Set ten years after Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom’s death, RABBIT REMEMBERED returns listeners to the small Pennsylvania town where Harry’s widow, Janice, and his son, Nelson, still reside. They are faced with a surprise when Annabelle, Harry’s 39-year-old illegitimate daughter, arrives on the scene, bringing with her ghosts from the past.
"Rabbit" Angstrom, failed hero of "Rabbit Run", is back. He has changed, somewhat for the worse. His marriage is collapsing, his job is becoming redundant and outside pressures disturb his peace of mind; but in the end, he achieves a kind of peace, the peace of exhaustion, perhaps.
The hero of John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), ten years after the hectic events described in Rabbit Redux (1971), has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is falling, gas lines are lengthening, the President collapses while running in a marathon, and double-digit inflation coincides with a deflation of national confidence.
Rabbit, now in his 50s and with a heart condition, is living in a condo in Florida. Nelson and his family come to stay and disaster unfolds. Rabbit has a serious heart attack after a boating accident with his granddaughter and Nelson has been embezzling the family firm to feed his cocaine habit.
The dozen short stories in Updike's new collection revisit many of the locales of his fiction: the small Pennsylvania town of Olinger, the lonely farm to which the hero moves as an adolescent, the exurban New England of adult camaraderie and sexual mischief, and the New York City of artistic ambition and taunting glamour.
