SOURCE: “Fifty-five and Fading,” in New Statesman & Society, October 26, 1990, p. 33.

In the following review, Quinn offers praise for Rabbit at Rest.

The past 30 years of American life have been pretty crowded by any standards, and will presumably continue to disgorge their historians, their scourges and their apologists. There will be many a baggy social chronicle to pin it all down, though few will match either the intimacy or the eloquence of John Updike's Rabbit sequence.

Centring on the fortunes and foibles of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, middle American anti-hero and everyman, each novel put the seal on a decade's end—the fifties in Rabbit, Run (1960), the sixties in Rabbit Redux (1971) and the seventies in Rabbit Is Rich (1981). In those rollicking, rueful comedies, Updike's talents were in overdrive, both as master of the heroic sentence and historian of the spirit. While Rabbit reeled through the years from marriage and dalliance...