[11] These changes also extend to entertainment, leisure, and sports: country clubs become more prevalent, characters go on vacation more frequently or retire to Florida, and golf becomes accessible to the middle class.
[11] These changes inspire mixed emotions, with Kielland-Lund describing Brewer as prompting "nostalgic longing for a vanishing pastoral ideal and grudging acceptance of the potential beauty of the cold and metallic urban landscape".
[13] One passage in Rabbit Run describes the city as a "treeless waste of industry, shoe factories and bottling plants and company parking lots and knitting mills converted to electronics parts and elephantine gas tanks lifting above trash-filled swampland".
[13] Rabbit Redux describes the city's attempts to revive its fledgling downtown neighborhood, tearing away entire blocks of buildings to create parking lots and exposing church facades.
For example, in Rabbit Redux, Angstrom's isolation and feelings of being trapped are reflected in the book's description of Brewer as a "stagnant city" and a wasteland characterized by a "desolate openness",[15][16] as well as his home as a "spacecraft" floating through a monotonous setting filled with uncaring residents.
[12] Conversely, after Angstrom survives a heart attack in Rabbit at Rest, he views Brewer with a renewed sense of optimism and beauty: at one point, he travels through a tunnel of Bradford pear trees and describes it as if it is heaven.