Rabbit Redux was published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, in November 1971, in a first printing priced at $6.95. The title — “redux” meaning brought back or restored, borrowed from Trollope’s Phineas Redux — signals Updike’s ambition: to bring Rabbit Angstrom back not as a simple sequel character but as a vessel for the entire traumatic experience of America at the end of the 1960s.
The Novel
It is 1969. Rabbit is thirty-six, working as a Linotype operator at the Brewer Vat, a trade already threatened by phototypesetting. His wife Janice is having an affair with a Greek-American car salesman named Charlie Stavros. When she leaves, Rabbit does not chase her. Instead, he takes in two strays: Jill, an upper-class teenage runaway and heroin user, and Skeeter, a volatile young Black man recently returned from Vietnam and wanted for dealing. The three of them — plus Nelson, now thirteen — form an unstable household in which Skeeter conducts nightly seminars on Black history, revolution, and Vietnam, using readings from Frederick Douglass, the Autobiography of Malcolm X, and various revolutionary texts.
The setup sounds schematic, but Updike executes it with extraordinary naturalistic skill. The dialogue crackles. The ideological debates between Rabbit (inarticulate, patriotic, confused) and Skeeter (brilliant, furious, possibly insane) are among the best things Updike ever wrote. The novel climaxes with neighbours firebombing Rabbit’s house — Jill dies in the fire, Skeeter escapes, and Rabbit is left holding the ruins of his life.
Political Context
Rabbit Redux is Updike’s most explicitly political novel, and it divided critics sharply. The left attacked it for giving a sympathetic platform to Rabbit’s hawkish views on Vietnam; the right was uncomfortable with Skeeter’s revolutionary rhetoric. Updike’s own position was famously complicated — he was one of the few prominent American writers to refuse to sign anti-Vietnam War petitions, not from militarism but from a contrarian distrust of consensus opinion. The novel makes no one comfortable.
The moon landing serves as a recurring counterpoint: television broadcasts of Apollo 11 punctuate the narrative, offering images of transcendence against the chaos of Rabbit’s earthbound life. It is one of the great formal devices in Updike’s work.
Collecting Rabbit Redux
First edition (1971, Knopf): First printing identifiable by “FIRST EDITION” on copyright page and price of $6.95 on front flap.
Approximate market values:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $400–$1,200
- Signed first edition: $1,500–$4,000
- Without jacket: $50–$150
Value trajectory: Significantly less valuable than Rabbit, Run as a collectible, reflecting both the larger first printing and the novel’s more divisive critical reception. However, complete sets of all four Rabbit novels in first edition, all signed, command $15,000–$30,000. The market for Updike firsts has been stable since his death in 2009 — not a dramatic appreciator, but a reliable hold for collectors of twentieth-century American literary fiction.
The Darkest Rabbit Novel
Readers who come to Redux expecting the lyric buoyancy of Rabbit, Run are often shocked. This is a much angrier, more confrontational novel. The prose is deliberately coarser, matching the coarseness of the era. Rabbit himself is more passive than in the first novel — things happen to him rather than through him. Some critics consider this the weakest of the four; others (including several major Updike scholars) regard it as the most daring and honest volume in the tetralogy, the one in which Updike genuinely risks his relationship with the reader.