Kirkus-Style Review of Rabbit is Rich by John Updike

An immense addition to the Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom universe, this novel is a study in the dynamic and fascinating qualities of mundanity.

This third installment of the “Rabbit” novels finds our “hero” counting his revenue stream from the vast display windows of his wife and mother-in-law’s Toyota dealership.  Now, Rabbit does own something like 25% of the company, but he also employees his wife’s former lover, lives with his wife and mother-in-law in his mother-in-law’s house, and has a son, Nelson, he’s unable to connect with or even coerce into going back to college.  But still, Rabbit is rich.  The gas crisis of the Carter administration doesn’t seem to touch him (in fact, Toyotas with their enviable gas mileage ratings are sitting pretty high on the market), he’s a member of the up-and-coming country club and Rotary Club with friends that advise him on when to play the gold market, he’s taken up jogging again, and he even seems to be immune to getting properly mugged in the degraded downtown of his main domicile, Brewer, PA.  Not to mention, Rabbit has a story teller that displays uncommon insights like, “When you think of the dead, you got to be grateful,” “The great thing about the dead, they make space,” and ‘“Course on the golf with a goose club,” Janice (Rabbit’s wife) giggles.  Someday what would give him great pleasure would be to take a large round rock and crush her skull in with it.’  So, maybe not everything is as hunky-dory as it would seem. 

Updike does tell a very common, social historical narrative of life in 1979-80 that nevertheless comes alive under his masterful hand for prose, insight, and even stream-of-consciousness character development.  There are several instances where the sentences run into one another and carry the reader forward as quickly as Brewer’s Running Horse River.  This comes to the reader one evening while Rabbit is running:

Not enough room in the world.  People came north from the sun belt in Egypt and lived in heated houses and now the heat is being used up, just the oil for the showroom and offices and garage has doubled since ’74 when he first saw the Springer Motors books … and when you try to cut it down to where the President says, the men in the garage complain, they have to work with their bare hands … guys under thirty now just will not work without comfort … socialism … heat tends to rise in a big space like that … if they built it now they’d put in twenty inches of insulation, if the Pope is so crazy about babies why doesn’t he try to keep them warm?

Rabbit as a “hero” is complex, sometimes disturbing, mostly likeable, and absolutely an everyman.  His story is not so dissimilar to many of ours, in which we’re pushed along by the faded glory of former accomplishments, accumulation of money, sex, and something concrete to call our own, some kind of forward motion even after we’ve stopped running and might in many ways be called rich.  Not for the faint of heart due to its nearly 500 pages, its placement in the other “Rabbit” novels, and its graphic sexual content, Rabbit is Rich is still an engrossing read and one of the better Pulitzer Prize-winning novels I’ve had the opportunity to explore.