thing. It makes you work for closure on Rabbit's life, rather than breezing through it. I will admit, though, that I spent a great deal longer reading this book than I should have considering its excellent contents. If anyone has any tips on comfortable positions for reading a giant hardbound book, I'm all ears.

Parts 3 and 4 of Rabbit's life were not as captivating to me as parts 1 and 2. My theory is that I can more easily relate to the younger Rabbit. So in the earlier books, I was constantly on edge about what came next, as if our fates as lost young people were intertwined. In these novels, Rabbit is older. He is stable and happy, well, not that happy, but the kind of happy that comes from stability. Updike's brilliance lies in his ability to capture Rabbit's voice so well while still allowing it to age. The Rabbit I read about retired in Florida is still the Rabbit who runs away from his wife at the beginning of book 1, but different in so many ways.

What this book(s) does is shatter the notion that there is any kind of certainty in life. Some things become more certain, but each "step" of life opens up new areas of uncertainty. Early on, you start a family and a career. In mid-life, you must come to terms with the fact that this is what your life has become and there isn't much room for change, etc. Reading this series was the closest I've ever come to watching a person grow up, and it was both fascinating and horrifying to realize that the early adult years are just the beginning of confusion and uncertainty.

Overall, this book is much too long and interesting to do it justice in a short Goodreads review. It's also one of those books that I imagine will take on more meaning later in life. Perhaps I will save this hardbound copy and return to it in 15 years to find that books 1 and 2 no longer excite me, but I can't put down books 3 and 4. The changing life philosophy of Rabbit is evident in the quotes, and that's what most interests me. So without further ado...

Favorite bits:

"But a lot of topics, he has noticed lately, in private conversation and even on television where they're paid to talk it up, run dry, exhaust themselves, as if everything's been said in this hemisphere." -pg.631

"But one of their bonds has always been that her confusion keeps pace with his. As the wind pours past he feels a scared swift love for something that has no name. Her? His life? The world?" -pg.684

"I pretty much like what I have. The trouble with that is, then you get afraid somebody will take it away from you." -pg.685

"The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started." -pg.700

"Then he remembers, descending into the molecules, what love feels like: huge, skin on skin, planets impinging." -pg.705

"Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inner dwindling." -pg.708

"He does not know if he loved her or not, but with her he had known love, had experienced that cloudy, inflation of self which makes us infants again and tips each moment with a plain excited purpose, as these wands of grass about his knees are tipped with packets of their own fine seeds." -pg.722

"Town after town numbingly demonstrated to him that his life was a paltry thing, roughly duplicated by the millions." -pg.743

"You never return to the same place." -pg.764

"Funny about feelings, they seem to come and go in a flash yet outlast metal." -pg.768

"From a certain angle the most terrifying thing in the world is your own life, the fact that it's yours and nobody else's." -pg.785

"'I must say,' Janice says, 'it does seem extravagant, to build such a thing you're only going to use once.' 'That's life.' Harry says." -pg.845

"What more can you ask of a wife in a way than that she stick around and see with you what happens next?" -pg.856

"You don't stop caring, champ. You still care about that little girl whose underpants you saw in kindergarten. Once you care, you always care. That's how stupid we are." -pg.866

"..his own life close in to a size his soul had not yet shrunk to fit." -pg.879

"Pru had none of that false savvy, she knew none of the names to drop, the fancy dead, and could talk only about what was alive now." -pg.906

"...families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle." -pg.914

"Life. Too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday." -pg.942

"The great sad lie told to children that is Christmas stains Weiser end to end, and through the murk he glimpses the truth that to be rich is to be robbed, to be rich is to be poor." -pg.961

"People are always a little sicker than you know." -pg.995

"Harry suddenly hates people who seem to know; they would keep us blind to the fact that there is nothing to know. We are each of us filled with a perfect blackness." -pg.1007

"Both know, what people should never know, that they will not meet again." -pg.1029

"What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand." -pg.1041

"The more dead you know it seems the more living there are you don't know." -pg.1041

"He knows her so well that making conversation with her is like having a struggle with himself." -pg.1072

"'Driving is boring,' Rabbit pontificates, 'but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.'" -pg.1074

"Funny how your wife reading the newspaper makes every item in it look fascinating, and then when you look yourself it all turns dull." -pg.1096

"All this family closeness is almost like an African hut where everybody sleeps and screws in full view of everybody else. But, then, Harry asks himself, what has Western man done with all his precious privacy, anyway? To judge from his history books, nothing much except invent the gun and psychoanalysis." -pg.1096

"...the things he looks at all seem tired; he's seen them too many times before. A kind of drought has settled over the world, a bleaching such as overtakes old color prints, even the ones kept in drawer." -pg.1099

"If you could ever get the poor to vote in this country, you'd have socialism. But people want to think rich. That's the genius of the capitalist system: either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be." -pg.1104

"The solider in Harry, the masochistic Christian, respects men like this. It's total uncritical love, such as women provide, that makes you soft and does you in." -pg.1106

"...perhaps that is the saddest loss time brings, the lessening of excitement about anything." -pg.1153

"What's a life supposed to be? They don't give you another for comparison." -pg.1207

"In crises there is something in our instincts which whittles, which tries to reduce the unignorable event back to the ignorable normal." -pg.1280

"We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies." -pg.1290

"Innocence is just an early age of stupidity." -pg.1313

"You're a man, you're free, you can do what you want in life, until you're sixty at least you're a buyer. A woman's a seller. She has to be. And she better not haggle too long." -pg.1362

I finished the series in March 2010.

Looking back, I don't recall ever experiencing such a profound sense of connection to the characters in a book or a series of books.

As I delved deeper into the story, I gradually developed a feeling as if I knew the Angstroms on a personal level, as if they were old family friends.

I found myself emotionally invested in their lives, rooting for them with the same enthusiasm and sincerity as I would for my own friends.

Their joys and sorrows became my own, and I was completely immersed in their world.

This unique connection made the reading experience truly unforgettable, and it left a lasting impression on me.

Even now, years after finishing the series, I still think of the Angstroms and their story with a sense of warmth and nostalgia.

It's as if they have become a part of my own personal history, and I will always cherish the time I spent getting to know them.

I now realize that I was overly optimistic when I borrowed the compilation of the four Rabbit novels. In fact, one is more than enough, and perhaps even excessive. After this experience, I find myself in need of some non-fiction works, although I'm not typically a non-fiction reader.

The main character in this story is a selfish and unlikeable individual, and his motives are, at best, rather obscure. It remains a mystery as to why the supporting cast would bother to stick around. He is truly cruel.

Maybe it's time for me to explore the world of non-fiction and see what new perspectives and knowledge it can offer. Who knows, perhaps I'll discover a new genre that I truly enjoy.

It really grew on me. Every book got better.

I really couldn’t stand any of the characters except for Eccles, the minister in the first book, and maybe Campbell, the minister in the third. And yet, somehow, it was enjoyable. The first book, Harry Angstrom was not a clearly defined person. I just kind of assumed he was me. Then all this crazy shit happens and I couldn’t believe what he was doing. It’s been a while since the end of a book made me so angry.

And then in book two, he’s kind of taking some punches and I enjoyed that because he deserves it. Still, he is such a pig. And as I’m moving along, there are things about this guy that are endearing, despite the letdowns. I think he is moving towards something, some enlightenment. And then there is the crash just like in book one. The anger grows but I continue because book three and four won the Big Awards. Also, obviously I’m not going to stop midway. I bought the tetralogy as a single hardcover at an Oakland used bookstore for $16.50.

By book three, I started to find him familiar. A certain type of jackass. And despite this, I still found myself rooting for him for much of it. His wife and kid are so painful from his perspective, and yet there are little glimpses where you see their perspective of how awful he is.

In book four, I decided that this character was written to be a piece of shit as a comment on certain types of people in the world. I don’t know if it is true or not. In the intro, Updike says social commentary is not a skill he possesses, and that there is no moral. I struggle to believe this. The first book, I couldn’t even tell if the author knew his hero was such a despicable person. By book four, there was no questioning this fact. It seems to me the reader is supposed to cringe through these scenes and put together that Harry represents arrogant, stupid, selfish, self-destructive, self-righteous America. Or maybe, that he is a manifestation of our basest, most animalistic tendencies as humans and the point is to show what a person’s life would be like if they just failed every moral test or refused to grow up or something like that.

The best parts of all four books were the details of time and place that run through them, more so than in any book I’ve read. The Phillies, music on the radio, the lunar landing, the civil rights movement, Vietnam war protests, inflation, gas shortages, the Challenger explosion, HIV, Voyager 2, movies that were out in the theater. Really gives a sense of what it was like to live in those times. And writing a book once a decade for four decades is pretty cool. It shows the evolution of a character and a society over time, and makes you think about your own life and the world we live in.

I'd only be a fool to rate these magnificent novels. But if I had to, I would simply quote the final line: "All I can tell you is, it isn't so bad."

This is a beautiful lyrical book. I have never read such wonderful passages that describe little things like sunsets, leaves, shoes, grasses, and so on. The protagonist is someone who you might not relate to much, but hey, people like that do exist! Reading this book is like taking a journey across a person's life, from his 20s till his 60s, spanning across all the major decades in an American life during the 50s to the 90s. I enjoyed the whole journey slowly and tastefully.

Also, I would like to add a beautiful quote that I kept note of: "The universe is unsleeping, neither nats nor stars sleep, to die will be to be forever wide awake" - Rabbit Redux. This quote adds a profound layer to the overall experience of the book, making you think about life, death, and the eternal nature of the universe. It makes you realize that even in the midst of our daily lives, there are these deeper mysteries and truths that we can only begin to fathom.

This Everyman isn't really Anyman.

While I generally have a tendency to be drawn to flawed characters, Rabbit Angstrom is disappointingly predictable. He appears to lack the ability to look within himself and reflect, instead wallowing in a state of depression and a sense that life has treated him unfairly. In reality, however, he fails to take responsibility for the disasters he himself causes.

Updike's beautiful prose, which is often lauded, seems entirely out of place when it comes to Rabbit. It gives the impression of a depth that simply isn't there. The peripheral characters, with the exception of his sister, all seem to be little more than paper cutouts, lacking the fullness and complexity of real people.

The misogyny that pervades the books becomes tiresome and, for me, relegates them to the category of "books that don't age well." This means that I don't believe Updike is really an important writer, despite his obvious skill and style. He explored similar territory in Toward the End of Time (1997), and if anything, the main character, Ben Turnbull, is even more repulsive than Rabbit. That book feels like an anachronism, an attempt to cover the same ground again without adding anything new or meaningful.

Updike was still a talented wordsmith, but in my opinion, he struggled with the long form. While his short stories were often empathic, nuanced, and emotionally gripping, I found the Rabbit novels to be a chore to read. I continued only because they offer a window into the eras in which they are set, albeit from a narrow white Protestant perspective. If one views Rabbit as simply representative of the worst impulses of those eras, he can be ignored, and the books can serve as a chronicle of American postwar culture.

Some writers, like Nabokov, are able to work within seemingly outdated societal strictures and still remain relevant. Others, like Ian McEwan, can transform those repressive mores into something modern and engaging. I have a feeling that Updike's novels will gradually fade into obscurity, becoming little more than a quaint relic of a bygone era, serving only as a source of nostalgia.

Right. So, AFTER Shakespeare and Paul Monette, these books would be up next.

To live a life through four books - and the WASPY American life that had never been written about in such detail, reality and charm - I loved everything about them.

Is anyone better at description and metaphor in the novel than Updike? Maybe Proust, ha! But really, everything I want literature to do - it does completely absorbing.

And it made me understand my parents more, as if THAT were possible. :-)

These books offer a unique perspective into a particular American lifestyle, one that is rich in history and culture. The detailed descriptions and vivid metaphors used by the author bring this world to life, making it easy for the reader to immerse themselves in the story.

Not only do these books provide entertainment, but they also offer valuable insights into the human condition. By understanding the experiences and emotions of the characters, we can gain a better understanding of ourselves and those around us.

In conclusion, these books are a must-read for anyone who loves literature and wants to explore a different side of American life.