Rabbit Is Rich (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"The reviewers seemed to be under the impression that the hero was a terrible character. It's incredible! No, I think it's the most interesting American novel I've read in quite a long time"

-- Mary McCarthy, interviewed in The Paris Review

"The power of the novel comes from a sense, not absolutely unworthy of Thomas Hardy, that the universe hangs over our fates like a great sullen hopeless sky. There is real pain in the book, and a touch of awe"

-- Norman Mailer, Esquire

"...An American protest against all the attempts to impress upon us the 'healthy, life-loving and comic' as our standard for novels. It is sexy, in bad taste, violent, and basically cynical. And good luck to it."

-- Angus Wilson, naming three Books of the Year in the Observer

And Rabbit Redux

"Against all odds, Rabbit Redux is a sequel that succeeds; it is in every respect uncannily superior to its distinguished predecessor and deserves to achieve even greater critical and popular acclaim."

-- Brendan Gill, The New Yorker

"I can think of no stronger vindication of the claims of essentially realistic fiction than this extraordinary synthesis of the disparate elements of contemporary experience. Rabbit Redux is a great achievement, by far the most audacious and successful book Updike has written."

-- Richard Locke, The New York Times Book Review -- Review --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"The reviewers seemed to be under the impression that the hero was a terrible character. It's incredible! No, I think it's the most interesting American novel I've read in quite a long time"

-- Mary McCarthy, interviewed in The Paris Review

"The power of the novel comes from a sense, not absolutely unworthy of Thomas Hardy, that the universe hangs over our fates like a great sullen hopeless sky. There is real pain in the book, and a touch of awe"

-- Norman Mailer, Esquire

"...An American protest against all the attempts to impress upon us the 'healthy, life-loving and comic' as our standard for novels. It is sexy, in bad taste, violent, and basically cynical. And good luck to it."

-- Angus Wilson, naming three Books of the Year in the Observer

And Rabbit Redux

"Against all odds, Rabbit Redux is a sequel that succeeds; it is in every respect uncannily superior to its distinguished predecessor and deserves to achieve even greater critical and popular acclaim."

-- Brendan Gill, The New Yorker

"I can think of no stronger vindication of the claims of essentially realistic fiction than this extraordinary synthesis of the disparate elements of contemporary experience. Rabbit Redux is a great achievement, by far the most audacious and successful book Updike has written."

-- Richard Locke, The New York Times Book Review


From the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (August 27, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0449911829
• ISBN-13: 978-0449911822
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #44,683 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 23 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)

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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Where "Wife Swap" isn't just a T.V. show., December 4, 2005

By	trainreader (Montclair, N.J.) - See all my reviews

(I made a mistake with the stars, it should be four). As stated in my recent reviews of "Rabbit Run" and "Rabbit Redux," I purchased the Rabbit tetralogy in its single volume form, and am attempting to read it straight through. I'll admit it, during some parts of "Rabbit Run," with Upike's occasionally ponderous prose, and Rabbit's amoral ways, I had my doubts about finishing. But, perhaps because I've simply grown accustomed to Updike's style, and Rabbit's sense of morality (or lack thereof), I enjoyed "Rabbit Redux," and "Rabbit is Rich," alot.

As with the two previous Rabbit novels, in "Rabbit is Rich" we continue to learn about Updike's/Rabbit's fear/obsession with: aging, death, children, suburbia, race, sexual preferences, breasts, genitalia and sex, sex, sex. We also get to learn something about golf and sailing techniques, and how to swap spouses on a vacation without, apparently, any guilt or consequences. Lest I sound sarcastic, I want to make one thing clear: "Rabbit is Rich" is well-written and compelling, and I can certainly understand why Updike is considered one of America's best contemporary novelists.

In "Rabbit is Rich," with the backdrop of the end of the Carter presidency (e.g. high inflation, gas shortages, and Americans held hostage in Iran), Harry Angstrom has taken over his late father-in-law's car dealership, specializing in Toyota's, and has proudly joined the ranks of the upper-middle class. He's fortunate to have a dependable right hand man, Charlie Stavros, also his closest friend, and his wife Janice's former lover (although that, surprisingly, doesn't stand in the way of their friendship). Rabbit's chief nemesis is his son, Nelson, who has returned home before completing college with a female friend, obviously running away from something. Nelson wants to join his parent's auto dealership to sell used convertibles, and Rabbit correctly deduces that Nelson is making the same mistakes in life as he did. Their love-hate relationship consumes much of the book.

Another problem that disturbs Rabbit's relative bliss has to do with his meeting a young woman at the dealership who he believes might be his illegitimate daughter, because she looks so much like Ruth, the prostitute he had an affair with 20 years earlier. Less significant is Rabbit's frequent fantasizing about getting rid of Janice, and hooking up with the younger wife of one of his golf buddies. Rabbit has obvious personality shortfalls, but some people seem to like him a great deal (especially the wife of yet another golf buddy, who is stricken with Lupus).

Anyway, I thought I would quote two good samples of sentences which demonstrate Updike's extraordinary descriptive writing:

Example one: "She breathed that air he'd forgotten, of high-school loveliness, come uninvited to bloom in the shadow of railroad overpasses, alongside telephone poles, within earshot of highways with battered aluminum center strips, out of mothers gone to lard and fathers ground down by gray days of work and more work, in an America littered with bottlecaps, and pull-tabs and pieces of broken muffler."

Example two: "The town he runs through is dark, full of slanty alleyways and sidewalks cracked and tipped from underneath, whole cement slabs lifted up by roots like crypt lids in a horror movie, the dead reach up, they catch at his heels."

Is it any wonder that critics rave about Updike's descriptive powers? Although Updike's Rabbit series isn't for everyone, I have come to appreciate more and more, with each successive Rabbit book, what an extraordinary writer he is.

7 of 7 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 (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Rabbit is Rich (Mass Market 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.