The Independent [London] for September 13, 2013 featured a piece by writer Justin Cartwright, who picked Rabbit at Rest for his “Book of a Lifetime.”
“Rabbit at Rest is a wonderful book, honest, detailed, perceptive and moving,” he writes. “Although quietly charming and without any symptoms of Bohemia, Updike was ruthlessly forensic with his characters. His description of Rabbit’s wayward son, Nelson, is devastating: in contrast to the free pass to life that Rabbit grants himself—he is, in his reckoning, tall, athletic, open and attractive, with a full head of hair—his son is small, balding and furtive with a drug habit and—worse—a trite kind of philophy, confidently uttered. How accurately Updike captures the new banality.”
Here’s the full story.
It’s a good book but not the kind one would reread over and over again. There are very few in THAT category. I submit Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita as one worthy of “book of a lifetime” honors.