Rabbit Is Rich
by John Updike
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Book Summary Information
Author: John UpdikeEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1996-08-27
ISBN: 0449911829
Number of pages: 544
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Book Reviews of Rabbit Is Rich
Book Review: "Let me tell you something about Toyotas"
Summary: 5 Stars
Another decade has passed in the lives of the Angstrom family, so it must be time for a crisis of Sturm-und-Drang proportions. Fortunately, in the third (and best) installment of Updike's series, the calamities rely on a lot less Sturm and a little more Drang. Although he is occasionally haunted by ghosts from past catastrophes, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom has grown comfortably wealthy in his middle years and the ills that afflict him--his persistent paunch, his defiant son, his rarely sober wife, his far-too-small home that he shares with his dominating mother-in-law--all are more suitable to the American Everyman he is meant to be, a patriot whose intellectual depths can be found in back issues of Consumer Reports. Meanwhile, the world around him seems to be falling apart--there are lines to get gasoline, there are hostages in Iran, there are Russians in Afghanistan--problems that seem remote indeed to a Toyota dealer in suburban Pennsylvania.
So when life's predicaments intrude, Harry sees them sometimes as opportunities, sometimes as annoyances. The gas shortage, a burden to everyone else, is a windfall to Harry's car business; one of the book's recurring gags is his near-religious belief in his own dealership spiel. The fluctuation in gold prices motivates him to buy krugerrands (a transaction that results in one of the book's most hilarious scenes). Even the discovery that he may or may not have a grown daughter living in the suburbs is a source of curiosity and nostalgia rather than distress.
In the annoyance column, however, is surely his son, dropping out of college, returning home with two girlfriends, one of them pregnant, and demanding a place in the family business. The love-hate relationship between Harry and Nelson is perhaps Updike's finest prose portrait; like most fathers and sons, the warring pair are grotesquely incapable of seeing their similarities and have become expert at amplifying their differences.
It wouldn't be a Rabbit novel without a trendy sex scene appropriate to 1979--spouse swapping, in this case--although here it's a source of whimsical longing rather than marital angst. And, like Philip Roth's Mickey Sabbath, Rabbit maintains both a libido that swerves to every attractive young woman whose wake he crosses and an immature lack of decorum that allows him to paw through his friends' intimate belongings. But these are just flashbacks to youth in a comfortable middle age. Rabbit has mellowed; he has learned to resign himself to the downsides of life's upsides. Even the grandchild "he has been waiting for" is just "another nail in his coffin."
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