In Peace

By Paul Gray

RABBIT AT REST

by John Updike

Knopf; 512 pages; $21.95

"You might say it's a depressed book about a depressed man, written by a depressed man." That is how John Updike described his forthcoming novel, Rabbit at Rest, to a convention of booksellers in June. Some of his market- minded listeners may have wondered if they could find some way that the book could be pitched as anything but . . . depressing. There was no need to worry. This fourth, and presumably final, installment of the life and times of Harold C. Angstrom -- Rabbit Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981) -- is far more upbeat than its subject matter would seem to warrant. And in the bargain it manages to be both poignant and excruciatingly funny.

Not that Rabbit is doing much of the laughing. During the time covered in the novel -- from the 1988 Christmas season to September 1989 -- he turns 56 and feels even older. His former job of running his wife Janice's inherited Toyota dealership has been given, by Janice, to their son Nelson, whom Rabbit still does not much like. The elder Angstroms winter in a Florida condo and spend the summers back home in southeastern Pennsylvania. Rabbit is restless, watching too much TV and packing in junk food; he now carries well over 230 lbs. on his 6-ft. 3-in. frame. During a rare period of exertion in Florida, he suffers a warning heart attack. In Pennsylvania he discovers that Nelson has skimmed more than $200,000 from the family business to pay for a cocaine habit.

These shocks generate most of the novel's plot. But what happens to Rabbit pales before what his jumpy, unpredictable consciousness makes of the experiences. His mind understandably roams as he tours a Florida theme park with his wife and two grandchildren: "Rabbit wonders how the Dalai Lama is doing, after all that exile. Do you still believe in God, if people keep telling you you are God?" The Dalai Lama has been in the news, and Rabbit, force-feeding himself at the tube, has become through sheer couch-potatodom a current-events buff. But the Tibetan religious leader continues to interest Rabbit, who later, in the hospital after an angioplasty on his clogged arteries, tries to imagine life after his death and fails. He cannot shake the impression that his hometown "and all the world beyond are just frills on himself, like the lace around a plump satin valentine, himself the heart of the universe, like the Dalai Lama."

Updike unobtrusively inserts hundreds of such interlinked references into the record of Rabbit's thoughts. The cumulative result is not only a character more interesting than any of his family or friends can imagine but also an interior life richer than even its owner recognizes. Rabbit's undiscriminating curiosity takes in everything, from old songs on the car radio to the crammed titles on a cineplex marquee: HONEY I SHRUNK BATMAN GHOSTBUST II KARATE KID III DEAD POETS GREAT BALLS. These are the fragments he innocently shores against his ruin, the kind of details that historians millenniums hence will cherish. Even his loopiest private opinions carry the whiff of theological profundity. Months into the Bush Administration, Rabbit misses Reagan: "The powerful thing about him as President was that you never knew how much he knew, nothing or everything, he was like God that way, you had to do a lot of it yourself."

Updike has certainly never lacked praise or recognition, but his productive career has also prompted a steady drone of cavils: too precious, too self- indulgent, too Waspish, too preoccupied with sex, religion and guilt. If any contradictory argument were needed, Rabbit at Rest provides it. Capping the Rabbit Quartet, this novel completes the most authoritative and most magical portrait yet written of the past four decades of American life.