Rabbit Is Rich [Paperback]

John Updike (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 27, 1996

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award
 
The hero of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, ten years after the events of Rabbit Redux, has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as the chief sales representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is falling, gas lines are lengthening, and double-digit inflation coincides with a deflation of national self-confidence. Nevertheless, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom feels in good shape, ready to enjoy life at last—until his wayward son, Nelson, returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to the lot. New characters and old populate these scenes from Rabbit’s middle age as he continues to pursue, in his zigzagging fashion, the rainbow of happiness.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Unquestionably Updike’s finest novel . . . Funny and sharp and damnably intelligent.”—The Boston Globe
 
“Dazzlingly reaffirms Updike’s place as master chronicler of the spiritual maladies and very earthly pleasures of the Middle-American male.”—Vogue
 
“Rich, funny . . . Updike at the very height of his powers.”—New York magazine

From the Publisher

12 1.5-hour cassettes --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (August 27, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0449911829
• ISBN-13: 978-0449911822
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #264,466 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 lived in Massachusetts. He was the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. John Updike died on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rabbit Has Quit Running; He Found the American Dream, April 4, 2005

By 

Antoinette Klein (Hoover, Alabama USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rabbit Is Rich (Paperback)

Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, John Updike's monumental "everyman" creation has reached middle age, and we find him ten years after the previous book comfortably ensconced in his mother-in-law's home, running Springer Motors for her and Janice, and actually in love with his wife at last. The Angstroms have achieved the American dream and are even the center of their own little clique at a country club established for the nouveau riche.

If you remember the Carter era, gas shortages, Cheryl Ladd replacing Farrah Fawcett in "Charlie's Angels" and Toyota's "Oh, what a feeling!" commercials, you will love this look back at America in 1979 and into the early 80's.

A fatter, richer Rabbit dabbles in gold and silver, plays golf, and wages war with his son Nelson, now a student at Kent State. When Nelson drops out of college and returns home, Rabbit says, "I like having Nelson in the house. It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses." Nelson is the worst of Rabbit, scared and running, torn between two women, impregnating and marrying one while too young to handle the responsibility, and taking off.

Rabbit, though outwardly-satisfied and enjoying his affluent life, has never ceased mourning for what he cannot have. A young girl who enters his Toyota dealership reminds him so much of himself and Ruth, his lover from RABBIT, RUN, that he is convinced she is the daughter he never knew and is restless until he can confront Ruth about her. Janice, on the other hand, has matured into a suburban wife, playing tennis and lolling about the country club pool and in general convincing Rabbit to admit that the decade past has taught her more than it has taught him.

The secondary characters in this installment are brilliant. We see Charlie Stavros progressing into old age and running off to Florida with a young girl, but it is the Angstroms country club friends who provide the most decadent insight into the times as a group trip to the Caribbean becomes an adventure in wife-swapping and brings Rabbit nearer his dream of possessing the wife of his good buddy.

Rabbit himself neatly sums up his existence when he says "At my age if you carried all the misery you've seen on your back you'd never get up in the morning." But get up he does, to strut another day at Springer Motors, to chase one more woman, to fight one more battle with Nelson, and in the final page to possess his heart's desire----but I'll leave that up you, good reader, to discover on your own what that desire is.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Everything hits at once, June 11, 2005

By 

Michael Battaglia - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rabbit Is Rich (Paperback)

Having not been born until the decade was nearly over, the legendary hedonism of the seventies was something I could never experience, so this book is probably the closest I'll ever come. The third book in Updike's Rabbit series, it continues to follow the life of Harry Angstrom, who seems to plow through life mostly be reacting, as opposed to taking a firm hand in events. The books don't need to be read in order, but there are certain slim plot threads that are carried over and some scenes have extra resonance as they echo earlier events. But isn't that the same with any life, some things just have more meaning if you know the story behind it. In this third novel Harry is settling down, living at his mother-in-law's house with his wife (they're back together now, and Harry even works cordially with the man she cheated on him with) while he works at the used car lot. Somehow he's achieved some state of stability, while not filthy rich, he's well off and he and his wife go out often with other well off couples from the area, playing tennis and hanging out by the pool. Overall, life's pretty good. Except it's not. Harry keeps thinking that the yoing girl he's seen around town a few times might be his daughter by way of his lover Ruth almost twenty years ago. And his son Nelson comes back to make trouble, escaping college, torn between two women and just complicating life in general. The best thing about the Rabbit novels is that they don't have a "plot" per se as much as direction, they function as a snapshot of a certain period of time and Updike manages to orchestrate events so that they have a natural rising action and climax that good fiction demands, while at the same time making it feel perfectly natural, following the rhythms of life. With his keen eye he depicts people caught in the decadence of the seventies even as everything was about to slide apart around them, it's the story of people shaped not only by the times, but by each other and the times that went before them. Harry remains a strangely endearing character, selfish and self-absorbed, directionless but looking for a way out, possessed of a weird code of decency that expresses itself in some odd ways. His discussions with his son are some of the best parts of the book, as Harry tries to help the kid out, their conversations quickly devolve into accusations and lead nowhere. Harry doesn't want to listen to his son and Nelson wants to hear nothing of what his dad has to say. Harry seems painfully self-aware of what's going on around him but powerless to do anything about it, striking out at various things to make him feel like he's doing something productive when in the end he's just spinning his wheels. Nelson has grown up finally and grown nowhere at all as well, in contrast to his father, who has achieved some domestic calm, Nelson acts like a man constantly trapped, boxed in every time he turns around, not sure if this option is the best one but sure it was better than the one before and maybe if he waits long enough and dallies, something better will present itself. All of these characters act and interact and intersect under the guise of Updike's finely tuned prose, his gift for description propelling even the slowest scene with a steady progression, providing a calm voice to every character's thoughts, imbuing even the most hollow person with a bit of life. The book has the messy cadence of life, with irrelevant conversations and asides, tangents that don't go anywhere and yet it's all guided by the steady hand of his words, carrying it to the only conclusions, checking us out so he can pause for a second and get ready to check in again ten years later to see how Harry is doing. In Harry Angstrom Updike has created as close to a real person (a real American, since he's so shaped by time and place) in all his imperfections and screwed up traits than most of us will ever see. People who say that it's "about nothing" miss the point. People who say "you can cut a lot of it out" miss the point. It's a prose photograph, showcasing all the messy details in all their glory, the same way you can't erase the house in the background because it clashes with the color of your shirt. You have to just take it all in, and make what you can of it.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rabbit: The Next Generation, May 30, 2001

By 

IRA Ross (LYNDHURST, NJ United States 07071) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rabbit Is Rich (Paperback)

In this third installment of the Rabbit series, circa 1979/1980, we find Harry ("Rabbit") Angstom confronted by inflation, gas shortages, the Carter Administration's crisis of confidence, and most importantly by his son, Nelson. Nelson, who is now in his 20's, desparately wants to work as a salesman in Rabbit's Toyota dealership, even though that would mean displacing the company's top salesman. Harry feels that Nelson lacks the necessary maturity and competence for the position and wants him to return to college in Ohio. To complicate matters, the dealership is now owned by Janice and by Rabbit's mother-in-law, who inherited the firm from Rabbit's late father-in-law. The women are on Nelson's side and, of course, gang up on Rabbit.

These are only a very few of the many complications in this great novel. Updike further develops the Harry/Nelson father and son relationship that was begun in _Rabbit Redux_. Updike has an uncanny ability to write realistic dialogue. The reader is able to gets into the heart and head of Nelson, whose anguish is palpable. It is the anguish of a young man who desperately wants to break away from his family and the past, and to attain personal responsibility, while seriously questioning his readiness for independence. Nelson, thus, must not only struggle with his feelings about a very pregnant girlfriend who he feels it his responsibilty to marry and to support, but also with some very painful memories for which he severely blames his father. Mutual resentments felt by both the son AND the father are revealed. Both admit a fear that Nelson may be doomed to repeat the same mistakes made years earlier by Rabbit.

The novel also realistically presents the various sexual insecurities of the average middle-aged male. Who else best represents the aging, average American male, but Harry Angstrom? Happily, Rabbit discovers much that is positive about himself in an interesting and sensitively portrayed (and unexpected) encounter with a friend's wife.

I highly recommend _Rabbit Is Rich_ to everyone who truly appreciates excellent writing and rich characterizations.