The first part of the book finds Rabbit genuflecting on his "wild, American luck". Too old to sleep around, or, let me rephrase that, too old to be good looking enough for women to give him some, Rabbit wonders around from wife to friends to old mistresses. His car dealerships, save his son's, are wildly successful. He has a a loving family and a son with a wife and grandkids. Yet, he is miserable. Almost brutal towards his wife, he throws a temper tantrum when he finds out that Janice is basically running his businesses. He meanders in his son's dealership and family and even cusses out his grandkids. I repeat his grandkids. In what basically is an American Eden, he walks out, complaining that the clouds are too big, the light is too bright, and the wings are too heavy.

Ah, but pretty soon darker clouds begin to form in the horizon of our misanthropic hero's seemingly endless summer. Rabbit discovers that his son's dealership is losing money hand over fist, and macho pontification and belittlement, the father's raison d'etre, ensues. But shortly afterwards, he finds out the real reason why the dealership is losing money: Nelson's a crackhead. Nelson, the child Angstrom abandoned in the first book and the sweet curious boy and teenager in the second and third has become a sobbing, hypersensitive, drug-addicted bastard, so consumed with his own pain and self-pity that he doesn't mind beating up his wife to numb it.

Nelson's base head pathos comes to fruition when Pru calls both Rabbit and Janice to pick his son up after a domestic violence incident. The conflict spurs Nelson to go in to rehab, Pru to come in closer contact with the family, and Rabbit to lose that majestic luck that came so easy to him for 56 years. Suddenly everything that Rabbit touches doesn't turn to gold. More than that, it's destroyed. His friends, long men of leisure and sexual play, start to die off and realize how bloody fucking miserable their lives were. Janice, the character that Updike is the most sympathetic to, develops her own life to the point that Rabbit seems like an antiquated albatross. And Rabbit brutally undercuts his son and the Son, in response, whines like a child, symbolizing two dysfunctional schools of male thought that have been pervasive through the 20th and 21st century.

But his slow, gradual slide becomes a quick and steep one when Rabbit decides to sleep with Pru. When found out, Janice moves away, Nelson's heartbroken when Pru tells her, and even his grandkids(I repeat, his grandkids) come to the realization that everyone who has came in contact with Rabbit Angstrom has found out, that he's a fucking bum. And this, contrary to the his conservative fans' assertions, is the theme of the Rabbit books; not "the plight of the suburban male" but the portrait of a man who has everything and blows it, not because he's "oppressed" but because he's a couple of humanity genes short. The final part of the book finds Rabbit doing what he did in the beginning of the book and what he did at the beginning of his first book: Running. He goes from place to place, hotel to hotel and, in the ultimate T.S Eliot " in my end is my beginning" moment, from basketball court to court, having a heart attack while shooting hoops with black street toughs, leading to the final, climatic scenes with his family.