Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is an empty shell of a overgrown adolescent whose entire sense of self rests on him having been quite good at basketball when he was in High School. Being chronically lacking in imagination or any sort of inner life he has since found himself living a spectacularly banal existance, which is entirely appropriate to his personality. His only problem is that he's ever-so-slightly bored. If only it had occurred to him to start coaching a basketball team the novel could've ended 30-pages in. However this is a "Great American Novel", and things couldn't be so easy. Instead Rabbit abandons the pregnant, cowed wife he is driving to alcoholism and the 2-year-old son who talks like a literary author occasionally slurring his words to appear cute, and scampers off for the dullest spree ever to hold a story together.

After a few paragraphs worth of bombastic declarations of his intent to drive off into the sunset and disappear forever into a literary device Rabbit realises his own limitations and instead goes to see his old basketball coach, a pederast with disturbing opinions about women. Then he spends a few weeks living with a prostitute whom he sexually mistreats, and playing golf with a pastor who is supposed to be convincing him to return to his family but who instead seems to be gradually becoming convinced that Rabbit is the perfect representative of the Modern American Male. The reader is less convinced of this than the pastor and author seem to be. Meanwhile Rabbit sexually mistreats the pastor's wife as well, in front of her toddler daughters. He also behaves similarly with his sister, since she is also a woman.

Eventually Rabbit hears that his wife is giving birth. He's bored anyway, so he scurries off to the hospital to reclaim the family he's been ignoring. The mistreated prostitute is immediately forgotten. Fortunately his wife completely forgives him and his father-in-law has been paying his rent and holding a job for him, so everything turns out absolutely fine.

Five minutes later Rabbit is bored again. He gets his wife drunk in order to force her into having sex with him, but her enthusiasm for the assault is lacking and he leaves aggrieved. Whilst he's wandering around debating whether the prostitute or the pastor's wife is the best bet for casual sex, his intoxicated wife accidentally drowns their baby daughter. To be honest, nobody seems that concerned. At the funeral Rabbit becomes annoyed that everyone is regarding him with slightly less than admiration and loudly announces to all present that his wife was the one who killed the baby. Then he bravely runs off again. The end.

This wouldn't be so spectacularly unappealing a book if Rabbit wasn't presented throughout as a sympathetic hero, a victim of circumstance. In actuality he seems to the architect of all his own problems, which are caused in their entirety by his stubborn ignorance and small-minded misogyny. This combines with the steady stream of characters who inexplicably worship Rabbit and hang on to his every word to create an air of unreality, an overall impression that the text is simply authorial wish-fulfillment. Even Updike admits in his afterword that Rabbit differs from him mainly through having additional athletic abilities and enhanced sexual appeal. No amount of literary pretension and intellectualism can hide the fact that Rabbit is nothing more than a Mary Sue with whom Updike is puffing-up his own ego, and the whole exercise ends up as nothing more than a privileged bore expressing his own sense of entitlement and dissatisfaction through the eyes of what he imagines to be an everyman. He isn't. He's one of the most dislikable characters ever to be expected to carry a book. All his actions are equally foolish and boring, and since none of the characters even approach coming to life at any point, the story as a whole is completely lacking in integrity or purpose.