Washington.--RABBIT HAS COME to rest as he should have from heart failure at an early age, a death brought on by his undisciplined surrender to the temptation of petty indulgences. The question is, is Rabbit us?
''Rabbit at Rest,'' John Updike's fourth and final novel about Harry ''Rabbit'' Angstrom, begins at a Florida airline terminal. Rabbit, 55 years old and 40 pounds overweight, is suffering intimations of his terminal illness -- chest pains -- and an irresistible craving for a candy bar. The book ends, many such surrenders later, with Rabbit hospitalized, sagging toward a death that might have been forestalled by sensible habits or serious surgery, which he rejected.
The preceding installments in this unique literary genre -- this epic of the mundane -- were ''Rabbit, Run'' (1960), ''Rabbit Redux'' (1971) and ''Rabbit is Rich'' (1981). Mr. Updike is not a novelist of ideas but of mingled domestic atmospheres and social intimations. But the mingling makes it reasonable for the readers who have made these books best-sellers to ransack them for social diagnoses. Mr. Updike's timing causes them to be seen as summations of decades.
When we first met Rabbit, he was 26. It was 1959 and Mr. Updike remembers that ''Kerouac's 'On the Road' was in the air, and a decade of 'dropping out' about to arrive, and the price society pays for unrestrained motion was on my mind.'' Mr. Updike kept returning to Rabbit to explore America's ''unease.''
The Rabbit we now rejoin (it is December 1988) is preoccupied with disasters, such as the terrorist destruction of the airliner over Lockerbie and, later, hurricane Hugo. ''He, too, is falling, helplessly falling, toward death.'' Death by potato chips.
The unbearable heaviness of being Rabbit is both physical and spiritual. He is fat, emotionally logy and oppressed by his vulgar gluttony. He has taken to the desultory reading of history, ''that sinister mulch of facts our little lives grow out of before joining the mulch themselves, the fragile brown rotting layers of previous deaths.''
Mr. Updike has now written 1,700 pages about this emotionally stunted, intellectually barren, morally repulsive egotist whose self-absorption lacks even the fascination of large scale. His life's work is an inherited Toyota dealership (''Who could ask for anything more?'') that is taken from him by the no-nonsense Japanese after his son embezzles from it to feed his cocaine habit. That addiction is convincingly depicted in all its hair-raising squalor, but it is, in a sense, less unnerving than Rabbit's collapse of will as he nibbles himself to death.
