“—and you’re so damn adolescent. There’s more things in the world than who’s boffing who.”
—Nelson Angstrom to his father, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, in Rabbit at Rest

When, in i960, a promising twenty-eight-year-old writer named John Updike published his second novel, Rabbit, Run, nobody—not even the young author himself—had any idea that it would turn out to be the first installment of a tetralogy, or that thirty years would pass before the last volume, the newly issued Rabbit at Rest, finally appeared.1 According to a recent essay by Updike in The New York Times Book Review, Rabbit, Run—with its tale of a former high-school basketball star who finds adult life less rewarding than his glory days on the court—was contrived principally for the purpose of exemplifying what Updike calls the “rabbit approach” to life, “spontaneous, unreflective, frightened,” and was designed in conjunction with his third novel, The Centaur (1963), which depicts the “horse method of coping with life, to get into harness and pull your load until you drop.” Though Updike set Rabbit, Run in his home state of Pennsylvania, his twenty-six-year-old protagonist, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, is no self-portrait but something of an alternative self, an Updike, as it were, whose talents are physical rather than artistic, who has stayed in Pennsylvania instead of moving to New England, and who, in his mid-twenties, is not a successful and resolute young man who has found his vocation but a weak-willed failure who doesn’t know what to