by John Updike
First published 1971
Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom sits in his empty house, his wife gone, his son distant. The former high school basketball star has grown soft at thirty-six, working his steady job while America explodes around him in 1969. The calm Eisenhower years of his youth have given way to Vietnam protests, drug culture, and social revolution. When a teenage runaway and a black radical move into his abandoned home, Rabbit finds his ordered world completely upended. His family has left him behind. His neighborhood changes daily. The country he understood no longer exists. Yet Rabbit holds onto his small routines and fading beliefs. He wants to belong somewhere, to believe in something, even as everything familiar crumbles. Updike places his anxious everyman at the center of a changing America, where old certainties dissolve and new realities take hold.
Genres: american-fiction, 20th-century, american, contemporary
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, social-commentary
Setting: America
Period: 1969
406 pages · Hardcover · Alfred A. Knopf