Updike's style in Rabbit at Rest

The 2nd (of 3) section of John Updike's Rabbit at Rest (1990) concludes with a horrendous scene that makes us question anything we may have thought or felt in defense of the eponymous Rabbit's (aka Harry Angstrom)'s morality and judgement; I won't divulge the incident in the interest of those who haven't read this novel - though who have will remember it. It's a strange and upsetting incident in that JU's writing is primarily, and especially in the Rabbit quartet, about character - much more than about plot (which moves along like a stream - with occasional waterfalls such as this incident). In fact, there are a # of such incidents along the way: the sunfish expedition and near-drowning, in part one, for ex. It strikes me that Updike's work follow this pattern: from description (the extraordinary facility he has for creating or evoking a time and place through recollection of period and topical details: the look, for ex., of a typical working-class household in an industrial Pennsylvania city ca 1950) to observation (numerous insights that put into context his many descriptive passages; anyone who, like me, makes marginal notations beside passages of unusual insight or perspective will find him/herself marking up the margins of almost every page) to character (who experiences and articulates these observations? from whose POV does Updike write? Ultimately, his own - he perceives articulates a world as none of his characters could - although his articulation as author and narrator provides us with access to the consciousness of another, establishes a character) to plot (Rabbit confronts various crises over the course of the novel and we care about how well, or poorly, he resolves these points of crisis because he is so well established as a character) to significance (the historical context, the evocation of an moment in world history). In Rabbit at Rest we have a double-perspective: Updike is so clear and precise about the particulars of his narration - the specificity of the U.S. in December 1988-spring 1989 - as noted by public events and the objects of life at that time, so it's strange and disorienting to measure the distance between that era and ours; for ex., Updike notes that LPs have been replaced by tapes which he recognizes will someday be replaced by CDs - which we now look at as obsolete as well. Time moves on.