And there is Nelson, Harry's son, a drug addict whose dependence is pushing him toward a mental breakdown. Updike touches on the spiritual awareness of American's during a conversation between Harry and his friend Charlie Stavos. "What do you think you are champ?" asks Charlie when Harry questions his choice to have pig valve replacement surgery. "A god made one of a kind with an immortal soul breathed in. A vehicle of grace. A battle field of good and evil. An apprentice angel. All those things they tried to teach you in Sunday school, or really didn't try very hard to teach you, just let them drift in and out of the pamphlets back there in that church basement buried deeper in his mind than an air-raid shelter."

In the course of the novel, Updike comments on the overabundance of information available through the media. "There is just no end to it, no end of information," says Harry. News of Tiananmen Square, First Dog Millie, elections in Poland, and Mike Schmidt's retirement, it's all right there, in front of him, like oxygen. His every thought is mediated by television, by the advertisers. His life, he reflects sadly, near the end of the book "seems no realer than the lives on TV shows," except that his is not interrupted every six minutes by commercial breaks.

Harry and...

Nelson has a drug addiction, cocaine and some crack, and goes through $200,000 of the businesses money. Though Harry and Janice send him to a rehabilitation centre, Toyota strips the garage of its franchise.
Harry sleeps with Nelson's wife Pru, his own daughter-in-law. "This is the worst thing you've ever done," says Janice. Harry runs south to Florida when the news of this infidelity becomes known and suffers another heart attack.

After Harry's coronary surgery his sister Mim phones from Las Vegas. Referring to their dead parents, Mim declares: "I suppose their hearts failed in the end but so does everybody's, because that's what life is, a strain on the heart." Harry dies a victim of his own moralistic delusions, his sexism, and his endless lechery.

In this book Updike has amassed a portrait of American culture and its disintegration. His examination of issues includes drug addiction, business corruption, the AIDS epidemic, the selling of America to foreign investors, and the fate of women in a declining job market. The flaws of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom are the flaws of America. The novel is a condemnation of the greed and instant gratification prevalent in the American psyche during the 1980's.