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Rabbit Angstrom #3
Rabbit Is Rich
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 Harry'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....
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 Harry'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....
545 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 1981
343 people are currently reading
13.1k people want to read
About the author
John Updike
758books2,352followersJohn Hoyer Updike was an American writer. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike is well known for his careful craftsmanship and prolific writing, having published 22 novels and more than a dozen short story collections as well as poetry, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker since the 1950s. His works often explore sex, faith, and death, and their inter-relationships.
He died of lung cancer at age 76.
He died of lung cancer at age 76.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 765 reviews
October 30, 2017
Ah, you bad, bad boy, Mr. John Updike.
It's 1979, Jimmy Carter is president, and it's a good time for selling Toyotas. Rabbit is head salesman at his late father-in-law's car dealership. He's still married to Janice. He's buddies with Charlie, his wife's former lover. And, he's rich. He belongs to a club, he drives a nice car, he's buying a house, he's taking vacations, he's ... well, he's having a swinging old time.
Sounds good, right? Well, the fly in the ointment is always there for Rabbit, whether it is his constantly wandering eye, his college dropout son causing all kinds of commotion, or the apparition of a girl who looks like she might be his daughter, the fruit of his three month affair almost two decades before. The reality is that despite everything, he's still "caught" in life. His wife and mother in law still call the shots at Springer Motors. His riches are all hinged on his marriage.
This was a HUGE improvement on . Updike does a phenomenal job of placing us in a time, with bell bottoms, soap opera watching and LeCars. Rabbit is still as compelling a character as ever, making astute internal observations in his sex-soaked brain. The writing is still encroyable, that distinctive poetic prose that flies to the heavens and also swoops into the mire, not afraid to get dirty.
Speaking of which, we get real down and dirty in this book. It's as raunchy as Rabbit's mind. The good, the bad, and the ugly are here for all to see. It's a veritable amusement park, with something for everyone. Some of it heated and erotic, some of it truly questionable (sleep-sex is non consensual in my books), some of it adventurous and kinky. Much would have been fairly shocking when it was published in 1981, and it impresses me that something so racy would make it through the Pulitzer screening process. I am also impressed that Updike makes 'middle aged' sex so lively and, well, sexy.
Having said all that, I do need to mention that not everything was roses for me in this read.
While I knew what I was getting into - this is the 3rd Rabbit book, I know by now he's no sweetheart - at times, it was too heavy on testosterone. Just at times, mind you, since I like testosterone. But during these times, as a female reader, it felt exclusionary (see: continued use of the C word), seen through a male's perspective by a male who doesn't really like women, even though he wants to have sex with most of them. And, at times, it felt over the top (see: imagining what his daughter's pubic hair might look like... WTF, Updike?).
At the end of the day though, I can't give it less than five stars. He won me over with his ruthless, bad-boy writing, with his complex characterization and understanding of human nature. And of course the sex. One thing's for certain, Updike knew how to use his, er, pen.
It's 1979, Jimmy Carter is president, and it's a good time for selling Toyotas. Rabbit is head salesman at his late father-in-law's car dealership. He's still married to Janice. He's buddies with Charlie, his wife's former lover. And, he's rich. He belongs to a club, he drives a nice car, he's buying a house, he's taking vacations, he's ... well, he's having a swinging old time.
Sounds good, right? Well, the fly in the ointment is always there for Rabbit, whether it is his constantly wandering eye, his college dropout son causing all kinds of commotion, or the apparition of a girl who looks like she might be his daughter, the fruit of his three month affair almost two decades before. The reality is that despite everything, he's still "caught" in life. His wife and mother in law still call the shots at Springer Motors. His riches are all hinged on his marriage.
This was a HUGE improvement on . Updike does a phenomenal job of placing us in a time, with bell bottoms, soap opera watching and LeCars. Rabbit is still as compelling a character as ever, making astute internal observations in his sex-soaked brain. The writing is still encroyable, that distinctive poetic prose that flies to the heavens and also swoops into the mire, not afraid to get dirty.
Speaking of which, we get real down and dirty in this book. It's as raunchy as Rabbit's mind. The good, the bad, and the ugly are here for all to see. It's a veritable amusement park, with something for everyone. Some of it heated and erotic, some of it truly questionable (sleep-sex is non consensual in my books), some of it adventurous and kinky. Much would have been fairly shocking when it was published in 1981, and it impresses me that something so racy would make it through the Pulitzer screening process. I am also impressed that Updike makes 'middle aged' sex so lively and, well, sexy.
Having said all that, I do need to mention that not everything was roses for me in this read.
While I knew what I was getting into - this is the 3rd Rabbit book, I know by now he's no sweetheart - at times, it was too heavy on testosterone. Just at times, mind you, since I like testosterone. But during these times, as a female reader, it felt exclusionary (see: continued use of the C word), seen through a male's perspective by a male who doesn't really like women, even though he wants to have sex with most of them. And, at times, it felt over the top (see: imagining what his daughter's pubic hair might look like... WTF, Updike?).
At the end of the day though, I can't give it less than five stars. He won me over with his ruthless, bad-boy writing, with his complex characterization and understanding of human nature. And of course the sex. One thing's for certain, Updike knew how to use his, er, pen.
November 5, 2017
When Harry “Rabbit� Angstrom begins to weep at his son Nelson's wedding, the ladies stare at him with surprise and become wistful, witnessing these unlikely, raw emotions. Aw, heck, ladies would you just look at Rabbit, mid-life, becoming a big softie? One woman quickly hands him her grubby handkerchief. The poor dear!
Oh, if only they knew. . . that, as the 46-year-old Rabbit stares at the page of his prayer book, which he thinks looks as “white and blank as the nape of Nelson's poor mute frail neck,� he is not weeping over how bittersweet and wonderful it all is, that his baby boy is growing up, marrying the woman he has impregnated and is taking his marriage vows. Nope. He's thinking how his son is becoming as trapped as he perceives himself to be. And, he's thinking. . . Run, Nelson, Run!
You see, Rabbit's got a bad case of “creeping middle-itis,� and he wants his son to run from the car lot that belongs to their family, wants him to run from the marriage he is entering, and wants him to run from the responsibilities of impending parenthood, too.
And why wouldn't Rabbit want his son to run? Running's what Rabbit does best. He did it in Rabbit, Run, he did it in Rabbit, Redux, and he's doing it all over again, here in Rabbit is Rich.
And, the worst part is. . . Rabbit doesn't know WHAT in hell he's running from. He's convinced himself it's women, even asks his son, “What're you going to do when you run out of women to tell you what do?�
But, that's all bullsh*t, isn't it, Rabbit? You're running from WOMEN? This, from a man who “thinks of the girl's long thigh as she stretched her way into the back seat and imagines he smells vanilla. Cunt would be a good flavor of ice cream, Sealtest ought to work on it.�
You LOVE women, Rabbit, so stop calling them “cunts,� and grow up.
You're running from yourself, Rabbit, so stop blaming it on the women around you, and stop acting caged by a life you made. (And looks pretty good, too, damn it.) Grow up, Rabbit, you're such a jackass!!
Oh, but, Rabbit, I can't help myself. I can't do anything else but love you as I hate you. Mr. Updike took on such an odyssey here, in creating you, and giving us, his lucky readers, this Tetralogy of Rabbit.
And, Mr. Updike. John. Dear, I know you're dead. . . but, can we talk?
Oh, if only they knew. . . that, as the 46-year-old Rabbit stares at the page of his prayer book, which he thinks looks as “white and blank as the nape of Nelson's poor mute frail neck,� he is not weeping over how bittersweet and wonderful it all is, that his baby boy is growing up, marrying the woman he has impregnated and is taking his marriage vows. Nope. He's thinking how his son is becoming as trapped as he perceives himself to be. And, he's thinking. . . Run, Nelson, Run!
You see, Rabbit's got a bad case of “creeping middle-itis,� and he wants his son to run from the car lot that belongs to their family, wants him to run from the marriage he is entering, and wants him to run from the responsibilities of impending parenthood, too.
And why wouldn't Rabbit want his son to run? Running's what Rabbit does best. He did it in Rabbit, Run, he did it in Rabbit, Redux, and he's doing it all over again, here in Rabbit is Rich.
And, the worst part is. . . Rabbit doesn't know WHAT in hell he's running from. He's convinced himself it's women, even asks his son, “What're you going to do when you run out of women to tell you what do?�
But, that's all bullsh*t, isn't it, Rabbit? You're running from WOMEN? This, from a man who “thinks of the girl's long thigh as she stretched her way into the back seat and imagines he smells vanilla. Cunt would be a good flavor of ice cream, Sealtest ought to work on it.�
You LOVE women, Rabbit, so stop calling them “cunts,� and grow up.
You're running from yourself, Rabbit, so stop blaming it on the women around you, and stop acting caged by a life you made. (And looks pretty good, too, damn it.) Grow up, Rabbit, you're such a jackass!!
Oh, but, Rabbit, I can't help myself. I can't do anything else but love you as I hate you. Mr. Updike took on such an odyssey here, in creating you, and giving us, his lucky readers, this Tetralogy of Rabbit.
And, Mr. Updike. John. Dear, I know you're dead. . . but, can we talk?
February 4, 2025
After reading number two in this series (Rabbit Redux, 3-stars), Rabbit is Rich has John Updike smashing the ball all over the park, he’s back to his deliciously, wicked, best.
We catch Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom in 1979. After the disasters that occurred in Rabbit Redux, things appear to have settled down for Rabbit and his wife Janice. Rabbit is the boss of the car yard handed down from his father-in-law, selling Toyota’s with his mate Charlie (the bloke who ran away with Janice in a previous instalment). Little Japanese cars seem to be rising in popularity due to the petrol crisis during this time.
They live with Ma Springer, Janice’s mum, and things are okay. I quite liked Ma Springer, yeah sure she’s a bit of an old battleaxe and the walls are thin � but she seems happy to have them around. It’s not long before the troublesome son, Nelson, comes to stay � he wants to drop out of college (he’s almost graduated for heaven’s sake). This pisses Rabbit off, no end. The relationship between father and son is fractured on a good day. Nelson has come back with a young woman called Melanie � girlfriend? Who knows? But of course � we are treated to Rabbit’s lecherous thoughts, which are ribald and comprehensive. Some of his musings made me cringe, and others made me laugh. Again, and I am qualified to say this, Updike hits the bullseye with the machinations of the male mind, ladies.
When dragging a pile of old Penthouse’s and Playboy’s to the trash - The full load of magazines makes the trash baller almost too heavy to lift. A ton of c*nt. He lugs it downstairs…�. Yes, if you’re new to Updike � this is what you’re in for.
We are then, quite happily, dragged into drama on steroids (truly). There’s Nelson’s apathy about life, and antipathy towards his Dad, Nelson’s propensity to damage cars, Nelson’s desire to take over the car-yard, Melissa’s body, the Angstrom’s circle of ‘interesting friends�, the politics of the time � gas, Iran, Carter (RIP), wife and husband swapping (explicit ((more explicit)), than usual), money and life in general, all in a town called Brewer.
Rabbit could never understand why people can’t drink seawater. It can’t be any worse than mixing Coke and potato chips
Updike’s overly descriptive writing is magic. If you read this and it becomes too much, put the book down and return to it with fresh eyes. You do not want to miss a beat. Whether it be the descriptions of the scenery as Rabbits drives to work or the curves of Pru’s (another girlfriend of Nelson), buttocks � it’s the best. Not Pru’s buttocks, the writing.
�.when he bent his face close to old Ruth’s in the light of the door, a glitter there, on the tired skin beneath here eyes, and by the idiotic thought, which it seems he should bottle and sell, that our tears are always young, the saltwater stays the same from the cradle, as she said, to grave
We are set up nicely now for #4, Rabbit at Rest. I must make sure to read this one within a few months � to remember what happened previously. It does take a while to remember and catch up otherwise.
I’m wondering if I’d like to sit down and have a beer with Rabbit.
This book also makes me wonder about my own life, mistakes, relationships with women and family, career and all the difficulties experienced � but also finding those wee nuggets of pleasure that pop-up from time to time.
5 Stars - of course.
We catch Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom in 1979. After the disasters that occurred in Rabbit Redux, things appear to have settled down for Rabbit and his wife Janice. Rabbit is the boss of the car yard handed down from his father-in-law, selling Toyota’s with his mate Charlie (the bloke who ran away with Janice in a previous instalment). Little Japanese cars seem to be rising in popularity due to the petrol crisis during this time.
They live with Ma Springer, Janice’s mum, and things are okay. I quite liked Ma Springer, yeah sure she’s a bit of an old battleaxe and the walls are thin � but she seems happy to have them around. It’s not long before the troublesome son, Nelson, comes to stay � he wants to drop out of college (he’s almost graduated for heaven’s sake). This pisses Rabbit off, no end. The relationship between father and son is fractured on a good day. Nelson has come back with a young woman called Melanie � girlfriend? Who knows? But of course � we are treated to Rabbit’s lecherous thoughts, which are ribald and comprehensive. Some of his musings made me cringe, and others made me laugh. Again, and I am qualified to say this, Updike hits the bullseye with the machinations of the male mind, ladies.
When dragging a pile of old Penthouse’s and Playboy’s to the trash - The full load of magazines makes the trash baller almost too heavy to lift. A ton of c*nt. He lugs it downstairs…�. Yes, if you’re new to Updike � this is what you’re in for.
We are then, quite happily, dragged into drama on steroids (truly). There’s Nelson’s apathy about life, and antipathy towards his Dad, Nelson’s propensity to damage cars, Nelson’s desire to take over the car-yard, Melissa’s body, the Angstrom’s circle of ‘interesting friends�, the politics of the time � gas, Iran, Carter (RIP), wife and husband swapping (explicit ((more explicit)), than usual), money and life in general, all in a town called Brewer.
Rabbit could never understand why people can’t drink seawater. It can’t be any worse than mixing Coke and potato chips
Updike’s overly descriptive writing is magic. If you read this and it becomes too much, put the book down and return to it with fresh eyes. You do not want to miss a beat. Whether it be the descriptions of the scenery as Rabbits drives to work or the curves of Pru’s (another girlfriend of Nelson), buttocks � it’s the best. Not Pru’s buttocks, the writing.
�.when he bent his face close to old Ruth’s in the light of the door, a glitter there, on the tired skin beneath here eyes, and by the idiotic thought, which it seems he should bottle and sell, that our tears are always young, the saltwater stays the same from the cradle, as she said, to grave
We are set up nicely now for #4, Rabbit at Rest. I must make sure to read this one within a few months � to remember what happened previously. It does take a while to remember and catch up otherwise.
I’m wondering if I’d like to sit down and have a beer with Rabbit.
This book also makes me wonder about my own life, mistakes, relationships with women and family, career and all the difficulties experienced � but also finding those wee nuggets of pleasure that pop-up from time to time.
5 Stars - of course.
April 23, 2012
Glib Capsule Review:
Rabbit cracks wise. Rabbit talks about cars. Rabbit scrutinises female anatomy. Rabbit bawls out no-good lowlife son. Rabbit’s actions receive entirely undeserved Harvard-strength descriptive torrent. Rabbit screws his wife. Rabbit fantasises about screwing his friend’s young wife. Rabbit makes racist or sexist remark. Rabbit thinks about daughter or dead Skeeter. Rabbit goes into four/five-page thought-stream with no paragraph breaks. Rabbit wants very much to have sexual intercourse with another lady. Rabbit isn’t really rich. Randomise these sentences for 423pp, that’s Rabbit is Rich.
Additional:
The third number in Updike’s tetralogy is a deliberately overweight, exhausting mess, centred almost entirely on Rabbit’s misadventures in opulence. For me, this is the novel’s greatest flaw: in Rabbit, Run, Updike wrote so eloquently from several POVs, notably from Janice’s, but here, aside from one or two swings to Nelson’s (Rabbit’s son) perspective, we’re trapped in Rabbit’s head for the long haul. Updike’s prose has gotten saggier and baggier since the 1950s—no writer but Nabokov can really sustain hyper-stylised prose over a 423pp novel (Ada being a bad example), so the marshy swamps of description tend to blur into one big OH THAT’S NICE, BUT SO WHAT? As for this comment that Rabbit is Rich is where Updike expanded upon the technical innovations in Ulysses—balls! Updike wrote breathtaking stream-of-consciousness prose in the first book, using Joycean borrowings to devastating effect. This book contains one clumsy attempt at thought-stream prose early on, replacing this with comma-drenched clumps of dullness for the duration. If Updike’s only intention was to write a supersize novel to reflect Rabbit’s distending gut and bank account, this is disappointing. His reluctance to abandon his hero’s relentless sexual musings to explore the family in greater depth is also disappointing. I wasn’t expecting change in the characters—we know they’ll remain appalling wretches until the final breath—but I needed more originality in the telling. Apart from these gripes, I lapped up the story OK.
Rabbit cracks wise. Rabbit talks about cars. Rabbit scrutinises female anatomy. Rabbit bawls out no-good lowlife son. Rabbit’s actions receive entirely undeserved Harvard-strength descriptive torrent. Rabbit screws his wife. Rabbit fantasises about screwing his friend’s young wife. Rabbit makes racist or sexist remark. Rabbit thinks about daughter or dead Skeeter. Rabbit goes into four/five-page thought-stream with no paragraph breaks. Rabbit wants very much to have sexual intercourse with another lady. Rabbit isn’t really rich. Randomise these sentences for 423pp, that’s Rabbit is Rich.
Additional:
The third number in Updike’s tetralogy is a deliberately overweight, exhausting mess, centred almost entirely on Rabbit’s misadventures in opulence. For me, this is the novel’s greatest flaw: in Rabbit, Run, Updike wrote so eloquently from several POVs, notably from Janice’s, but here, aside from one or two swings to Nelson’s (Rabbit’s son) perspective, we’re trapped in Rabbit’s head for the long haul. Updike’s prose has gotten saggier and baggier since the 1950s—no writer but Nabokov can really sustain hyper-stylised prose over a 423pp novel (Ada being a bad example), so the marshy swamps of description tend to blur into one big OH THAT’S NICE, BUT SO WHAT? As for this comment that Rabbit is Rich is where Updike expanded upon the technical innovations in Ulysses—balls! Updike wrote breathtaking stream-of-consciousness prose in the first book, using Joycean borrowings to devastating effect. This book contains one clumsy attempt at thought-stream prose early on, replacing this with comma-drenched clumps of dullness for the duration. If Updike’s only intention was to write a supersize novel to reflect Rabbit’s distending gut and bank account, this is disappointing. His reluctance to abandon his hero’s relentless sexual musings to explore the family in greater depth is also disappointing. I wasn’t expecting change in the characters—we know they’ll remain appalling wretches until the final breath—but I needed more originality in the telling. Apart from these gripes, I lapped up the story OK.
July 18, 2024
After experiencing an early midlife crisis in book two of this series, Rabbit Angstrom is now in his midlife period. His son has grown to a young man and is now the mirror-image of what Rabbit was at that age - uncertain of himself.
Rabbit has seemingly straightened his own life out and doesn't need this. He'll do what he can to help his son out. Or will he?
I'm thoroughly enjoying the reading of this award-winning - this book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction - series of five from start to finish.
I whole-heartedly recommend to all the reading of the Rabbit Angstrom series by John Updike for the human element that he expresses so well with his superb writing.
Now, on to book four.
Rabbit has seemingly straightened his own life out and doesn't need this. He'll do what he can to help his son out. Or will he?
I'm thoroughly enjoying the reading of this award-winning - this book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction - series of five from start to finish.
I whole-heartedly recommend to all the reading of the Rabbit Angstrom series by John Updike for the human element that he expresses so well with his superb writing.
Now, on to book four.
February 9, 2017
Watching Rabbit Angstrom at almost my age was fascinating. The text is deliciously Proustian and I love the perspective on the 70s. The world microcosm Brewster is alive fascinating as a study of America in the waning years of the 20th century's hangover after the 60s. His descriptions of human relationships are among the most realistic I have ever read. A must.
A much better book IHMO than Redux, Rabbit is never really rich, but the text is incredibly rich in the relationships - particularly between Rabbit and his son - and fantastic writing. It is perhaps my favorite of the series.
A much better book IHMO than Redux, Rabbit is never really rich, but the text is incredibly rich in the relationships - particularly between Rabbit and his son - and fantastic writing. It is perhaps my favorite of the series.
October 21, 2018
This third decade of Rabbit’s shenanigans is... incredibly dull. Didn’t the 70’s include all that Disco & outrageous fashion and pre-80s outrageous & vapid opulence? It does exist in Rabbit’s (albeit OUR) America, but Rabbit has become such an old man (at the age of 46!) that he cannot enjoy his monetary glory at all. He worries still, not for the well being of his family, no, but mostly over his own selfish hide, his manly desires fulfilled (though mostly not). I hated the dialogue between the main couple and the country club bunnies; I hated that most of the time Rabbit and son talk about cars and materialistic stuff. This is the longest and least compelling of the novels� thus far. (To complete the tetralogy [I myself prefer the term ‘quadrilogy’] the final Angstrom novel, “Rabbit at Rest� is finally next on my queue.)
August 24, 2016
Rabbit is the great American schlub. He's perfectly mediocre. He's one of those guys whose best days were as a high school athlete and now he's growing a beer gut. He's got an okay job, he's a pretty shitty father, he's a pig, he loves Consumer Reports, he's racist but not so racist that he thinks of himself as racist. He's an everyday asshole.
Updike has managed to neither love nor hate him, just describe him. But he gets you deep enough into him that you find yourself feeling bad for him when he doesn't get to fuck some other guy's wife. So that's something.
Rabbit is Rich is set in 1979 as Rabbit hits middle age, his 40s. Updike gives a perfect view of American life on the cusp of the 80s - sunken living rooms, smoking while pregnant, the gas crisis. There's also a Balzacian specificity about finances - actual numbers for what middle class means in that age. Because Rabbit is not actually Rich. He's getting by.
Rich means Janice, in fact, as corny as that sounds. Rabbit and Janice have both cheated on each other in prior books; their marriage began because he knocked her up and has almost sputtered out numerous times, but they've somehow stumbled into liking each other at this point. ("A man fucks your wife," he muses, "it puts a new value on her, within limits.") I didn't see that coming. Updike is careful with this development - it's dangerously sentimental - and he pulls it off.
He pulls this whole book off, in fact, which is startling because after the excellent Rabbit, Run, the followup Rabbit Redux was bullshit. Updike makes a heroic comeback for this third book, the first to win a Pulitzer (the next one will too); it's the best so far.
Updike is of course the apotheosis of dick lit, just another old white guy writing about his penis, and we modern readers don't really crack open his books expecting to find something we recognize. But his understanding of Rabbit, his feel for human nature, is shocking. His use of sex scenes to push the plot forward is once again perfectly effective. When Rabbit pees on a lady, he pees for a reason.
And the writing, man. Updike continues to write in the present tense, casually pulling it off. He slips in and out of stream-of-consciousness, as if just to prove that he can do that too. He describes one person's voice "like bubbles of fat in water, every syllable." Another person "enunciates with such casual smiling sonorousness that his sentences seem to keep travelling around a corner after they are pronounced." A woman laughs "like change tossed on a counter." This is brilliant writing, always engaging, never standoffish, writing that makes you stop and laugh and think holy shit, I can't believe he came up with that.
This is the least eventful of the Rabbit books so far . Too much plot has been a flaw in the other two - a disastrous one in Rabbit Redux, a minor one in Rabbit, Run. Updike gooses you with it here but he's teasing, he pulls it back. Updike now realizes that he wants to write about an uneventful life, which is more interesting and more of a challenge. Rabbit is surprised, I think, to find himself at middle age and happyish. He's surprised to find that he loves his wife. He's surprised to find himself rich, or rich enough. I'm surprised to find Updike recovering from Rabbit Redux. We're all surprised here. This is better than we thought it would be.
Updike has managed to neither love nor hate him, just describe him. But he gets you deep enough into him that you find yourself feeling bad for him when he doesn't get to fuck some other guy's wife. So that's something.
Rabbit is Rich is set in 1979 as Rabbit hits middle age, his 40s. Updike gives a perfect view of American life on the cusp of the 80s - sunken living rooms, smoking while pregnant, the gas crisis. There's also a Balzacian specificity about finances - actual numbers for what middle class means in that age. Because Rabbit is not actually Rich. He's getting by.
Rich means Janice, in fact, as corny as that sounds. Rabbit and Janice have both cheated on each other in prior books; their marriage began because he knocked her up and has almost sputtered out numerous times, but they've somehow stumbled into liking each other at this point. ("A man fucks your wife," he muses, "it puts a new value on her, within limits.") I didn't see that coming. Updike is careful with this development - it's dangerously sentimental - and he pulls it off.
He pulls this whole book off, in fact, which is startling because after the excellent Rabbit, Run, the followup Rabbit Redux was bullshit. Updike makes a heroic comeback for this third book, the first to win a Pulitzer (the next one will too); it's the best so far.
Updike is of course the apotheosis of dick lit, just another old white guy writing about his penis, and we modern readers don't really crack open his books expecting to find something we recognize. But his understanding of Rabbit, his feel for human nature, is shocking. His use of sex scenes to push the plot forward is once again perfectly effective. When Rabbit pees on a lady, he pees for a reason.
And the writing, man. Updike continues to write in the present tense, casually pulling it off. He slips in and out of stream-of-consciousness, as if just to prove that he can do that too. He describes one person's voice "like bubbles of fat in water, every syllable." Another person "enunciates with such casual smiling sonorousness that his sentences seem to keep travelling around a corner after they are pronounced." A woman laughs "like change tossed on a counter." This is brilliant writing, always engaging, never standoffish, writing that makes you stop and laugh and think holy shit, I can't believe he came up with that.
This is the least eventful of the Rabbit books so far . Too much plot has been a flaw in the other two - a disastrous one in Rabbit Redux, a minor one in Rabbit, Run. Updike gooses you with it here but he's teasing, he pulls it back. Updike now realizes that he wants to write about an uneventful life, which is more interesting and more of a challenge. Rabbit is surprised, I think, to find himself at middle age and happyish. He's surprised to find that he loves his wife. He's surprised to find himself rich, or rich enough. I'm surprised to find Updike recovering from Rabbit Redux. We're all surprised here. This is better than we thought it would be.
November 17, 2023
Adrenalinã curatã. Forțã!
June 30, 2024
Rabbit is poor. You could give Rabbit ten million dollars in 1970s money and he would still be poor. This guy has no idea what the important or good things in life are. His mind stays in the gutter, he has no respect for other people, he has raised a son which is even worse than he is, and he is married to a harpy. I muster some sympathy for him now and again, (who wouldn’t feel sorry for this: there isn’t a corner of the Springer house where Harry feels able to breathe absolutely his own air., but mostly I think at this point in his life he is unredeemable.
In the hands of a lesser writer, Rabbit Angstrom would bring nothing worthwhile to the literary world, but John Updike somehow manages to make me see him as a reflection of his society, his age, his world. He is obsessed with women: his wife, a girl he hopes is his daughter from his affair in book one, his friends� wives (all of them). He never looks at any woman, with the possible exception of Janice’s mother, without speculating about her sexually, even those he professes to find unattractive. He obsesses over women, but he does not like them and he surely does not understand them.
He senses intelligence in her but intelligence in women has never much interested him.
Just as Rabbit does not like women, I do not like Rabbit, but I cannot seem to look away from the wreck his life has become. If he died tomorrow, what would he leave? Who would remember him? Why has he lived? He hasn’t even gotten that much out of life for himself. And, by the way, Rabbit’s tangible riches are simply middle-class money and a position of some authority at the car dealership–and even that is an illusion.
Rabbit’s son, Nelson, is a spoiled, misguided, self-centered piece of work. Oh yes, you could feel sorry for his floundering, but I find I don’t. He might not approved of Rabbit, but he is his father and he has provided for him well, so he doesn’t deserve this:
Mom-mom can’t last forever and when she kicks the bucket that leaves him and Mom in charge of the lot, with Dad up front like one of those life-size cardboard cutouts you used to see in car showrooms before cardboard became too expensive.
There is nothing to admire and little to redeem these characters, but then, John Updike knows how to turn the tables at the last moment and have the title make sense. Damn, Rabbit is rich.
In the hands of a lesser writer, Rabbit Angstrom would bring nothing worthwhile to the literary world, but John Updike somehow manages to make me see him as a reflection of his society, his age, his world. He is obsessed with women: his wife, a girl he hopes is his daughter from his affair in book one, his friends� wives (all of them). He never looks at any woman, with the possible exception of Janice’s mother, without speculating about her sexually, even those he professes to find unattractive. He obsesses over women, but he does not like them and he surely does not understand them.
He senses intelligence in her but intelligence in women has never much interested him.
Just as Rabbit does not like women, I do not like Rabbit, but I cannot seem to look away from the wreck his life has become. If he died tomorrow, what would he leave? Who would remember him? Why has he lived? He hasn’t even gotten that much out of life for himself. And, by the way, Rabbit’s tangible riches are simply middle-class money and a position of some authority at the car dealership–and even that is an illusion.
Rabbit’s son, Nelson, is a spoiled, misguided, self-centered piece of work. Oh yes, you could feel sorry for his floundering, but I find I don’t. He might not approved of Rabbit, but he is his father and he has provided for him well, so he doesn’t deserve this:
Mom-mom can’t last forever and when she kicks the bucket that leaves him and Mom in charge of the lot, with Dad up front like one of those life-size cardboard cutouts you used to see in car showrooms before cardboard became too expensive.
There is nothing to admire and little to redeem these characters, but then, John Updike knows how to turn the tables at the last moment and have the title make sense. Damn, Rabbit is rich.
January 12, 2022
La vita si dissolve dietro di noi mentre siamo ancora vivi
Leggere un romanzo nel momento adeguato è determinante per apprezzarlo. A trent'anni è troppo tardi per leggere kerouac e troppo presto per leggere Updike, questo pensavo prima di trovare nella postfazione:
Updike aveva spiegato che Corri, Coniglio era in parte una risposta a Sulla strada di Kerouac e inteso come una «dimostrazione realistica di cosa accade a un giovane padre di famiglia americano quando prende la strada»
Ho letto senza saperlo il terzo episodio di una tetralogia (*1), e l'ho letto nel momento adeguato. Se penso alla definizione “Grande romanzo americano� dico che io lo intendo così. La vicenda narrata abbraccia un numero limitato di giorni, ma lo fa in modo totale, tanto che sembra di essere a fianco del protagonista che li narra, Harry “Rabbit� Angstrom. Chi volesse affrontare Updike è bene che faccia un po' di palestra con Richard Ford, chi ha già letto Ford e l'ha trovato prolisso, passi oltre. Cinquecento lunghe pagine in cui Harry è diventato il mio coniglio da compagnia. Non sempre ero in sintonia con lui, ma se anche voi avete superato il mezzo del cammin di vostra vita, le sue considerazioni non vi lasceranno indefferenti. Harry non risparmia niente a chi lo legge, con lui si entra nelle toilettes degli amici, si finisce sotto le coperte (ho gradito le pagine erotiche, l'ossessione per la carota Cindy e la sorpresa dell'erba medica Thelma) ci si sente feticisti e guardoni ma se volessimo unirci alle critiche che suo figlio gli muove, lui ci risponderebbe:
Magari nella vita non avrò fatto granché di buono. Lo so benissimo. Ma non ho commesso il peccato piú grave. Non mi sono messo disteso in attesa della morte.
Ho apprezzato il romanzo, ho apprezzato lo stile (prolisso nel descrivere stati d'animo, sensazioni, ricordi, cioè prolisso nel peggiore dei modi per numerosi lettori, ma non per me) ho apprezzato l'ironia laterale, Updike non è mai diretto, gioca di sponda ma colpisce sempre la palla piena (le palle, a sentire i detrattori).
Dopo Steinbeck, Wilson, Yates, Malamud, la mia personale idea di “Grande romanzo americano� si arricchisce di un nuovo interprete: Updike.
La vicenda si svolge fra la fine del 1979 e i primi giorni del 1980 la colonna è quella scelta da Coniglio
Donna Summer- Hot Stuff
Bee Gees - Stayin' Alive
(*1)
Rabbit, Run (Corri, Coniglio, 1960)
Rabbit Redux (Il ritorno di Coniglio, 1971)
Rabbit is Rich (Sei ricco, Coniglio, 1981)
Rabbit At Rest (Riposa Coniglio, 1990)
Leggere un romanzo nel momento adeguato è determinante per apprezzarlo. A trent'anni è troppo tardi per leggere kerouac e troppo presto per leggere Updike, questo pensavo prima di trovare nella postfazione:
Updike aveva spiegato che Corri, Coniglio era in parte una risposta a Sulla strada di Kerouac e inteso come una «dimostrazione realistica di cosa accade a un giovane padre di famiglia americano quando prende la strada»
Ho letto senza saperlo il terzo episodio di una tetralogia (*1), e l'ho letto nel momento adeguato. Se penso alla definizione “Grande romanzo americano� dico che io lo intendo così. La vicenda narrata abbraccia un numero limitato di giorni, ma lo fa in modo totale, tanto che sembra di essere a fianco del protagonista che li narra, Harry “Rabbit� Angstrom. Chi volesse affrontare Updike è bene che faccia un po' di palestra con Richard Ford, chi ha già letto Ford e l'ha trovato prolisso, passi oltre. Cinquecento lunghe pagine in cui Harry è diventato il mio coniglio da compagnia. Non sempre ero in sintonia con lui, ma se anche voi avete superato il mezzo del cammin di vostra vita, le sue considerazioni non vi lasceranno indefferenti. Harry non risparmia niente a chi lo legge, con lui si entra nelle toilettes degli amici, si finisce sotto le coperte (ho gradito le pagine erotiche, l'ossessione per la carota Cindy e la sorpresa dell'erba medica Thelma) ci si sente feticisti e guardoni ma se volessimo unirci alle critiche che suo figlio gli muove, lui ci risponderebbe:
Magari nella vita non avrò fatto granché di buono. Lo so benissimo. Ma non ho commesso il peccato piú grave. Non mi sono messo disteso in attesa della morte.
Ho apprezzato il romanzo, ho apprezzato lo stile (prolisso nel descrivere stati d'animo, sensazioni, ricordi, cioè prolisso nel peggiore dei modi per numerosi lettori, ma non per me) ho apprezzato l'ironia laterale, Updike non è mai diretto, gioca di sponda ma colpisce sempre la palla piena (le palle, a sentire i detrattori).
Dopo Steinbeck, Wilson, Yates, Malamud, la mia personale idea di “Grande romanzo americano� si arricchisce di un nuovo interprete: Updike.
La vicenda si svolge fra la fine del 1979 e i primi giorni del 1980 la colonna è quella scelta da Coniglio
Donna Summer- Hot Stuff
Bee Gees - Stayin' Alive
(*1)
Rabbit, Run (Corri, Coniglio, 1960)
Rabbit Redux (Il ritorno di Coniglio, 1971)
Rabbit is Rich (Sei ricco, Coniglio, 1981)
Rabbit At Rest (Riposa Coniglio, 1990)
March 12, 2024
Falsă recenzie arogantă & nihilistă:
În timp ce fidelii maniaci ai noilor apariții își pierd vremea cu cine știe ce compilație a mai făcut Pîrvulescu sau cu ce o mai fi scormonit Niculescu prin epuiza(n)tul “interbelic�, capodopere reale adună praful uitării.
Am tot notat pe GR câteva nimicuri, impresii personale, despre cartea asta, pe măsură ce înaintam cu lectura. Acum nu prea mai am ce scrie; în primul rând, a fost un privilegiu s-o citesc!
Mă grăbesc să adaug că îi compătimesc pe cei care n-au reușit să aprecieze “Rabbit� cum se cuvine, la vremea citirii.
Dacă “Rabbit� nu te “mișcă�, literar vorbind, nu știu ce altceva te-ar putea urni din imobilism.
Seria a apărut în condiții grafice “cenușărești� (coperte ce se dezlipesc, oricâtă grijă ai avea; fonturi mici, înghesuite - impresie de ieftineală, deși fiecare volum din serie trecea de 40 de lei), la Humanitas, în Raftul Denisei.
Presupun că n-a fost destul de siropoasă pentru gustul “celebrei� care dă numele acestui “raft�, ca să merite un tipar mai acătării� (am mai scris aici cam aceleași lucruri și despre seria lui Richard Ford = Ziua Independenței etc)
Un real eveniment, așadar, tetralogia “Rabbit�! Compătimire pentru cei cărora le lipsește “organul� degustării ei depline. Notă proastă, dată editurii Humanitas, că n-o reeditează în ediție de lux (cum ar merita & cum procedează cu orice “operă� liiceană).
Iar acest al treilea volum, să descoperi uluit că e chiar mai bun, mai viu, mai alert, decât primele două� Cum poate un autor să-și mențină standardul atât de ridicat, în mod constant, sute de pagini, mai multe volume? Păi, uite-așa: Updike e unul dintre inegalabili.
Din păcate, stilul ăsta frust și din cale-afară de coroziv de a face literatură nu prea prinde la românași (nici, în sens mai îngust, la generația Z). Mai ales miorițele - carpete de librărie - fug ca de satana de scriitori enormi, ca: Updike, Roth, Bellow, Henry Miller�
În timp ce fidelii maniaci ai noilor apariții își pierd vremea cu cine știe ce compilație a mai făcut Pîrvulescu sau cu ce o mai fi scormonit Niculescu prin epuiza(n)tul “interbelic�, capodopere reale adună praful uitării.
Am tot notat pe GR câteva nimicuri, impresii personale, despre cartea asta, pe măsură ce înaintam cu lectura. Acum nu prea mai am ce scrie; în primul rând, a fost un privilegiu s-o citesc!
Mă grăbesc să adaug că îi compătimesc pe cei care n-au reușit să aprecieze “Rabbit� cum se cuvine, la vremea citirii.
Dacă “Rabbit� nu te “mișcă�, literar vorbind, nu știu ce altceva te-ar putea urni din imobilism.
Seria a apărut în condiții grafice “cenușărești� (coperte ce se dezlipesc, oricâtă grijă ai avea; fonturi mici, înghesuite - impresie de ieftineală, deși fiecare volum din serie trecea de 40 de lei), la Humanitas, în Raftul Denisei.
Presupun că n-a fost destul de siropoasă pentru gustul “celebrei� care dă numele acestui “raft�, ca să merite un tipar mai acătării� (am mai scris aici cam aceleași lucruri și despre seria lui Richard Ford = Ziua Independenței etc)
Un real eveniment, așadar, tetralogia “Rabbit�! Compătimire pentru cei cărora le lipsește “organul� degustării ei depline. Notă proastă, dată editurii Humanitas, că n-o reeditează în ediție de lux (cum ar merita & cum procedează cu orice “operă� liiceană).
Iar acest al treilea volum, să descoperi uluit că e chiar mai bun, mai viu, mai alert, decât primele două� Cum poate un autor să-și mențină standardul atât de ridicat, în mod constant, sute de pagini, mai multe volume? Păi, uite-așa: Updike e unul dintre inegalabili.
Din păcate, stilul ăsta frust și din cale-afară de coroziv de a face literatură nu prea prinde la românași (nici, în sens mai îngust, la generația Z). Mai ales miorițele - carpete de librărie - fug ca de satana de scriitori enormi, ca: Updike, Roth, Bellow, Henry Miller�
February 24, 2022
This is another terrific book in John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom series. Updike’s idea of revisiting Harry “Rabbit� Angstrom’s life at 10-year intervals is brilliant. Each book in the series is a detailed and intimate portrait of a short, pivotal period in Harry’s life. Every 10 years that portrait is updated and renewed. Reading the series is like checking in periodically with a friend whom you don’t see frequently and learning what’s new while you remember what you know about the friend’s past. And in the case of Harry Angstrom, checking in every 10 years is about right, because when you come right down to it, he’s not a very likable guy.
In Rabbit Is Rich, the third book of the series, it’s 1979. At 46 years old, Harry is still running—except now he’s mostly running in place. He’s 30 pounds overweight, with a paunch, and when he actually does go for a run, he ends up red-faced and out of breath.
Harry is doing well financially—he even invests in Krugerrands—and he thinks of himself as rich. The Toyota dealership that he has been managing since his father-in-law’s death is doing well, buoyed by the gasoline crisis. Harry is a member of the Rotary Club, and he has joined a country club, where he plays a lot of golf, his wife Janice plays a lot of tennis, and they have a lot of drinks with their friends. Harry’s not thrilled that they live with Janice’s mother in her house, but all in all, he has few things to complain about, at least objectively.
But Harry wouldn’t be Harry (and the books wouldn’t be interesting) if he just placidly accepted his life. He still wants the freedom that he feels he somehow deserves, and he still blames Janice for tying him down. “It was his wife’s fault. The entire squeezed and cut-down shape of his life is her fault; at every turn she has been a wall to his freedom.� When his son, Nelson, accuses him of not liking anyone, Rabbit retorts, “‘I like everybody. I just don’t like getting boxed in.’�
Ah, Nelson. Harry’s relationship with Nelson, which is central to the book, is paradoxical. Harry says he loves his 22-year-old son, but he doesn’t really want him around. He thinks Nelson is weak and he cuts him no slack. He’s unwilling to recognize himself in Nelson, but Janice tells him that Nelson is the same as he was at that age: he’s afraid of life. This Rabbit can understand, because that fear didn’t ever leave him. “Life. Too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.� Harry secretly hopes that Nelson will do what he tried to do 20 years earlier: run.
Harry is becoming more and more conscious of death, thinking often of all the people he’s known who are now dead. Each year around Labor Day, with fall around the corner, he is reminded that “he’s suffered another promotion, taken another step up the stairs that has darkness at the head.� Maybe that explains why his obsession with sex seems even stronger now in middle age than it was when he was younger. (Not that Harry’s libido was ever anything but strong.) His obsession at the moment is his lust for the wife of one of his golfing buddies.
Updike has an exceptional talent for descriptive writing. With respect to sex, his writing is frank and, more often than not, crude. (I could do with fewer instances of the c-word.) But Updike’s descriptive prose can also soar. One of my favorite passages describes Harry’s thoughts as he thinks of his life while on vacation in the Poconos: “he feels love for each phenomenon and not for the first time in his life seeks to bring himself into harmony with the intertwining simplicities that uphold him, that were woven into him at birth. There must be a good way to live.�
Harry “Rabbit� Angstrom is middle-aged and living a stable, conventional life. The upheaval he caused when he ran away in Rabbit, Run is 20 years behind him. His disastrous experiment with alternative lifestyles in Rabbit Redux has now been in the rear-view mirror for 10 years. But he is still looking for that “good way to live.�
In Rabbit Is Rich, the third book of the series, it’s 1979. At 46 years old, Harry is still running—except now he’s mostly running in place. He’s 30 pounds overweight, with a paunch, and when he actually does go for a run, he ends up red-faced and out of breath.
Harry is doing well financially—he even invests in Krugerrands—and he thinks of himself as rich. The Toyota dealership that he has been managing since his father-in-law’s death is doing well, buoyed by the gasoline crisis. Harry is a member of the Rotary Club, and he has joined a country club, where he plays a lot of golf, his wife Janice plays a lot of tennis, and they have a lot of drinks with their friends. Harry’s not thrilled that they live with Janice’s mother in her house, but all in all, he has few things to complain about, at least objectively.
But Harry wouldn’t be Harry (and the books wouldn’t be interesting) if he just placidly accepted his life. He still wants the freedom that he feels he somehow deserves, and he still blames Janice for tying him down. “It was his wife’s fault. The entire squeezed and cut-down shape of his life is her fault; at every turn she has been a wall to his freedom.� When his son, Nelson, accuses him of not liking anyone, Rabbit retorts, “‘I like everybody. I just don’t like getting boxed in.’�
Ah, Nelson. Harry’s relationship with Nelson, which is central to the book, is paradoxical. Harry says he loves his 22-year-old son, but he doesn’t really want him around. He thinks Nelson is weak and he cuts him no slack. He’s unwilling to recognize himself in Nelson, but Janice tells him that Nelson is the same as he was at that age: he’s afraid of life. This Rabbit can understand, because that fear didn’t ever leave him. “Life. Too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.� Harry secretly hopes that Nelson will do what he tried to do 20 years earlier: run.
Harry is becoming more and more conscious of death, thinking often of all the people he’s known who are now dead. Each year around Labor Day, with fall around the corner, he is reminded that “he’s suffered another promotion, taken another step up the stairs that has darkness at the head.� Maybe that explains why his obsession with sex seems even stronger now in middle age than it was when he was younger. (Not that Harry’s libido was ever anything but strong.) His obsession at the moment is his lust for the wife of one of his golfing buddies.
Updike has an exceptional talent for descriptive writing. With respect to sex, his writing is frank and, more often than not, crude. (I could do with fewer instances of the c-word.) But Updike’s descriptive prose can also soar. One of my favorite passages describes Harry’s thoughts as he thinks of his life while on vacation in the Poconos: “he feels love for each phenomenon and not for the first time in his life seeks to bring himself into harmony with the intertwining simplicities that uphold him, that were woven into him at birth. There must be a good way to live.�
Harry “Rabbit� Angstrom is middle-aged and living a stable, conventional life. The upheaval he caused when he ran away in Rabbit, Run is 20 years behind him. His disastrous experiment with alternative lifestyles in Rabbit Redux has now been in the rear-view mirror for 10 years. But he is still looking for that “good way to live.�
September 3, 2019
Pulitzer Prize winner 1982. Wow. Wow. Wow. Just finished this today, and once again, "Rabbit" Harry Angstrom has left me speechless and wanting more! This third book (in the four-book series) is the best so far. The writing is absolutely unique and mind-blowing. I can't even believe I don't get to read it tonight!
As I said in my review of #2, if you're going to read this series, you must start with the first book and read in order. There were so many references to #1 and #2 in this novel, that a reader starting with this book would probably feel lost (but could still appreciate the level of writing). The first novel was 1959, second 1969, and now in Rabbit is Rich it is 1979. Finally a year I know and can remember as I was 13 that year. And, Harry Rabbit Angstrom is almost 50, so he's also now at an age I can relate to. Maybe that's part of why I liked Rabbit is Rich so much! All the books are contemporary to the time, so it was nostalgic reading about Carter, gas prices, disco music, etc.
In a nutshell, there have only been a few other writers EVER who have been able to so skillfully portray the complete monotony of every day life like Updike. Every scene with the wife, his mother-in-law, his college-aged son, his co-workers at the Toyota dealership, his friends at the country club - priceless. Updike is not afraid to write what we are all thinking, but what we won't say out loud.
Again, even at 5 stars - still not for everyone. Harry thinks about sex and women constantly. This book was the most graphic - any fetish you can imagine he is thinking about it and doing it. I'll leave that up to you! Also, racial comments that you NEVER hear said today, but again, without me writing it here - think Archie Bunker on steroids. Honestly, I don't know if I can even type some of the words on this site without being banned. So again, read at your own risk.
But for those of you who can understand that that's all part of the character and part of the times, you will accept this for the masterpiece it is. Great writers are great observers. Updike is a master observer!
As I said in my review of #2, if you're going to read this series, you must start with the first book and read in order. There were so many references to #1 and #2 in this novel, that a reader starting with this book would probably feel lost (but could still appreciate the level of writing). The first novel was 1959, second 1969, and now in Rabbit is Rich it is 1979. Finally a year I know and can remember as I was 13 that year. And, Harry Rabbit Angstrom is almost 50, so he's also now at an age I can relate to. Maybe that's part of why I liked Rabbit is Rich so much! All the books are contemporary to the time, so it was nostalgic reading about Carter, gas prices, disco music, etc.
In a nutshell, there have only been a few other writers EVER who have been able to so skillfully portray the complete monotony of every day life like Updike. Every scene with the wife, his mother-in-law, his college-aged son, his co-workers at the Toyota dealership, his friends at the country club - priceless. Updike is not afraid to write what we are all thinking, but what we won't say out loud.
Again, even at 5 stars - still not for everyone. Harry thinks about sex and women constantly. This book was the most graphic - any fetish you can imagine he is thinking about it and doing it. I'll leave that up to you! Also, racial comments that you NEVER hear said today, but again, without me writing it here - think Archie Bunker on steroids. Honestly, I don't know if I can even type some of the words on this site without being banned. So again, read at your own risk.
But for those of you who can understand that that's all part of the character and part of the times, you will accept this for the masterpiece it is. Great writers are great observers. Updike is a master observer!
February 8, 2018
Rabbit is Rich won a pocketful of awards, most notably the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. That doesn't mean I have to like it, and I certainly didn't. It's not that Updike's writing isn't great - no writer can do a better job of placing you uncomfortably inside a character's brain as Updike can, and no book made me want to find a plain brown wrapper to cover it like this book did. It's not that I'm unfamiliar with Harry/Rabbit Angstrom's life journey to this point, having read the first two Rabbit volumes. And it's not that I find Rabbit's progress (or lack of) through life any more surprising or disagreeable than any number of people I know or have known in my life, as a person slightly older than Rabbit himself in this book. At some point a reader has to ask him/herself, why am I reading about this? What's the point of reading every unfiltered thought of a 1970's vintage middle-aged man who seems to be mostly obsessed with 2 things - oral sex, and the fate of his illegitimate daughter? Maybe it's the same compulsion that draws us to stalk Facebook pages of high school acquaintances, to see what's happened to so-and-so we barely knew (or could hardly stand) decades later. I certainly didn't find Rabbit likeable in the last tale, and his story was only mildly interesting for the fact his life was going off the rails - by the end of Rabbit Redux, he had lost his job, his home, pretty much his marriage, and was doing all he could to emotionally lose his son. OK, so ten years later he finds himself in a much better financial situation (though hardly "rich") and treading water at best in every other area. So what?
Perhaps the uniqueness of the Rabbit series is that Harry Angstrom has aged in real time, as the once-per-decade literary parachuting into his life for a few days or few weeks happens at about the same, real, calendar time. And perhaps the real "value" of this series is that it gives us insight into Updike's mindset, every 10 years or so. I'm still trying to reconcile the Updike who wrote the passionate forward to Graham Greene's The Power and The Glory and the surprising Easter Poem, with the Updike who seems to be projecting not only his cynical observations of middle America in the late 70's, but his own disappointment and even despair over the supposed American Dream.
Oh well, on to the last Rabbit book (another Pulitzer winner). I just gotta know what happens, even if I can't stand the guy.
Perhaps the uniqueness of the Rabbit series is that Harry Angstrom has aged in real time, as the once-per-decade literary parachuting into his life for a few days or few weeks happens at about the same, real, calendar time. And perhaps the real "value" of this series is that it gives us insight into Updike's mindset, every 10 years or so. I'm still trying to reconcile the Updike who wrote the passionate forward to Graham Greene's The Power and The Glory and the surprising Easter Poem, with the Updike who seems to be projecting not only his cynical observations of middle America in the late 70's, but his own disappointment and even despair over the supposed American Dream.
Oh well, on to the last Rabbit book (another Pulitzer winner). I just gotta know what happens, even if I can't stand the guy.
January 21, 2022
Da un certo punto di vista la cosa più terrificante del mondo è proprio la tua vita, il fatto che è tua e di nessun altro.
I classici non li commento, ma appunto vorrei sottolineare (pare che molti non lo sappiano) che Updike, e in particolare la serie del Coniglio, è un classico imperdibile, una pietra miliare. La storia dell'Uomo Comune, dell'Americano Medio, è a sua volta figlia del Babbitt, grande romanzo del 1922 che valse il Nobel a Sinclair Lewis.
Updike è uno di quegli scrittori che, mio Dio, come scrivono! Non capita spesso di incontrare una scrittura così splendida, così completa, vivida, intensa, trascinante. Con una penna in mano, è capace di tutto. Che talentaccio! Io che detesto i romanzi scritti al presente -mi è capitato di scartarne certuni solo per questo motivo- me lo sono bevuto tutto quasi senza accorgermene. Credo si possa definire l'ultimo grande scrittore americano classico (Roth è un outsider), prima che arrivasse il postmoderno.
Assolutamente imprescindibile.
I classici non li commento, ma appunto vorrei sottolineare (pare che molti non lo sappiano) che Updike, e in particolare la serie del Coniglio, è un classico imperdibile, una pietra miliare. La storia dell'Uomo Comune, dell'Americano Medio, è a sua volta figlia del Babbitt, grande romanzo del 1922 che valse il Nobel a Sinclair Lewis.
Updike è uno di quegli scrittori che, mio Dio, come scrivono! Non capita spesso di incontrare una scrittura così splendida, così completa, vivida, intensa, trascinante. Con una penna in mano, è capace di tutto. Che talentaccio! Io che detesto i romanzi scritti al presente -mi è capitato di scartarne certuni solo per questo motivo- me lo sono bevuto tutto quasi senza accorgermene. Credo si possa definire l'ultimo grande scrittore americano classico (Roth è un outsider), prima che arrivasse il postmoderno.
Assolutamente imprescindibile.
June 29, 2023
This is in many ways a return to form for Updike; it’s tighter and more emotionally rich than Redux. However, I still prefer the leanness and propulsive feeling of Rabbit, Run.
With these novels, Updike has painted an obsessively intimate portrait of a very particular kind of American man: white, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, sex-obsessed, money-obsessed, and profoundly unable to own his neuroses and flaws. All of those factors seem like they should be off-putting to read about, and they are, but I also have to admire how honestly Updike sees Rabbit and his cronies, and how he embeds these uncomfortable subjects in poetic, stream-of-consciousness, beautifully constructed sentences.
The best moments in this installment involve Rabbit and his son Nelson, and the manner in which they push and pull at each other is sad and funny and surprising.
I’ll be very curious to see how Updike winds up his Rabbit tale with the final installment, but I’ll give it some time before I read Rabbit at Rest.
With these novels, Updike has painted an obsessively intimate portrait of a very particular kind of American man: white, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, sex-obsessed, money-obsessed, and profoundly unable to own his neuroses and flaws. All of those factors seem like they should be off-putting to read about, and they are, but I also have to admire how honestly Updike sees Rabbit and his cronies, and how he embeds these uncomfortable subjects in poetic, stream-of-consciousness, beautifully constructed sentences.
The best moments in this installment involve Rabbit and his son Nelson, and the manner in which they push and pull at each other is sad and funny and surprising.
I’ll be very curious to see how Updike winds up his Rabbit tale with the final installment, but I’ll give it some time before I read Rabbit at Rest.
April 17, 2009
He's rich, and in the third volume he miraculously manages not kill anyone while looking for some quick sex. Who says you can't learn from experience?
August 27, 2021
DNF ~33%
I don't care how many Pulitzer Prizes this series won, I can't take another minute of this disgusting, insufferable main character, the overblown self-important writing, and the truly vile descriptions of women and sex. How anybody can read this and not want to actually vomit is beyond me. I wish I had a physical copy of this book so I could set it on fire, I am that disgusted.
I don't care how many Pulitzer Prizes this series won, I can't take another minute of this disgusting, insufferable main character, the overblown self-important writing, and the truly vile descriptions of women and sex. How anybody can read this and not want to actually vomit is beyond me. I wish I had a physical copy of this book so I could set it on fire, I am that disgusted.
August 17, 2024
As this is the third book I have read in Updike’s Rabbit series, I am finding it harder to write this review to say something fresh about it that hasn’t been said in the previous two. He continues the theme is life’s entrapments, for various characters, even to the extent that he says the Pope is trapped and is “running scared... like everybody else.� Harry just doesn’t “like getting boxed in.� And he now sees that he is trapped by his wife’s fortune.
At 46, he muses, “…if a meaning of life was to show up, you’d think it would have by now.�
Certainly at the beginning of the novel, he still sees the world only through his own lens of self absorption, such as this thought he has: “A man f**ks your wife, it puts a whole new value on her, within limits.�
Perhaps, Harry is in a slow process of change, or at least acceptance. Not that he is very hopeful about it. “Life is too big for us in the end.� He thinks “…we’ll all be dead soon enough, already we’re survivors…� and “the planets keep their courses no matter what we do.� If Harry can accept his circumstances, perhaps he can begin to enjoy them, and not feel like a trapped rabbit wanting escape. Not in this novel, though.
Updike’s writing is still so concrete, so descriptive and puts the reader exactly into the American culture of the novel’s time. Witness when Harry’s wife makes this play: “Naked, she lurches onto the bed where he is trying to read the July issue of Consumer Reports and thrusts her tongue into his mouth. He tastes Gallo, baloney and toothpaste while his mind is still trying to sort out the virtues and failings of the great range of can openers put to test over five close pages of print.�
The writing is very seductive. But I hope Rabbit comes to rest in the next one. 4.5 stars rounded down to 4.
At 46, he muses, “…if a meaning of life was to show up, you’d think it would have by now.�
Certainly at the beginning of the novel, he still sees the world only through his own lens of self absorption, such as this thought he has: “A man f**ks your wife, it puts a whole new value on her, within limits.�
Perhaps, Harry is in a slow process of change, or at least acceptance. Not that he is very hopeful about it. “Life is too big for us in the end.� He thinks “…we’ll all be dead soon enough, already we’re survivors…� and “the planets keep their courses no matter what we do.� If Harry can accept his circumstances, perhaps he can begin to enjoy them, and not feel like a trapped rabbit wanting escape. Not in this novel, though.
Updike’s writing is still so concrete, so descriptive and puts the reader exactly into the American culture of the novel’s time. Witness when Harry’s wife makes this play: “Naked, she lurches onto the bed where he is trying to read the July issue of Consumer Reports and thrusts her tongue into his mouth. He tastes Gallo, baloney and toothpaste while his mind is still trying to sort out the virtues and failings of the great range of can openers put to test over five close pages of print.�
The writing is very seductive. But I hope Rabbit comes to rest in the next one. 4.5 stars rounded down to 4.
May 6, 2014
"Harry Angstrom -- A Memoir of Boners"
It's the late 1970s and Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is older, fatter, and still just as obsessed with his prick and where it might go as ever.
Example: "He never world have given Charlie a handshake like this two weeks ago, but since fucking Thelma up the ass..."
That's an actual sentence in the book (about 4/5 of the way in).
He's now firmly ensconced in his role as Sales Manager for his dead father-in-law's Toyota dealership, he plays a lot of golf at the local country club, and he's really good friends with the man his wife ran off with for several months in the last novel "Rabbit Redux." He's still just as cruel and dim-witted as ever, but now he reads a lot of "Conusmer Reports" (which is one of the better recurring themes in the book, Rabbit's mindless consumerism).
Oh, and he wants to screw EVERYTHING. And Updike goes into EXHAUSTIVE detail about all the various erections and near-erections, and stirrings of erections that Rabbit experiences. Sorry, but the sexual awakening (was he ever asleep?) of a middle aged nitwit is not exactly riveting.
So when the "climax" of the book is a tropical vacation and an exercise in chunky, pasty, flabby partner-swapping, I say enough. I've committed to finishing the series as they're "important" books (this one won the Pulitzer!), but man is this a trying experience.
As before, this is a book of its era. I have no doubt this book speaks to baby-boomers who lived through the Carter era and the sexual revolution before it. And I have no doubt that Rabbit is meant to be a sympathetic character to those boomers. But as that generation is easily the worst generation this country has suffered through, it's real hard to feel anything but contempt.
It's the late 1970s and Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is older, fatter, and still just as obsessed with his prick and where it might go as ever.
Example: "He never world have given Charlie a handshake like this two weeks ago, but since fucking Thelma up the ass..."
That's an actual sentence in the book (about 4/5 of the way in).
He's now firmly ensconced in his role as Sales Manager for his dead father-in-law's Toyota dealership, he plays a lot of golf at the local country club, and he's really good friends with the man his wife ran off with for several months in the last novel "Rabbit Redux." He's still just as cruel and dim-witted as ever, but now he reads a lot of "Conusmer Reports" (which is one of the better recurring themes in the book, Rabbit's mindless consumerism).
Oh, and he wants to screw EVERYTHING. And Updike goes into EXHAUSTIVE detail about all the various erections and near-erections, and stirrings of erections that Rabbit experiences. Sorry, but the sexual awakening (was he ever asleep?) of a middle aged nitwit is not exactly riveting.
So when the "climax" of the book is a tropical vacation and an exercise in chunky, pasty, flabby partner-swapping, I say enough. I've committed to finishing the series as they're "important" books (this one won the Pulitzer!), but man is this a trying experience.
As before, this is a book of its era. I have no doubt this book speaks to baby-boomers who lived through the Carter era and the sexual revolution before it. And I have no doubt that Rabbit is meant to be a sympathetic character to those boomers. But as that generation is easily the worst generation this country has suffered through, it's real hard to feel anything but contempt.
December 6, 2020
Rabbit, Run (1960)/Rabbit, Redux (1971)/Rabbit is Rich (1981)/Rabbit At Rest (1990)/ Rabbit Remembered (2001)
Author: John Updike
Read: July-August 2020
Rating: 2.5/5 stars; 2/5 stars; 3/5 stars; 3.5/5 stars; 4/5 stars
**** Spoilers ****
"Rabbit is Read" (A Haibun Review)
So it begins. We are unceremoniously introduced to Harry Angstrom, nicknamed "Rabbit" because he vaguely resembled the animal as a child. Right away, he isn't exactly likable. And as the book continues, this doesn't get any better. More familiar, used to, and maybe accepting of his ways, yes. We are also introduced to the fictional universe in which Rabbit resides. He lives in Mt. Judge, a suburb of Brewer, Pennsylvania. Other locations mentioned are real, including Lancaster, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. We begin Rabbits story with him impulsively abandoning his pregnant wife Janice and 2-year-old son Nelson; he drives around, intending to maybe go cross-country, loses his confidence and returns; instead of actually returning home, however, he meets up with his high school basketball coach-cum-mentor Marty, then shacks up with a part-time prostitute named Ruth. He has a couple conversations with a local priest, Eccles, who finally convinced him to return to his wife when she is in the hospital- in labor. Supposedly this is enough for him to suddenly feel guilty enough to re-establish his wedding vows and find it in his heart to move back home. Yet. In the following mere days to weeks after giving birth to their daughter Rebecca June Armstrong, he very nearly cheats on her twice with two different women! Tragedy strikes when- following their first argument post-reconciliation- a drunken Janice drowns baby Rebecca. At his daughter's funeral, the turmoil in his head reaches an apex. And surprise, surprise- Rabbit does what is easiest- he runs. His feet carry him to Ruth's place, where he is greeted with the news of her pregnancy- immediately followed by her proclamation that she is determined to keep it. Alas, this first volume of Rabbit's sorry ends with him no better than it began.
With an unlikable protagonist, a good novel must compensate. And Updike does. Mostly. Typically banal scenarios are made interesting with his eye for detail and description. Insight into the human psyche is obvious. But, sometimes this goes overboard. Details including the ingredients on a television dinner. Descriptions of multiple rooms requiring pages of text that do not necessarily contribute to the story. Long run on sentences; general negligence of proper punctuation. And when one might already have trouble caring about what happens to our main character, these things become much more difficult to overlook.
"Rabbit, Run" up first,
Introducing Updike's world
and writing style.
Began recalling "The Confederacy of Dunces" while reading "Run", but now fully formed conviction that there are many similarities. Both peculiar, selfish, and not entirely likable young-ish American men getting into a series of misadventures. Not a straightforward designated plot; more domestic and possibly mundane scenarios made interesting through their experience. There's a scattered cast of characters, a few main ones and various minor roles. Long harangues and blocks of detailed text can be vexsome- especially those of a religious or political nature. Oh, both Pulitzer winners. But- to finish the perhaps unfair comparison- "Dunces" was funnier and one could at least feel sorry for Ignatius, while Rabbit struggles to come across as anything but the selfish misanthrope he is almost proud to be.
Overall, not impressed with the second book. It's the 60s; Updike uses a fair amount of the text for social commentary. Cannot be denied that Updike has a keen eye for detail and that he knows how to write. But complaints from the first book are only aggravated in book two. It is ten years later, Rabbit is no longer selling the MagiPeeler- he's a senior Linotype operator at the local printing plant. Back with his wife, but now it's Janice's turn to cheat. The beau she chooses is Charlie Stavros, her coworker at her father's car dealership. When she is caught, rather than repent, she decides to move out. Perhaps in retaliation, Rabbit allows Jill, a pretty young runaway from Connecticut, and Skeeter, an African American drug dealer on the run, to stay with him. Thirteen year old Nelson and his thirty-six old father both quickly find themselves attached to Jill- the former out of an innocent first love, the latter as a sexual conquest. Conservative neighbors take issue with this and it results in someone setting fire to the Armstrong house, burning a drug-laden Jill alive before she can escape. Skeeter, sadly, had run out without a second thought to saving her; Nelson and Rabbit were both elsewhere. Unlike the first book, "Redux" ends with Janice and Rabbit back together again, Charlie having never been "the marrying type". Most obtrusive flaws? Excessive soapbox harangues of political and religious natures; substantial excerpts on civil rights and racism texts that serve no real purpose other than filling up space.
"Rabbit Redux" next,
the characters familiar,
shenanigans new.
Three out of four. Here we find the eponymous man- like the time he is living in, America in 1979- "running out of gas". Hand in hand with Updike's social commentary on the country's economic and political situation, Rabbit is conspicuously fed up with things. This includes his marriage, his son, his career, his social life, his sex life. He still clings onto his life's highlight- a high school basketball hero. Rabbit's discriminative, crude, offensive, and racist actions, thoughts, and words have accumulated and continue to do so. It seems even to have gotten worse in this installment, as his (at least ostensible) hatred for his now grown son Nelson shines in full. Not only to his wife and in his actions, but by proclaiming to his face that he is a good for nothing and he wants him gone. Admittedly, part of the problem might be that up to now, he has been living with his wife and mother-in-law under the same roof ever since they reconciled. Thankfully, that is one of the few notable events that occurs in "Rich"- the purchase of the couple's first house, after a successful investment in gold and silver. In his middle age of 46, life consists of reading "Consumer Reports", frequenting the country club where he feels compelled to keep up appearances, and finding new women to pine after, new ways to cheat on his wife. Although, facilitated by repeated forgiveness or naiveté from Janice, he always returns to her.
Most of the book takes place in good old Mt. Judge, where Nelson has returned after his short stint at Kent State University in Ohio. He is adamant about working at the Toyota Dealership, ruffling his father's feathers for months, who is strongly against his son running everything at the lot. It is also eventually revealed that he had knocked up a girl and this was the real reason for his escape. Theresa, who goes by "Pru" (a nickname given by friends that saw her as prudish), arrives by the end of the summer and moves in. Not the most attentive fiancé, Nelson is drunk at a party with her- right behind her in fact- when she falls down some flights of stairs. Luckily it is only her arm that that suffers, and she gives birth to a healthy baby girl soon after. Alas, following the example of his cowardly father, Nelson runs away back to Ohio for a while. Encouraging him to run- going so far as to insist that Nelson is marrying out of obligation, not love- Rabbit finally gives his son some good advice- to not grow up to be like him- something he appears to be disproportionately worried about. Meanwhile, as all this is going on in his family life, after a girl named Annabelle visits the Toyota dealership that he is convinced is his daughter, Rabbit makes a few trips to where he last knew Ruth resided (Ruth from "Run", the prostitute he lived and had an affair with for a few months). He eventually confronts her regarding Annabelle, but Ruth adamantly denies it. Although she admits that even if it were true, she would never admit it. Likely not really wanting the truth, Rabbit declines her highly suspect offer to let him see the birth certificate. The third installment ends anticlimactically with Nelson still gone and Pru having taken his place in the Angstrom residence.
Updike continues to take his eye for detail maybe a little too far into banality- long multiple-page chunks of text with no pause for dialogue, almost stream of consciousness style monologues with run-on sentences of characters' thoughts. There were some sections from Nelson's point of view, which was a nice change of pace. Hilariously, at some point Rabbit comments on how he disdains how "coarse" his friends are. This, coming from him, a misogynist or maybe even misanthrope who uses derogatory language all the time and expresses the most discriminative and racist thoughts!
"Rabbit is Rich" third,
his appalling deeds get worse-
but we're stuck with him.
Final (formal) installment for the tetralogy. It is almost 1989. Rabbit is an old man, at least according to him. In reality, he is only in his mid-50s, "semi-retired", and now spends his winters in a Florida condominium he has purchased with his wife. To further the cliche, he does indeed play golf every week with some buddies. Rabbit turns 56, making it three decades since we met him in Book #1. Baby Nelson is now grown and married with his own children, with Rabbit and Janice now grandparents! Both their own parents, sadly, are no longer around. As we have now come to expect, the plot revolves around a series of events and sometimes mundane happenings in Rabbit and his friends and family's lives. Tangents that often do not readily benefit the story. And the more than occasional soapbox harangue on politics, religion, the state of affairs in this country, or what it means to be an American. The minutiae, too often, crosses the line into tedium. The complete ingredients list on various packages, the play by play of a golf game that literally takes 20 plus pages, a likewise play-by-play mentioning each song and accompanying commentary that comes on the radio during several hours of airplay.
A testament to "people never change", Rabbit is still as politically argumentative, still a womanizer, still cheating on his wife, still as discriminative and racist as ever. Surprise, surprise. Yet. Like a childhood friend we can't help but stick with, we somehow read on, interested in this man's life. He does, after all, have some redeeming qualities. These are especially notable in his role as a grandfather (as opposed to father, in which he is far from ideal) to Judy and Roy. Aging is a central theme; coming to terms with morality and keeping the cynical nature of his in check- at least enough to keep misery at bay (turns out he is evidently not very good at this.) In the first third of the book he has a heart attack and becomes dependent- mostly mentally- on the reassuring nitroglycerin pill he begins to keep in his pocket.
Alas, in this final installment of the series, Rabbit finally does something that crosses the line. No, it does not make it better that it was foreshadowed in "Rich". When one predicts such a thing, it is almost a farce. Because, really? Rabbit sleeps with his son's wife? His daughter-in-law. Yes. A question with no answer for dedicated readers: Can a story with an unlikable protagonist still be good? One almost feels guilty for praising a book where our "hero" does something so appallingly offensive. Without this deed, "Rest" is easily the best book in the series. As it is, the decision is not quite as clear-cut. Updike skillfully provides the advantage of comforting familiarity to loyal readers, while making sure not to exclude new readers- one could start reading "Rabbit at Rest" and everything would be perfectly understandable. However, it is this retrospection and various events that hearken back to decades ago; and the intimate feelings it evokes in readers- as if we really know Rabbit- that makes this final installment more praiseworthy than it would have been as a standalone. Like a Sympathy Oscar, it might deserve its praise- in a collective sense.
"Rabbit at Rest" last,
fine writing for shameful man,
bittersweet farewell.
Short sequel, short story, novella, long epilogue- whichever label you wish to use, here we have the final final installment! In the fittingly titled tale that was included in Updike's 2000 collection of thirteen stories, "Remembered" gives us a much awaited update on the supporting characters; life after Rabbit. The year is 1999, asking with its Y2K paranoia and Clinton scandal drama. Nelson, now separated from Pru, has moved back in with his mother. Janice has ended up with Rabbit's childhood nemesis from his basketball days, Ronnie Harrison. The three of them struggle along, the two men barely friendly. Main plot is introduction of Annabelle, half-sister to Nelson. What was only strongly implied in previous novels- that Rabbit did indeed father a daughter during his short affair with Ruth in "Run"- is finally confirmed. Likely because it reminds then of Rabbit's infidelities, neither Janice nor Ronnie have any interest in Annabelle, and are in fact downright rude to her. Nelson, though, has a soft spot for her, meeting with her for lunch on several occasions, inviting her to Thanksgiving, and defends her in the face of his family's animosity. Without much luck with convincing them, however, he finally moves out. As the book- and sadly the Rabbit series (looks like for real this time!)- comes to an end, things are left in a positive note, with Annabelle being generally accepted into the Angstrom family, with a prospective romantic involvement with Fosnacht, a childhood friend of Nelson's, and Nelson and Pru's once defunct marriage looking promising.
Perhaps the ultimate evidence for the theory that it was disagreement with the character of Rabbit rather than Updike's aptitude as a writer that led to my less than stellar assessment of the tetralogy, this was likely my favorite in the series. After being overshadowed by his father in all the other books, Nelson finally comes into his own here and really becomes relatable in his quest to connect with his long lost half sister, and admirable in his counseling work with drug addicts.
A final verdict on the "Rabbit" series ultimately comes down to whether a reader likes Rabbit or not and whether an unlikable protagonist is necessarily exclusory of a great book(s). Love him? You'll love the books. Hate him? Good luck overcoming that. Updike is to be commended on tying up loose ends- something many authors neglect to do, especially in a book series. It feels "special" to remember reading about such and such an event mostly referenced in this final book that initially took place in "Run". As for my final verdict, I quote Rabbit's last words in a Florida hospital bed, his only son Nelson nervously perching over him, "... all I can tell you is, it isn't so bad."
"Rabbit Remembered",
Angstrom updates post-Harry,
comforting finish.
#Haibun #ReviewPoem #60s #70s #80s #abortion #alcoholism #arson #baby #bathtub #bookseries #childbirth #deathofoffspring #deathofparent #deathofspouse #divorce #drowning #drugs #dubiousparentage #elderly #epigraph #familysaga #farmlife #fatherson #Florida #funeral #grandparents #hospital #infidelity #inlaws #marriage #mentor #motherhood #motherson #NationalBookAward #NBCCA #novella #pagetoscreen #parenting #Pennsylvania #politics #prostitution #PulitzerPrize #racism #religion #runaway #sequel #sequeled #siblings #sports #tetralogy #uniquechaptertitles #unlikableprotagonist #VietnamWar
Author: John Updike
Read: July-August 2020
Rating: 2.5/5 stars; 2/5 stars; 3/5 stars; 3.5/5 stars; 4/5 stars
**** Spoilers ****
"Rabbit is Read" (A Haibun Review)
So it begins. We are unceremoniously introduced to Harry Angstrom, nicknamed "Rabbit" because he vaguely resembled the animal as a child. Right away, he isn't exactly likable. And as the book continues, this doesn't get any better. More familiar, used to, and maybe accepting of his ways, yes. We are also introduced to the fictional universe in which Rabbit resides. He lives in Mt. Judge, a suburb of Brewer, Pennsylvania. Other locations mentioned are real, including Lancaster, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. We begin Rabbits story with him impulsively abandoning his pregnant wife Janice and 2-year-old son Nelson; he drives around, intending to maybe go cross-country, loses his confidence and returns; instead of actually returning home, however, he meets up with his high school basketball coach-cum-mentor Marty, then shacks up with a part-time prostitute named Ruth. He has a couple conversations with a local priest, Eccles, who finally convinced him to return to his wife when she is in the hospital- in labor. Supposedly this is enough for him to suddenly feel guilty enough to re-establish his wedding vows and find it in his heart to move back home. Yet. In the following mere days to weeks after giving birth to their daughter Rebecca June Armstrong, he very nearly cheats on her twice with two different women! Tragedy strikes when- following their first argument post-reconciliation- a drunken Janice drowns baby Rebecca. At his daughter's funeral, the turmoil in his head reaches an apex. And surprise, surprise- Rabbit does what is easiest- he runs. His feet carry him to Ruth's place, where he is greeted with the news of her pregnancy- immediately followed by her proclamation that she is determined to keep it. Alas, this first volume of Rabbit's sorry ends with him no better than it began.
With an unlikable protagonist, a good novel must compensate. And Updike does. Mostly. Typically banal scenarios are made interesting with his eye for detail and description. Insight into the human psyche is obvious. But, sometimes this goes overboard. Details including the ingredients on a television dinner. Descriptions of multiple rooms requiring pages of text that do not necessarily contribute to the story. Long run on sentences; general negligence of proper punctuation. And when one might already have trouble caring about what happens to our main character, these things become much more difficult to overlook.
"Rabbit, Run" up first,
Introducing Updike's world
and writing style.
Began recalling "The Confederacy of Dunces" while reading "Run", but now fully formed conviction that there are many similarities. Both peculiar, selfish, and not entirely likable young-ish American men getting into a series of misadventures. Not a straightforward designated plot; more domestic and possibly mundane scenarios made interesting through their experience. There's a scattered cast of characters, a few main ones and various minor roles. Long harangues and blocks of detailed text can be vexsome- especially those of a religious or political nature. Oh, both Pulitzer winners. But- to finish the perhaps unfair comparison- "Dunces" was funnier and one could at least feel sorry for Ignatius, while Rabbit struggles to come across as anything but the selfish misanthrope he is almost proud to be.
Overall, not impressed with the second book. It's the 60s; Updike uses a fair amount of the text for social commentary. Cannot be denied that Updike has a keen eye for detail and that he knows how to write. But complaints from the first book are only aggravated in book two. It is ten years later, Rabbit is no longer selling the MagiPeeler- he's a senior Linotype operator at the local printing plant. Back with his wife, but now it's Janice's turn to cheat. The beau she chooses is Charlie Stavros, her coworker at her father's car dealership. When she is caught, rather than repent, she decides to move out. Perhaps in retaliation, Rabbit allows Jill, a pretty young runaway from Connecticut, and Skeeter, an African American drug dealer on the run, to stay with him. Thirteen year old Nelson and his thirty-six old father both quickly find themselves attached to Jill- the former out of an innocent first love, the latter as a sexual conquest. Conservative neighbors take issue with this and it results in someone setting fire to the Armstrong house, burning a drug-laden Jill alive before she can escape. Skeeter, sadly, had run out without a second thought to saving her; Nelson and Rabbit were both elsewhere. Unlike the first book, "Redux" ends with Janice and Rabbit back together again, Charlie having never been "the marrying type". Most obtrusive flaws? Excessive soapbox harangues of political and religious natures; substantial excerpts on civil rights and racism texts that serve no real purpose other than filling up space.
"Rabbit Redux" next,
the characters familiar,
shenanigans new.
Three out of four. Here we find the eponymous man- like the time he is living in, America in 1979- "running out of gas". Hand in hand with Updike's social commentary on the country's economic and political situation, Rabbit is conspicuously fed up with things. This includes his marriage, his son, his career, his social life, his sex life. He still clings onto his life's highlight- a high school basketball hero. Rabbit's discriminative, crude, offensive, and racist actions, thoughts, and words have accumulated and continue to do so. It seems even to have gotten worse in this installment, as his (at least ostensible) hatred for his now grown son Nelson shines in full. Not only to his wife and in his actions, but by proclaiming to his face that he is a good for nothing and he wants him gone. Admittedly, part of the problem might be that up to now, he has been living with his wife and mother-in-law under the same roof ever since they reconciled. Thankfully, that is one of the few notable events that occurs in "Rich"- the purchase of the couple's first house, after a successful investment in gold and silver. In his middle age of 46, life consists of reading "Consumer Reports", frequenting the country club where he feels compelled to keep up appearances, and finding new women to pine after, new ways to cheat on his wife. Although, facilitated by repeated forgiveness or naiveté from Janice, he always returns to her.
Most of the book takes place in good old Mt. Judge, where Nelson has returned after his short stint at Kent State University in Ohio. He is adamant about working at the Toyota Dealership, ruffling his father's feathers for months, who is strongly against his son running everything at the lot. It is also eventually revealed that he had knocked up a girl and this was the real reason for his escape. Theresa, who goes by "Pru" (a nickname given by friends that saw her as prudish), arrives by the end of the summer and moves in. Not the most attentive fiancé, Nelson is drunk at a party with her- right behind her in fact- when she falls down some flights of stairs. Luckily it is only her arm that that suffers, and she gives birth to a healthy baby girl soon after. Alas, following the example of his cowardly father, Nelson runs away back to Ohio for a while. Encouraging him to run- going so far as to insist that Nelson is marrying out of obligation, not love- Rabbit finally gives his son some good advice- to not grow up to be like him- something he appears to be disproportionately worried about. Meanwhile, as all this is going on in his family life, after a girl named Annabelle visits the Toyota dealership that he is convinced is his daughter, Rabbit makes a few trips to where he last knew Ruth resided (Ruth from "Run", the prostitute he lived and had an affair with for a few months). He eventually confronts her regarding Annabelle, but Ruth adamantly denies it. Although she admits that even if it were true, she would never admit it. Likely not really wanting the truth, Rabbit declines her highly suspect offer to let him see the birth certificate. The third installment ends anticlimactically with Nelson still gone and Pru having taken his place in the Angstrom residence.
Updike continues to take his eye for detail maybe a little too far into banality- long multiple-page chunks of text with no pause for dialogue, almost stream of consciousness style monologues with run-on sentences of characters' thoughts. There were some sections from Nelson's point of view, which was a nice change of pace. Hilariously, at some point Rabbit comments on how he disdains how "coarse" his friends are. This, coming from him, a misogynist or maybe even misanthrope who uses derogatory language all the time and expresses the most discriminative and racist thoughts!
"Rabbit is Rich" third,
his appalling deeds get worse-
but we're stuck with him.
Final (formal) installment for the tetralogy. It is almost 1989. Rabbit is an old man, at least according to him. In reality, he is only in his mid-50s, "semi-retired", and now spends his winters in a Florida condominium he has purchased with his wife. To further the cliche, he does indeed play golf every week with some buddies. Rabbit turns 56, making it three decades since we met him in Book #1. Baby Nelson is now grown and married with his own children, with Rabbit and Janice now grandparents! Both their own parents, sadly, are no longer around. As we have now come to expect, the plot revolves around a series of events and sometimes mundane happenings in Rabbit and his friends and family's lives. Tangents that often do not readily benefit the story. And the more than occasional soapbox harangue on politics, religion, the state of affairs in this country, or what it means to be an American. The minutiae, too often, crosses the line into tedium. The complete ingredients list on various packages, the play by play of a golf game that literally takes 20 plus pages, a likewise play-by-play mentioning each song and accompanying commentary that comes on the radio during several hours of airplay.
A testament to "people never change", Rabbit is still as politically argumentative, still a womanizer, still cheating on his wife, still as discriminative and racist as ever. Surprise, surprise. Yet. Like a childhood friend we can't help but stick with, we somehow read on, interested in this man's life. He does, after all, have some redeeming qualities. These are especially notable in his role as a grandfather (as opposed to father, in which he is far from ideal) to Judy and Roy. Aging is a central theme; coming to terms with morality and keeping the cynical nature of his in check- at least enough to keep misery at bay (turns out he is evidently not very good at this.) In the first third of the book he has a heart attack and becomes dependent- mostly mentally- on the reassuring nitroglycerin pill he begins to keep in his pocket.
Alas, in this final installment of the series, Rabbit finally does something that crosses the line. No, it does not make it better that it was foreshadowed in "Rich". When one predicts such a thing, it is almost a farce. Because, really? Rabbit sleeps with his son's wife? His daughter-in-law. Yes. A question with no answer for dedicated readers: Can a story with an unlikable protagonist still be good? One almost feels guilty for praising a book where our "hero" does something so appallingly offensive. Without this deed, "Rest" is easily the best book in the series. As it is, the decision is not quite as clear-cut. Updike skillfully provides the advantage of comforting familiarity to loyal readers, while making sure not to exclude new readers- one could start reading "Rabbit at Rest" and everything would be perfectly understandable. However, it is this retrospection and various events that hearken back to decades ago; and the intimate feelings it evokes in readers- as if we really know Rabbit- that makes this final installment more praiseworthy than it would have been as a standalone. Like a Sympathy Oscar, it might deserve its praise- in a collective sense.
"Rabbit at Rest" last,
fine writing for shameful man,
bittersweet farewell.
Short sequel, short story, novella, long epilogue- whichever label you wish to use, here we have the final final installment! In the fittingly titled tale that was included in Updike's 2000 collection of thirteen stories, "Remembered" gives us a much awaited update on the supporting characters; life after Rabbit. The year is 1999, asking with its Y2K paranoia and Clinton scandal drama. Nelson, now separated from Pru, has moved back in with his mother. Janice has ended up with Rabbit's childhood nemesis from his basketball days, Ronnie Harrison. The three of them struggle along, the two men barely friendly. Main plot is introduction of Annabelle, half-sister to Nelson. What was only strongly implied in previous novels- that Rabbit did indeed father a daughter during his short affair with Ruth in "Run"- is finally confirmed. Likely because it reminds then of Rabbit's infidelities, neither Janice nor Ronnie have any interest in Annabelle, and are in fact downright rude to her. Nelson, though, has a soft spot for her, meeting with her for lunch on several occasions, inviting her to Thanksgiving, and defends her in the face of his family's animosity. Without much luck with convincing them, however, he finally moves out. As the book- and sadly the Rabbit series (looks like for real this time!)- comes to an end, things are left in a positive note, with Annabelle being generally accepted into the Angstrom family, with a prospective romantic involvement with Fosnacht, a childhood friend of Nelson's, and Nelson and Pru's once defunct marriage looking promising.
Perhaps the ultimate evidence for the theory that it was disagreement with the character of Rabbit rather than Updike's aptitude as a writer that led to my less than stellar assessment of the tetralogy, this was likely my favorite in the series. After being overshadowed by his father in all the other books, Nelson finally comes into his own here and really becomes relatable in his quest to connect with his long lost half sister, and admirable in his counseling work with drug addicts.
A final verdict on the "Rabbit" series ultimately comes down to whether a reader likes Rabbit or not and whether an unlikable protagonist is necessarily exclusory of a great book(s). Love him? You'll love the books. Hate him? Good luck overcoming that. Updike is to be commended on tying up loose ends- something many authors neglect to do, especially in a book series. It feels "special" to remember reading about such and such an event mostly referenced in this final book that initially took place in "Run". As for my final verdict, I quote Rabbit's last words in a Florida hospital bed, his only son Nelson nervously perching over him, "... all I can tell you is, it isn't so bad."
"Rabbit Remembered",
Angstrom updates post-Harry,
comforting finish.
#Haibun #ReviewPoem #60s #70s #80s #abortion #alcoholism #arson #baby #bathtub #bookseries #childbirth #deathofoffspring #deathofparent #deathofspouse #divorce #drowning #drugs #dubiousparentage #elderly #epigraph #familysaga #farmlife #fatherson #Florida #funeral #grandparents #hospital #infidelity #inlaws #marriage #mentor #motherhood #motherson #NationalBookAward #NBCCA #novella #pagetoscreen #parenting #Pennsylvania #politics #prostitution #PulitzerPrize #racism #religion #runaway #sequel #sequeled #siblings #sports #tetralogy #uniquechaptertitles #unlikableprotagonist #VietnamWar
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 4, 2024
"How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old."
'Rabbit is Rich' is the third of four novels about the life of Harry “Rabbit� Angstrom. Each novel, written in approximately 10-year intervals, explores some upheaval in Rabbit’s life. In this novel, Harry is no longer running but has dropped to a slow walk in order to enjoy the fruits of middle-aged affluence, however, his cosy country-club lifestyle is thrown into upheaval when his son, Nelson, quits college to return home with a mystery girl.
The two earlier novels found Rabbit longing for his former glory days as a high-school basket ball star. In this novel, things seem to be going his way again. In the midst of the 1979 oil crisis, Harry is owner of a fuel-efficient Toyota dealership and business is brisk. But Rabbit seems unsettled by his good fortune and is just waiting for some catastrophe to occur.
Like the other books in this series this novel is full of richly textured detail but there is deliberately very little action. Updike is unsparing in his description of Rabbit's selfishness and in particular his sexual exploits. But quite why this particular book i was the one that won the Pulitzer Prize I don't quite understand nor do I understand why Updike felt the need to litter it with so many explicit sexual episodes. I don't think that I'm a prude but I felt that most of the sexual details were simply unnecessary.
Overall this was my least favourite book in the series thus far but will be looking to finish it off at some point.
'Rabbit is Rich' is the third of four novels about the life of Harry “Rabbit� Angstrom. Each novel, written in approximately 10-year intervals, explores some upheaval in Rabbit’s life. In this novel, Harry is no longer running but has dropped to a slow walk in order to enjoy the fruits of middle-aged affluence, however, his cosy country-club lifestyle is thrown into upheaval when his son, Nelson, quits college to return home with a mystery girl.
The two earlier novels found Rabbit longing for his former glory days as a high-school basket ball star. In this novel, things seem to be going his way again. In the midst of the 1979 oil crisis, Harry is owner of a fuel-efficient Toyota dealership and business is brisk. But Rabbit seems unsettled by his good fortune and is just waiting for some catastrophe to occur.
Like the other books in this series this novel is full of richly textured detail but there is deliberately very little action. Updike is unsparing in his description of Rabbit's selfishness and in particular his sexual exploits. But quite why this particular book i was the one that won the Pulitzer Prize I don't quite understand nor do I understand why Updike felt the need to litter it with so many explicit sexual episodes. I don't think that I'm a prude but I felt that most of the sexual details were simply unnecessary.
Overall this was my least favourite book in the series thus far but will be looking to finish it off at some point.
July 19, 2023
A novel so good it makes me go from being moderately bemused by Updike's (bygone?) icon status to buying into it. I adore how Nelson's character works as a sort of metatext on the first novel in both humorous and cynical ways. Updike's sex writing feels so unsparing here. The male libido really is here on the page.
The novel made me chuckle. Made me cringe. Made me gasp. Made me depressed. Made me clutch my pearls. Made me understand the highbrow-lowbrow collision in this series more. Made me see how this series, particularly this novel, has the Balzacian quality of including extremely minute cultural/financial details to not just evoke a certain decade but record its nuances before they're completely erased from memory's myopia. Made me realize I know little to nothing about how car dealerships operate. Made me admire Harry/Rabbit as a skeezy character I once judged and now appreciate. Made me more aware of Updike's literary compassion that doesn't shy away from a profoundly disgruntling honesty. Made me want to read more Philip Roth (and more Updike). Made me experience a certain sense of awe.
Could've read 1000 more pages of this. And I somewhat will. Because there's one more novel left. Exciting.
The novel made me chuckle. Made me cringe. Made me gasp. Made me depressed. Made me clutch my pearls. Made me understand the highbrow-lowbrow collision in this series more. Made me see how this series, particularly this novel, has the Balzacian quality of including extremely minute cultural/financial details to not just evoke a certain decade but record its nuances before they're completely erased from memory's myopia. Made me realize I know little to nothing about how car dealerships operate. Made me admire Harry/Rabbit as a skeezy character I once judged and now appreciate. Made me more aware of Updike's literary compassion that doesn't shy away from a profoundly disgruntling honesty. Made me want to read more Philip Roth (and more Updike). Made me experience a certain sense of awe.
Could've read 1000 more pages of this. And I somewhat will. Because there's one more novel left. Exciting.
August 11, 2022
Rabbit Is Rich is a 1981 novel by John Updike, the third installment of the celebrated “Rabbit� series of books.
Each book in the series takes place during a certain decade of American history, with Rabbit Is Rich corresponding to the late 1970’s. Carter is President, the hostages are being held in Iran, gas lines are lengthy, foreign cars are coming into 'vogue'. During this time, I was in my early 30's; I remember it all.
Because I lived during this era, I did love the beginning of the book. But as I read further, I realized that I did not like even one of the characters and the marriage of Harry (Rabbit) and Janice was way too 'open' for me.
But it did win the Pulitzer, so I soldiered on. Giving it an extra star for the Prize and the nostalgic history.
3 stars
Each book in the series takes place during a certain decade of American history, with Rabbit Is Rich corresponding to the late 1970’s. Carter is President, the hostages are being held in Iran, gas lines are lengthy, foreign cars are coming into 'vogue'. During this time, I was in my early 30's; I remember it all.
Because I lived during this era, I did love the beginning of the book. But as I read further, I realized that I did not like even one of the characters and the marriage of Harry (Rabbit) and Janice was way too 'open' for me.
But it did win the Pulitzer, so I soldiered on. Giving it an extra star for the Prize and the nostalgic history.
3 stars
December 2, 2013
His own life closed in to a size his soul had not yet shrunk to fit.
Rabbit is dragged kicking and screaming into middle-age. Regular people are not known to react well to this, and Rabbit is worse than regular people. This makes for an often hilarious read.
Strangely enough, he toes the line for the most part but it's not because of maturity. His wife has inherited all the money he enjoys (and boy, is he smug about all the money he didn't earn) and if he leaves her, he loses the money. He likes being rich for the first time in his life and he feels sorry for his Dad who died poor.
He feels emasculated because he is at the mercy of Springer wealth so he can't inflict damage on poor Janice any more. There's always the son. Nelson is grown up and has his own daddy-issues. Rabbit is jealous of his son(!) and feels competitive when he's around his home. By now, we know each of these characters inside out. There was a lot of shaking of the head and chuckling knowingly at the things they do and say. You see the many ways families mess up each others' lives and the cycle of mistakes repeating generation after generation.
As nauseating as Rabbit is (and as entertaining as his story is), it wouldn't be the book that it is without Updike's gorgeous writing that serves to point out some life-truths every few pages. As often as I paused in disgust at Rabbit's latest thoughts, I also paused to muse about these stunning sentences that make some of Rabbit's dilemmas all too human. This is the book where you feel closest to Harry, where you see his perspective and agree with him sometimes, which is a miracle considering everything he's done so far.
Maybe the dead are gods, there's certainly something kind about them, the way they give you room. What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones who watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
Easily the best Rabbit book so far.
P.S. There's also a minister to rival Eccles. Provides plenty of humour.
January 10, 2020
There are two kinds of male authors you love to hate.
The first is well-known and easily explicable: Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Ralph Ellison, Cormac McCarthy. Their works are all masculine self-assertion and lighting out for the territory; they describe the world of men and the world at war, a world of incised identity and imperiled honor; woman, if she appears, is just a vampire or squid, a mouth that devours, vagina dentata, sucking the vitals out of everything.
The second category is not generally recognized as a category, but should be: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, James Joyce—and John Updike. These men write—extensively, obsessively, and very often well—about women; they write about the social and cultural worlds of women and often live in those worlds, since they didn't join the army or play too many sports; and their dislike of women, when they express it, is not the distanced and mythological fear, as of Medusa, expressed by the men's men in the first category, but rather the resentful abrasions and betrayals of intimacy.
They also generally share what Hawthorne's biographer, , wisely observed of her subject: an "unsettling, overwhelming identification with women." This is why their work is marked by a permeability of gender as well as an occasional (or more than occasional) impatience with women. Here is John Updike's mock-hero, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, in successful middle age, reflecting on his desire for a daughter—or rather, a desire that a young woman he's just met is his daughter, from a long-ago affair:
Updike, though, is not Rabbit, even if Rabbit is a tunnel through which he can send some of his secret messages about what it feels like to be a man in the latter 20th century. What it feels like: this is the mission of Updike's Rabbit novels, a four-book and four-decade chronicle, through one middle-class white man's life, of America from the 1950s through the 1990s.
In the first volume, Rabbit, Run (1960), a young Harry, former high-school basketball star in the eastern-Pennsylvania town of Brewer, marries young to Janice Springer, and then tried to escape his marriage in an affair with a woman named Ruth; eventually, Janice drunkenly drowns her and Rabbit's baby daughter, Rebecca, but the couple reconciles in the end. In (1971), Janice's affair with Stavros, an employee at the car dealership her father owns, prompts Rabbit on his own journey into the '60s heart of darkness: an eventually fatal and fiery entanglement, in which he also involves his son Nelson, with Jill, a troubled white hippie, and Skeeter, a black revolutionary.
Rabbit Is Rich (1981), the third installment, begins with Harry in middle age, still married to Janice, now working at her late father's dealership alongside her former lover, now Rabbit's best friend, Stavros. Despite the title's promise of extraordinary wealth, Harry and Janice have merely ascended into the upper stratum of Brewer's middle class, into the golf and country-club set, this amid the newsy circumstances of America's Carter-era malaise. The longest but the least plotted of the novels so far, Rabbit Is Rich mainly concerns Nelson's return to the parental home from an unsuccessful stint in college. He comes back with first one woman and then another and with a wish to take his place in the family car business. The possibility looms that will soon have, whether he wants it or not, a family of his own. Harry, meanwhile, resents this rival under his roof:
The theme of oedipal strife is augmented by Harry's mid-life second youth under the influence of his new prosperity and the changing times. He and Janice seem—more even than the younger generation—to enjoy the freedoms of the sexual revolution. The novel's literal climax comes when the Angstroms and their country-club friends swap spouses at a Caribbean resort, and Harry enjoys an unexpectedly poignant anal dalliance with a friend's sick wife. She is, she confesses, desperately in love with him. Another motif is Rabbit's belief that a young girl from the country he's started seeing around Brewer is his daughter from the affair narrated in Rabbit, Run. Harry is surrounded by, obsessed with, resentful of a mixed company of women who define his life.
The novel's themes, then, are time's passage and human decline, both personal and political—and the question of whether wealth can make up for it. Without much of a story, though, Updike puts his style to the work of embodying these themes almost alone. As his admirers and detractors alike would observe, he covers the whole visible universe in language. Not a surface that meets Rabbit's eye goes ungilded by Updike's lush lexicon, and Rabbit, being l'homme moyen sensuel in a famously pornographic decade, spends a lot of time gazing on women's bodies. Tolerance of this will vary from reader to reader.
Updike, like it or not, descends from the tradition of Flaubert, Joyce, and Nabokov, which is, as observes, a secular version of the believer's finding justification for the creation in its mundane splendors. But Updike, unlike his literary forebears, is a Christian, and Christ was harder on money-changers than he was even on those who lusted in their hearts. Rabbit Is Rich never quite settles its thesis on riches, or on whether it is satirizing its protagonists' nouveau-riche pretensions or just portraying them neutrally. In its perhaps most famous scene, Rabbit invests in gold Krugerrands (to keep his money safe from inflation) and then has sex with his wife atop a pile of them:
Both the choice of currency, with its intimations of apartheid, and the grotesque exaggeration of the whole scenario suggest Flaubertian satire, as when Emma Bovary hears her lover's romantic pleadings while the agricultural fair, with its pigs and manure and civic orations, goes on outside. But the satire here is less obvious than Flaubert's, with his precise juxtaposition of discordant details; Updike gives us too many details to balance one against the other. We are swimming in the abundant coinage of his prose, but can't establish exact values. If Updike's attitudes toward gender and sex alienate younger generations, it is his stylistic abundance, often seemingly gratuitous, that repelled old-guard critics like Harold Bloom and James Wood.
I think Updike's disinterest—which does not mean boredom, but lack of partisanship—is to the novel's advantage. He lets us inhabit his characters' multifarious lives without directing our attention or attitude. This means that his personae's moral behavior, their political attitudes, their racial bigotry, their sexual fantasies, and more are recorded without censure. Such self-effacement is brave in a writer, because it respects readers enough to let them think for themselves, even if they decide the author is as vile as they may deem the characters. Updike, through his very withdrawal, wins the realist novel the honor of recording history in the moment.
Take, for instance, the novel's racial politics. On the one hand, the narrative centers on a company of white people who don't say anything positive in almost 500 pages about anyone who isn't white. (Even my forebears, not themselves paragons of racial enlightenment, aren't spared: "'The spics do that,' Harry says. 'The spics and the wops.'") But here Updike does exactly what critical theorists of race would have the white writer, or any writer, do: he writes about white people with total class and ethnic specificity as he charts their ideologies as products of their social setting, not as universal truths.
The Rabbit novels are monuments to the detail, a microscopic examination of one man in one milieu; Updike never gives the sense that he is writing everybody's story, only that he will tell you everything there is to know, including much you don't want to know, about this body:
Updike seems at times determined to alienate readers from Rabbit, not to endear us to him, by finding words for his every unreasonable appetite and unkind thought—until we realize, unless we are hypocritical moralists, that our heads, too, are full of unreasonable appetites and unkind thoughts, even if not the same ones.
437 pages, though, is too many pages to survive on pure description, and there is an almost farcical amount of sex, even for a novel set in the 1970s, doing duty for plot developments. Part of Updike's point, I take it, is that fashions in sexual morality change, and that these changes alter everyone's lives for good and ill. If there is any critique of the sexual revolution here, it comes when Updike portrays the older and more privileged generation disporting themselves, while the young are confused and adrift in the chaos of a world without norms.
Much the novel's pleasure comes from its surprising resonance with the present. I kept finding today in yesterday. How does Updike portray the United States in 1979? It is an America where the middle class is threatened with decline, the environment is about to collapse, the youth are failing to mature and are moving back in with their parents, older people are hoarding wealth and position to keep young people from ascending in the world—and the U.S. is practically at war with Iran. I kept wondering as I read: Just how long has this apocalypse been going on? Or is it—life—always this way, with each fresh generation naively appalled by it?
This cyclical character of history, this transient character of morality, offers all the more support for Updike's narrative dispassion. We can't change the world, but we can record it as it is, or even better than it is, transfigured—transubstantiated, Menand would say—by the poet's eye. A sense of historical futility also allows Rabbit Is Rich to strike its mingled note of bitter satire of and keening elegy for a world always wrong but still too beautiful to lose. Here are the final sentences—Rabbit meeting his baby granddaughter for the first time, finally turned, as it were, into a woman—and note that no moralist could catch, as Updike does, almost as deftly as Shakespeare, the mixed feelings a man might have on greeting new life as he runs into the twilight of his own:
The first is well-known and easily explicable: Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Ralph Ellison, Cormac McCarthy. Their works are all masculine self-assertion and lighting out for the territory; they describe the world of men and the world at war, a world of incised identity and imperiled honor; woman, if she appears, is just a vampire or squid, a mouth that devours, vagina dentata, sucking the vitals out of everything.
The second category is not generally recognized as a category, but should be: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, James Joyce—and John Updike. These men write—extensively, obsessively, and very often well—about women; they write about the social and cultural worlds of women and often live in those worlds, since they didn't join the army or play too many sports; and their dislike of women, when they express it, is not the distanced and mythological fear, as of Medusa, expressed by the men's men in the first category, but rather the resentful abrasions and betrayals of intimacy.
They also generally share what Hawthorne's biographer, , wisely observed of her subject: an "unsettling, overwhelming identification with women." This is why their work is marked by a permeability of gender as well as an occasional (or more than occasional) impatience with women. Here is John Updike's mock-hero, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, in successful middle age, reflecting on his desire for a daughter—or rather, a desire that a young woman he's just met is his daughter, from a long-ago affair:
Her eyes his blue: wonderful to think that he has been turned into cunt, a secret message carried by genes all that way through all these comings and goings all these years, the bloody tunnel of growing and living, of staying alive. He better stop thinking about it, it fills him too full of pointless excitement.
Updike, though, is not Rabbit, even if Rabbit is a tunnel through which he can send some of his secret messages about what it feels like to be a man in the latter 20th century. What it feels like: this is the mission of Updike's Rabbit novels, a four-book and four-decade chronicle, through one middle-class white man's life, of America from the 1950s through the 1990s.
In the first volume, Rabbit, Run (1960), a young Harry, former high-school basketball star in the eastern-Pennsylvania town of Brewer, marries young to Janice Springer, and then tried to escape his marriage in an affair with a woman named Ruth; eventually, Janice drunkenly drowns her and Rabbit's baby daughter, Rebecca, but the couple reconciles in the end. In (1971), Janice's affair with Stavros, an employee at the car dealership her father owns, prompts Rabbit on his own journey into the '60s heart of darkness: an eventually fatal and fiery entanglement, in which he also involves his son Nelson, with Jill, a troubled white hippie, and Skeeter, a black revolutionary.
Rabbit Is Rich (1981), the third installment, begins with Harry in middle age, still married to Janice, now working at her late father's dealership alongside her former lover, now Rabbit's best friend, Stavros. Despite the title's promise of extraordinary wealth, Harry and Janice have merely ascended into the upper stratum of Brewer's middle class, into the golf and country-club set, this amid the newsy circumstances of America's Carter-era malaise. The longest but the least plotted of the novels so far, Rabbit Is Rich mainly concerns Nelson's return to the parental home from an unsuccessful stint in college. He comes back with first one woman and then another and with a wish to take his place in the family car business. The possibility looms that will soon have, whether he wants it or not, a family of his own. Harry, meanwhile, resents this rival under his roof:
Janice asks him why is his heart so hard toward Nelson. Because Nelson has swallowed up the boy that was and substituted one more pushy man in the world, hairy wrists, big prick. Not enough room in the world.
The theme of oedipal strife is augmented by Harry's mid-life second youth under the influence of his new prosperity and the changing times. He and Janice seem—more even than the younger generation—to enjoy the freedoms of the sexual revolution. The novel's literal climax comes when the Angstroms and their country-club friends swap spouses at a Caribbean resort, and Harry enjoys an unexpectedly poignant anal dalliance with a friend's sick wife. She is, she confesses, desperately in love with him. Another motif is Rabbit's belief that a young girl from the country he's started seeing around Brewer is his daughter from the affair narrated in Rabbit, Run. Harry is surrounded by, obsessed with, resentful of a mixed company of women who define his life.
The novel's themes, then, are time's passage and human decline, both personal and political—and the question of whether wealth can make up for it. Without much of a story, though, Updike puts his style to the work of embodying these themes almost alone. As his admirers and detractors alike would observe, he covers the whole visible universe in language. Not a surface that meets Rabbit's eye goes ungilded by Updike's lush lexicon, and Rabbit, being l'homme moyen sensuel in a famously pornographic decade, spends a lot of time gazing on women's bodies. Tolerance of this will vary from reader to reader.
Updike, like it or not, descends from the tradition of Flaubert, Joyce, and Nabokov, which is, as observes, a secular version of the believer's finding justification for the creation in its mundane splendors. But Updike, unlike his literary forebears, is a Christian, and Christ was harder on money-changers than he was even on those who lusted in their hearts. Rabbit Is Rich never quite settles its thesis on riches, or on whether it is satirizing its protagonists' nouveau-riche pretensions or just portraying them neutrally. In its perhaps most famous scene, Rabbit invests in gold Krugerrands (to keep his money safe from inflation) and then has sex with his wife atop a pile of them:
His underwear off, the overhead light still on, his prick up like a jutting piece of pink wreckage, he calms her into lying motionless and places a Krugerrand on each nipple, one on her navel, and a number on her pussy, enough to mask the hair with a triangle of unsteady coins overlapping like snake scales. If she laughs and her belly moves the whole construction will collapse. Kneeling at her hips, Harry holds a Krugerrand by the edge as if to insert it in a slot.
Both the choice of currency, with its intimations of apartheid, and the grotesque exaggeration of the whole scenario suggest Flaubertian satire, as when Emma Bovary hears her lover's romantic pleadings while the agricultural fair, with its pigs and manure and civic orations, goes on outside. But the satire here is less obvious than Flaubert's, with his precise juxtaposition of discordant details; Updike gives us too many details to balance one against the other. We are swimming in the abundant coinage of his prose, but can't establish exact values. If Updike's attitudes toward gender and sex alienate younger generations, it is his stylistic abundance, often seemingly gratuitous, that repelled old-guard critics like Harold Bloom and James Wood.
I think Updike's disinterest—which does not mean boredom, but lack of partisanship—is to the novel's advantage. He lets us inhabit his characters' multifarious lives without directing our attention or attitude. This means that his personae's moral behavior, their political attitudes, their racial bigotry, their sexual fantasies, and more are recorded without censure. Such self-effacement is brave in a writer, because it respects readers enough to let them think for themselves, even if they decide the author is as vile as they may deem the characters. Updike, through his very withdrawal, wins the realist novel the honor of recording history in the moment.
Take, for instance, the novel's racial politics. On the one hand, the narrative centers on a company of white people who don't say anything positive in almost 500 pages about anyone who isn't white. (Even my forebears, not themselves paragons of racial enlightenment, aren't spared: "'The spics do that,' Harry says. 'The spics and the wops.'") But here Updike does exactly what critical theorists of race would have the white writer, or any writer, do: he writes about white people with total class and ethnic specificity as he charts their ideologies as products of their social setting, not as universal truths.
The Rabbit novels are monuments to the detail, a microscopic examination of one man in one milieu; Updike never gives the sense that he is writing everybody's story, only that he will tell you everything there is to know, including much you don't want to know, about this body:
It streams noisily into the bowl it seems forever, embarrassingly, all those drinks at dinner. Then he sits down on the seat anyway, to let out a little air. Too much shellfish. He imagines he can smell yesterday's crabmeat and when he stands he tests with a finger down there to see if he stinks. He decides he does. Better use a washcloth.
Updike seems at times determined to alienate readers from Rabbit, not to endear us to him, by finding words for his every unreasonable appetite and unkind thought—until we realize, unless we are hypocritical moralists, that our heads, too, are full of unreasonable appetites and unkind thoughts, even if not the same ones.
437 pages, though, is too many pages to survive on pure description, and there is an almost farcical amount of sex, even for a novel set in the 1970s, doing duty for plot developments. Part of Updike's point, I take it, is that fashions in sexual morality change, and that these changes alter everyone's lives for good and ill. If there is any critique of the sexual revolution here, it comes when Updike portrays the older and more privileged generation disporting themselves, while the young are confused and adrift in the chaos of a world without norms.
Nelson is on the attack, frazzled and feeling rotten, poor kid. "And who are you to criticize me and Pru for going out to see some friends when you were off with yours seeing those ridiculous exotic dancers? How could you stand it, Mom?"
Janice says, "It wasn't as bad as I'd thought. They keep it within bounds. It really wasn't any worse than it used to be at the old fairgrounds."
"Don't answer him," Harry tells her. "Who's he to criticize?"
"The funny thing," Janice goes on, "is how Cindy and Thelma and I could agree which girl was the best and the men had picked some girl entirely different. We all liked this tall Oriental who was very graceful and artistic and they liked, Mother, the men liked some little chinless blonde who couldn't even dance."
"She had that look about her," Harry explains. "I mean, she meant it."
"And then that tubby dark one that turned you on. With the feather."
"Olive-complected. She was nice too. The feather I could have done without."
Much the novel's pleasure comes from its surprising resonance with the present. I kept finding today in yesterday. How does Updike portray the United States in 1979? It is an America where the middle class is threatened with decline, the environment is about to collapse, the youth are failing to mature and are moving back in with their parents, older people are hoarding wealth and position to keep young people from ascending in the world—and the U.S. is practically at war with Iran. I kept wondering as I read: Just how long has this apocalypse been going on? Or is it—life—always this way, with each fresh generation naively appalled by it?
This cyclical character of history, this transient character of morality, offers all the more support for Updike's narrative dispassion. We can't change the world, but we can record it as it is, or even better than it is, transfigured—transubstantiated, Menand would say—by the poet's eye. A sense of historical futility also allows Rabbit Is Rich to strike its mingled note of bitter satire of and keening elegy for a world always wrong but still too beautiful to lose. Here are the final sentences—Rabbit meeting his baby granddaughter for the first time, finally turned, as it were, into a woman—and note that no moralist could catch, as Updike does, almost as deftly as Shakespeare, the mixed feelings a man might have on greeting new life as he runs into the twilight of his own:
Oblong cocooned little visitor, the baby shows her profile blindly in the shuddering flashes of color jerking from the Sony, the tiny stitchless seam of the closed eyelid aslant, lips bubbled forward beneath the whorled nose as if in delicate disdain, she knows she's good. You can feel in the curve of the cranium she's feminine, that shows from the first day. Through all this she has pushed to be here, in his lap, his hands, a real presence hardly weighing anything but alive. Fortune's hostage, heart's desire, a granddaughter. His. Another nail in his coffin. His.
April 7, 2025
Terzo capitolo della saga di Coniglio, con ampio distacco il migliore finora. Pulitzer + National Book Award nel 1982. Ambisce all’ideale di Grande Romanzo Americano, e Harry Angstrom va tranquillamente ad affiancarsi ai miei personaggi letterari preferiti. Che fenomeno, Updike.
[91/100]
[91/100]
July 25, 2011
I read this book as the third in the Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, and then Rabbit is Rich). My book group chose Rabbit, Run out of curiosity about books by the recently-deceased John Updike. I was inspired enough to continue with the series. By far, I enjoyed this book the most of the three. Rabbit has finally become a sympathetic character, taking control of his life and making decisions. The previous two books showed Rabbit as a self-consumed ass, indirectly contributing to the deaths of two innocent people. He just let the world wash over him, stuck reliving his glory high school days as a basketball star and behaving indecisively. In this book, it was a relief to see him taking actions, even if they were stupid or risky, such as buying gold or going on vacation when his new daughter-in-law was due to go into labor.
A major theme in the book was the father-son relationship between Rabbit and Nelson. I was surprised at how threatened and annoyed Rabbit was by his now-adult son. Nelson is actually a bit more mature, although spoiled, than his dad was at the same age. I didn’t like Nelson, but found that Updike did a great job in capturing the generational differences. I’m curious to read this book in 15 years, to see how my reaction may differ to this dynamic. In fact, I’m going to hold off reading the next book, Rabbit at Rest, until I can relate, age-wise, with Rabbit a bit more.
Another reason I could have enjoyed this book was because I was alive during the time it took place. I loved the Toyota images (I drove an 80 Toyota Corolla, affectionately referring to it as the “Shit Mobile�), the clothing descriptions, and the country club atmosphere (which I idolized because my family couldn’t afford it). Rabbit, Run seemed to include a lot of slang from the 50’s that I could not pick up; either that, or I just could not relate to what he was trying to say. This book didn’t present that kind of challenge. In Rabbit, Redux, a major theme was the racial tension in America. I think Updike could have used this book to address gender inequality similarly, but I’m glad he only touched on that theme.
If you’re curious what the baby boomer generation may have been going through during the late 70’s/early 80’s, this is a good book to read!
A major theme in the book was the father-son relationship between Rabbit and Nelson. I was surprised at how threatened and annoyed Rabbit was by his now-adult son. Nelson is actually a bit more mature, although spoiled, than his dad was at the same age. I didn’t like Nelson, but found that Updike did a great job in capturing the generational differences. I’m curious to read this book in 15 years, to see how my reaction may differ to this dynamic. In fact, I’m going to hold off reading the next book, Rabbit at Rest, until I can relate, age-wise, with Rabbit a bit more.
Another reason I could have enjoyed this book was because I was alive during the time it took place. I loved the Toyota images (I drove an 80 Toyota Corolla, affectionately referring to it as the “Shit Mobile�), the clothing descriptions, and the country club atmosphere (which I idolized because my family couldn’t afford it). Rabbit, Run seemed to include a lot of slang from the 50’s that I could not pick up; either that, or I just could not relate to what he was trying to say. This book didn’t present that kind of challenge. In Rabbit, Redux, a major theme was the racial tension in America. I think Updike could have used this book to address gender inequality similarly, but I’m glad he only touched on that theme.
If you’re curious what the baby boomer generation may have been going through during the late 70’s/early 80’s, this is a good book to read!
November 29, 2018
Made it to page 38 before I could no longer handle the toxic masculinity. Don't know how I tolerated the first 2 books. Will not attempt the last 2 books.
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