BOOK (1990)

Rabbit at Rest by John Updike Knopf

Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is not just resting, he's frazzled. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning fourth part of the quartet about the fictional former high-school basketball star, Rabbit vegetates in Florida at the end of the 1980s - a time plagued by debt, Aids and terrorism.

He must cope with chest pains and a libido undercut by the fear of 'nothing under you but black space'. The adulterer - forensically depicted by master satirist John Updike - channel-surfs and grazes uncontrollably. He is hooked on trans fat-rich snacks that sharpen the strain on his heart. According to new research, his ill - compulsive eating - is swayed by the same mechanism behind drug addiction.

Rabbit would nod because his drug addict son, Nelson, takes after him. Despite Nelson's cocaine compulsion, he has been handed the keys to the family business - a Pennsylvania Toyota dealership - by Rabbit's put-upon spouse.

Incapable of restraint, Rabbit beds Nelson's wife while the leech is away at rehab. Despite the repose implied by the vintage novel's title, Rabbit at Rest offers scant comfort.

'Rabbit at Rest is certainly the most brooding, the most demanding, the most concentrated of John Updike's longer novels,' rival novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote in The New York Times. 'This is the saddest and deepest of the Rabbit novels, an aching portrait of America at the end of the Reagan era,' the Library Journal wrote. '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,' Publishers Weekly said.