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The Angstrom Family

© Sarah White

I don't usually get into sequels. I've never liked James Bond or Indiana Jones. I've never watched a Rocky movie all the way through, nor a Friday the 13th or Halloween feature.

Maybe it's because these are all movies, but I've never been much for the sequel idea in books, either, until Harry Potter. OK, and Lord of the Rings. I thought it was a kind of cheating to use the same characters over and over, as if the author couldn't come up with enough new characters to carry a new story.

But my self-imposed reading lesson recently brought me to the last two books in the Rabbit series by John Updike: "Rabbit is Rich" and "Rabbit at Rest."

This series is composed of four books published over four decades and detailing the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a small-town boy from Pennsylvania nicknamed Rabbit for his prowess on the basketball court.

Rabbit marries into a Toyota dealership owned by his father-in-law. There are the normal problems of modern life in these pages, but the Angstroms obviously are anything but normal.

I've only read the third and fourth books of this series, but I really fell in love with the characters. Rabbit is so human, he's dumb and horny and hates his wife and kid as much as he loves them, he eats the wrong things and knows it and beats himself up, he still thinks of himself as a kid, he worries, he fights, he has affairs, he lives.

The other characters aren't all as fully developed but they are still nicely drawn -- the wife who doesn't seem to feel much like a wife or mother who decides to take real estate classes to pass the time, the drug-addicted son who is too defensive about everything to ever survive, the hippie girl who takes over the family's garden and kitchen, the Greek womanizer who is a master of automobile sales, on and on.

These are great books. They should be read by everyone who has lived through these four decades (1960s-90s) as they paint a true picture of life and really make you feel for the characters, as if they were real people and this is their history.

After you read these books, you will feel like you know these people, because you just watched them live their whole lives. You'll know more about them than you know about some of your friends (not that you'd want to know this stuff about your friends) and that you could just walk right up to the big picture window at the Toyota lot and strike up a conversation with the people there.

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