Rabbit Redux

infobox Book |
name = Rabbit Redux
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption = First edition cover
author = John Updike
illustrator =
cover_artist =
country = United States
language = English
series =
genre = Novel
publisher = Alfred A. Knopf
release_date = 1971
english_release_date =
media_type = Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
pages = 406 pp
isbn = ISBN 0394474392
preceded_by = Rabbit, Run
followed_by = Rabbit is Rich

"Rabbit Redux" is a 1971 novel by John Updike. It is the second book in his "Rabbit" series, which begins with "Rabbit, Run", and is followed by "Rabbit Is Rich" and "Rabbit At Rest". There is also a related 2001 novella, "Rabbit Remembered".

Plot summary

"Rabbit Redux" finds the former high-school basketball star working a dead-end job and approaching middle age in the downtrodden and fictional city of Brewer, Pennsylvania, the city of his birth. When his wife leaves him for another man, Harry and his twelve-year-old son are at a loss, and the chaotic state of the nation circa 1969 finds its way into Harry's home.

Updike's recurring themes of guilt, sex, and death are joined here by racism, as Harry plays host to an African-American named Skeeter, a cynical, drug-dealing Vietnam vet who engages Harry in debates about the war and race relations. A wealthy white teenager fleeing suburban Connecticut, Jill, enthralls Harry and his son, and the four of them make a scandalous household emblematic of the Summer of Love's most confusing implications, culminating in a house fire that kills Jill. Harry and Janice are finally reconciled at book's end.

Redux

Redux means "brought back, restored" (from the Latin reducere - bring back). ["Oxford English Dictionary" entry for "redux".] Other works of literature using the same word in the title are John Dryden's "Astraea Redux" (1662), "a poem on the happy restoration and return of His Sacred Majesty" and Anthony Trollope's "Phineas Redux" (1873).

"Rabbit Redux" led to a redux in popularity of the word redux and, in "Rabbit at Rest", Rabbit notices "a story...in the Sarasota paper a week or so ago, headlined Circus Redux. He hates that word, you see it everywhere, and he doesn't know how to pronounce it. Like arbitrageur and perestroika." ["Rabbit at Rest", p.50]

Links

* [http://www.nytimes.com/1971/11/05/books/updike-rabbit.html Review by Anatole Broyard, NY Times]

References