''Rabbit at Rest'' is certainly the most brooding, the most demanding, the most concentrated of John Updike's longer novels. As Rabbit's doctor has informed his wife, ''Sometimes it's time.'' But in the nightmare efficiency of late 20th-century medical technology, in which mere vegetative existence may be defined as life, we are no longer granted such certainty. The final word of so many thousands is Rabbit's, and it is, singularly, ''Enough.'' This is, in its context, in an intensive cardiac care unit in a Florida hospital, a judgment both blunt and touchingly modest, valedictory and yet enigmatic. With this elegiac volume, John Updike's much-acclaimed and, in retrospect, hugely ambitious Rabbit quartet - ''Rabbit, Run'' (1960), ''Rabbit Redux'' (1971), ''Rabbit Is Rich'' (1981) and now ''Rabbit at Rest'' - comes to an end.
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