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Rabbit Is Rich

by: John Updike
en

0449911829  9780449911822 

 


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Book Description:

Winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Ten years after RABBIT REDUX, Harry Angstrom has come to enjoy prosperity as the Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors. The rest of the world may be falling to pieces, but Harrry's doing all right. That is, until his son returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to his lot....


From the Paperback edition.



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Rabbit is Rich is the third of five John Updike Rabbit novels, all of which focus on their central character Harry Angstrom. In Rabbit is Rich, Harry Angstrom has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of a Toyota agency in Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is falling, gas lines are lengthening, the President collapses while running in a marathon, and double-digit inflation coincides with a deflation of national confidence. Nevertheless, Harry Angstrom feels in good shape, ready to enjoy life at last until his son, Nelson, returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to his lot. New characters and old populate these scenes from Rabbit's middle age, as he continues, in his erratic fashion, to pursue happiness.

 


Date: 2007-09-12   Rating: 5
Review:

the american consumer

Rabbit is Rich is a vast compendium of detail and more detail about American life in the 1979 and 1980. Updike clutters the novel with overviews of Consumer Report articles, magazine ads, TV shows, the every present demand of things to be bought and sold, money to be exchanged for goods and services. And of course, this is the point. Rabbit is rich, and these riches bring with them a measure of both security and insecurity. He can make love to Janice of a bed of South African Krugerrand, but not stop his son as accepting a snow mobile as a trade in for a car on the family Toyota lot. He can hold his first granddaughter in his lap and realize that she is the last nail in his coffin while he yearns to find the grown daughter he may or may not have fathered. Rabbit is Rich presents a nuanced portrait of all its characters, and we get to see all their beauty and ugliness without a shred of sentimentality or bias. This makes for difficult reading at times, but this is mitigated by Updike's upfront narrative style, the ease and proficiency of his prose; the reader feels secure in the hands of this narration. We are being taken on a journey, for good or ill, and we will get there in good shape or bad.



Date: 2007-04-25   Rating: 5
Review:

Flush times for Harry Angstrom

This is the third of the four Rabbit novels. Ten more years have elapsed since the end of the second novel (RABBIT REDUX), and by now things are looking up for Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. He's been working in his father-in-law's Toyota dealership these ten years, becoming the head of it after Fred Springer dies (though crafty Fred has left 51% of the ownership to his daughter Janice and wife Bessie), and these are flush times. But not everything is perfect: Harry still has troubles with his son Nelson, who works with him at the dealership and is heavy into drugs. In tone, this is the lightest and most comical of the Rabbit books, achieved mainly by Updike by giving all the women in the book the upper hand. There are also many individual comic scenes, most dealing with Harry's new-found wealth and materialism, and also sexual situations. (The mate swapping scene, which goes from disappointment to delight for Harry, and eventually leads to a long-term affair for Harry and Thelma, is wonderfully developed.) Winner of the Pulitzer and National and American Book Awards, this is definitely John Updike at the peak of his form.



Date: 2006-07-06   Rating: 4
Review:

Is Rabbit content?

When we join (or rejoin) Rabbit in 1979, he has been the general manager of old Fred Springer's (his wife Janice's deceased dad) Toyota dealership for several years with prospects looking good in the midst of a gasoline crunch. Rabbit, that is Harry Angstrom, is hardly rich but he is content and overweight, his life revolving mostly around country club life for those with varying amounts of new money.

But the rockiness of Rabbit's past bubbles just below the surface. When a young girl comes with a boyfriend to look at Toyota's, Rabbit immediately suspects she is his daughter from a fling some twenty years prior. And his son Nelson has returned home with a girl in tow completely undecided about his future which rekindles past father-son antagonisms.

Harry is not a particularly remarkable character; he is not very reflective, though he keeps abreast of current affairs. He is reasonably content to take life day by day with a sometimes obsession for women. The book is basically a slice-of-life book. Using remarkable powers of observation, description, and insight, the author looks at middle-age, middle-class issues of marriage, aging, boredom, children, parents, infidelity, work, worries, etc. At times the various descriptions of every nook and cranny of the small PA towns where Rabbit was raised and still lives become somewhat tedious.

There is no plot to speak of. The book follows the life of an aging Rabbit for about six months and that is sufficient time for the author to let us all know what life is like for him or those similarly situated.



Date: 2005-12-05   Rating: 3
Review:

Where "Wife Swap" isn't just a T.V. show.

(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.



Date: 2005-06-12   Rating: 5
Review:

Everything hits at once

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.