Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is in his mid-thirties, living with his wife, Janice, and their teenage son, Nelson, in a (fictional) city in Pennsylvania. He works a fairly dead-end job (alongside his father) as a linotype operator at a local printing firm, a job which is under threat of becoming redundant as a result of advances in computerised typesetting.
Harry and Janice have a chequered history together: married quite young, and parents of both Nelson and a younger daughter, Becky, who Janice drunkenly drowned in the bathtub while Harry had briefly left the family home to shack up with a prostitute. But age has calmed things down a bit, or at least it has on Harry's side. Janice, on the other hand, feeling neglected and restless, begins an affair with local man Charlie Stavros, exotically Greek to Harry's corn-fed American, and an anti-war Democrat to Harry's hawkish Republican. Plenty to chew on there, as we're at the cusp of the 1960s turning into the 1970s and the Vietnam war is in full swing.
Keen to exercise his freedom now that Janice has swanned off with another man, Harry starts hanging out at a local jazz club and soon acquires a couple of lodgers: Jill, a young white girl from Connecticut and Skeeter, an eccentric black Vietnam vet with some radical political views and a mild Messiah complex. Harry is conscious that Jill is young enough to be his daughter, and moreover intermittently addled by the increasingly hard drugs Skeeter is plying her with, but when a bunk-up is offered is nonetheless unable to resist the urge to go WAHEYYY and climb on with some gusto.
The loose commune at Harry's house is the focus of some local scandal, especially given Skeeter's increasingly eccentric behaviour and Jill's increasing detachment from reality and dependence on harder drugs, including, eventually, heroin. Harry seeks some solace by hooking up with the woman next door, Peggy Fosnacht, who despite being considerably older and plumper than Jill is a much more rewarding lay. It is while over at Peggy's in a post-coital slumber that Harry gets a call from Skeeter alluding vaguely to Bad Stuff happening at the house, and when Harry gets there he finds it on fire and with the fire service in attendance. Once they eventually get the fire under control they do a sweep of the house and bring out Jill's body - Skeeter had made good his escape but she was too deep in smack-induced slumber to wake up.
So with his house destroyed and his erstwhile sort-of-girlfriend dead, and, moreover, with the axe finally falling on his job at the printing firm, Harry finds himself (and Nelson) back living with his parents again. As it happens Janice is starting to cool off on the whole Charlie Stavros thing and the end of the book finds Harry and Janice testing out a tentative reconciliation.
Rabbit Redux is the second book in the Rabbit series (which comprises four novels and a concluding short story) and a sequel to Rabbit, Run which I read probably thirty years ago. My recollections of that book are fairly hazy but I seem to recall having slightly mixed feelings about it, partly because of the unlikeability (if that is even a word) of the central character. Oddly, despite my being much closer to Rabbit's fictional age (mid-twenties) then than I am now I enjoyed Rabbit Redux considerably more, perhaps because my advancing age means I identify more closely with Rabbit's character traits (general grumpiness, irascibility with young people, persistent horniness). Marry Me is the only other Updike on this list, way back in 2009.
As often happens, what it's actually about is a little more difficult to pin down. The idea of producing one of these novels every decade or so is presumably to produce a sort of audit of the current state of the USA through the eyes of a fairly ordinary everyman character (Rabbit has no pretensions to intellectualism); in the case of Rabbit Redux this means late-1960s topics like Vietnam and sexual politics. Much of the sex stuff was probably bracingly frank at the time, but has lost the power to shock fifty-odd years later.
One odd parallel with a recent book on this list: Light Perpetual also featured a character whose job involved manual typesetting and who found themselves having to rethink their whole career after automation meant their former job no longer existed.
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