Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike (PDF)

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award The hero of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, ten years after the events of Rabbit Redux, has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as the chief sales representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is falling, gas lines are lengthening, and double-digit inflation coincides with a deflation of national self-confidence. Nevertheless, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom feels in good shape, ready to enjoy life at last—until his wayward son, Nelson, returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to the lot. New characters and old populate these scenes from Rabbit’s middle age as he continues to pursue, in his zigzagging fashion, the rainbow of happiness.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Unquestionably Updike’s finest novel . . . Funny and sharp and damnably intelligent.”—The Boston Globe “Dazzlingly reaffirms Updike’s place as master chronicler of the spiritual maladies and very earthly pleasures of the Middle-American male.”—Vogue “Rich, funny . . . Updike at the very height of his powers.”—New York magazine From the Inside Flap Winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.Ten years after RABBIT REDUX, Harry Angstrom has come to enjoy prosperity as the Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors. The rest of the world may be falling to pieces, but Harrry’s doing all right. That is, until his son returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to his lot….From the Paperback edition. From the Back Cover Winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.Ten years after RABBIT REDUX, Harry Angstrom has come to enjoy prosperity as the Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors. The rest of the world may be falling to pieces, but Harrry’s doing all right. That is, until his son returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to his lot…. “From the Paperback edition. About the Author John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. I Running out of gas, Rabbit Angstrom thinks as he stands behind the summer-dusty windows of the Springer Motors display room watching the traffic go by on Route 111, traffic somehow thin and scared compared to what it used to be. The fucking world is running out of gas. But they won’t catch him, not yet, because there isn’t a piece of junk on the road gets better mileage than his Toyotas, with lower service costs. Read Consumer Reports, April issue. That’s all he has to tell the people when they come in. And come in they do, the people out there are getting frantic, they know the great American ride is ending. Gas lines at ninety-nine point nine cents a gallon and ninety per cent of the stations to be closed for the weekend. The governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania calling for five-dollar minimum sales to stop the panicky topping-up. And truckers who can’t get diesel shooting at their own trucks, there was an incident right in Diamond County, along the Pottsville Pike. People are going wild, their dollars are going rotten, they shell out like there’s no tomorrow. He tells them, when they buy a Toyota, they’re turning their dollars into yen. And they believe him. A hundred twelve units new and used moved in the first five months of 1979, with eight Corollas, five Coronas including a Luxury Edition Wagon, and that Celica that Charlie said looked like a Pimpmobile unloaded in these first three weeks of June already, at an average gross mark-up of eight hundred dollars per sale. Rabbit is rich. He owns Springer Motors, one of the two Toyota agencies in the Brewer area. Or rather he co-owns a half-interest with his wife Janice, her mother Bessie sitting on the other half inherited when old man Springer died five years back. But Rabbit feels as though he owns it all, showing up at the showroom day after day, riding herd on the paperwork and the payroll, swinging in his clean suit in and out of Service and Parts where the men work filmed with oil and look up white-eyed from the bulb-lit engines as in a kind of underworld while he makes contact with the public, the community, the star and spearpoint of all these two dozen employees and hundred thousand square feet of working space, which seem a wide shadow behind him as he stands there up front. The wall of imitation boards, really sheets of random-grooved Masonite, around the door into his office is hung with framed old clippings and team portraits, including two all-county tens, from his days as a basketball hero twenty years ago—no, more than twenty-five years now. Even under glass, the clippings keep yellowing, something in the chemistry of the paper apart from the air, something like the deepening taint of sin people used to try to scare you with. ANGSTROM HITS FOR 42. “Rabbit” Leads Mt. Judge Into Semi-Finals. Resurrected from the attic where his dead parents had long kept them, in scrapbooks whose mucilage had dried so they came loose like snakeskins, these clippings thus displayed were Fred Springer’s idea, along with that phrase about an agency’s reputation being the shadow of the man up front. Knowing he was dying long before he did, Fred was getting Harry ready to be the man up front. When you think of the dead, you got to be grateful. Ten years ago when Rabbit got laid off as a Linotyper and reconciled with Janice, her father took him on as salesman and when the time was ripe five years later had the kindness to die. Who would have thought such a little tense busy bird of a man could get it up for a massive coronary? Hypertense: his diastolic had been up around one-twenty for years. Loved salt. Loved to talk Republican, too, and when Nixon left him nothing to say he had kind of burst. Actually, he had lasted a year into Ford, but the skin of his face was getting tighter and the red spots where the cheek and jaw bones pressed from underneath redder. When Harry looked down at him rouged in the coffin he saw it had been coming, dead Fred hadn’t much changed. From the way Janice and her mother carried on you would have thought a mixture of Prince Valiant and Moses had bit the dust. Maybe having already buried both his own parents made Harry hard. He looked down, noticed that Fred’s hair had been parted wrong, and felt nothing. The great thing about the dead, they make space. While old man Springer was still prancing around, life at the lot was hard. He kept long hours, held the showroom open on winter nights when there wasn’t a snowplow moving along Route 111, was always grinding away in that little high-pitched grinder of a voice about performance guidelines and washout profits and customer servicing and whether or not a mechanic had left a thumbprint on some heap’s steering wheel or a cigarette butt in the ashtray. When he was around the lot it was like they were all trying to fill some big skin that Springer spent all his time and energy imagining, the ideal Springer Motors. When he died that skin became Harry’s own, to stand around in loosely. Now that he is king of the lot he likes it here, the acre of asphalt, the new-car smell present even in the pamphlets and pep talks Toyota mails from California, the shampooed carpet wall to wall, the yellowing basketball feats up on the walls along with the plaques saying Kiwanis and Rotary and C of C and the trophies on a high shelf won by the Little League teams the company sponsors, the ample square peace of this masculine place spiced by the girls in billing and reception that come and go under old Mildred Kroust, and the little cards printed with HAROLD C. ANGSTROM on them and CHIEF SALES REPRESENTATIVE. The man up front. A center of sorts, where he had been a forward. There is an airiness to it for Harry, standing there in his own skin, casting a shadow. The cars sell themselves, is his philosophy. The Toyota commercials on television are out there all the time, preying on people’s minds. He likes being part of all that; he likes the nod he gets from the community, that had overlooked him like dirt ever since high school. The other men in Rotary and Chamber turn out to be the guys he played ball with back then, or their ugly younger brothers. He likes having money to float in, a big bland good guy is how he sees himself, six three and around two fifteen by now, with a forty-two waist the suit salesman at Kroll’s tried to tell him until he sucked his gut in and the man’s thumb grudgingly inched the tape tighter. He avoids mirrors, when he used to love them. The face far in his past, crew-cut and thin-jawed with sleepy predatory teen-age eyes in the glossy team portraits, exists in his present face like the chrome bones of a grille within the full front view of a car and its fenders. His nose is still small and straight, his eyes maybe less sleepy. An ample blown-dry-looking businessman’s haircut masks his eartips and fills in where his temples are receding. He didn’t much like the counterculture with all its drugs and draft-dodging but he does like being allowed within limits to let your hair grow longer than those old Marine cuts and to have it naturally fluff out. In the shaving mirror a chaos of wattles and slack cords blooms beneath his chin in a way that doesn’t bear study. Still, life is sweet. That’s what old people used to say and when he was young he wondered how they could mean it. Last night it hailed in Brewer and its suburbs. Stones the size of marbles leaped up from the slant little front yards and drummed on the tin signs supporting flickering neon downtown; then came a downpour whose puddles reflected a dawn gray as stone. But the day has turned breezy and golden and the patched and white-striped asphalt of the lot is dry, late in the afternoon of this longest Saturday in June and the first of calendar summer. Usually on a Saturday Route 111 is buzzing with shoppers pillaging the malls hacked from the former fields of corn, rye, tomatoes, cabbages, and strawberries. Across the highway, the four concrete lanes and the median divider of aluminum battered by many forgotten accidents, stands a low building faced in dark clinker brick that in the years since Harry watched its shell being slapped together of plywood has been a succession of unsuccessful restaurants and now serves as the Chuck Wagon, specializing in barbecued take-outs. The Chuck Wagon too seems quiet today. Beyond its lot littered with flattened take-out cartons a lone tree, a dusty maple, drinks from a stream that has become a mere ditch. Beneath its branches a picnic table rots unused, too close to the overflowing dumpster the restaurant keeps by its kitchen door. The ditch marks the bound of a piece of farmland sold off but still awaiting its development. This shapely old maple from its distance seems always to be making to Harry an appeal he must ignore. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Irving, writing contemporaneously, has captured the heart of WASPy America at the beginning of the 80s. Our protagonist, Rabbit Angstrom, found himself in previous volumes leaving behind the conventional American dream for hard right turns into adultery and communal living. Now, there is no real development of the character. We’ll into his forties, he is who he is. Thus the novel becomes a travelogue of 1979. The Ayatollah has his hostages, interest rates are double digits, and wife swapping is accepted practice. Throughout the novel, the “greatest generation” worries about the boomers, exemplified by the youngest Angstrom, who just cannot find a place in an evolving America. A time capsule of sorts, the book captures a man who has stumbled on to a fortune, but has neither the wit or wisdom to keep it. Far from being exceptional Rabbit is a blunt object who ends the novel at a crossroads of new beginnings and old mistakes.In comparison to the other books in the series, this one is fairly explicit. Still a good read.

⭐Rabbit is Rich is the third installment of the tetralogy written by John Updike, featuring as its protagonist, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. This book follows Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux which follow the life of Angstrom in his hometown of Mt. Judge, near Brewster, Pennsylvania. When we left Rabbit at the conclusion of Rabbit Redux, he had just lost his job as a linotypist, lost his wife to a Greek car salesman and taken up with two 60s era hippies, an interlude that ended in the death of one and the fiery destruction of his home.Rabbit is Rich finds Angstrom roughly ten years later, reconciled with his wife Janice, co-owning and managing the car dealership that he and his wife inherited with the death of his father-in-law. Rabbit is drawing a salary of $500/week and taking profits from the dealership of an additional $15,000/year. Rabbit is rich.The time frame is the late 70s, Jimmy Carter is President, inflation is rampant, gas prices are soaring and a general malaise has fallen over the country, but Rabbit is selling Toyotas like hotcakes. Much of the action centers upon Rabbit’s dysfunctional relationship with his college aged son and interaction between he, his wife and their country club friends.While much of the writing is entertaining and very well done, it must be noted that at times, Updike seems to fly off on wild screeds of florid, almost unintelligible prose that leave the reader simply rolling his eyes. Nevertheless, the characters contained in the story are well presented and fleshed out beautifully, even some of the more peripheral players. All in all, this is a fascinating look at life during the late 70s, from the perspective of a middle class, Pennsylvania family, though Rabbit and his circumstances can hardly be viewed as representative. This may be the best of the three “Rabbit” books I’ve read so far. On to the finale, Rabbit at Rest.

⭐It’s understandable why learned Pulitzer members awarded the truly gifted writer, Mr. Updike, their prize. They probably could relate to Harry Angstrom and the other people who inhabit “Rabbit is Rich.” It’s putting it mildly to say that deep introspection isn’t these character’s strong suit. This book successfully depicts the zeitgeist of middle-class America. The scenes take place in 1979-1980 just prior to the Reagan Revolution, but easily could be applied to today’s mindset. Rabbit is a complex character, but not the brightest bunny in the world. Sometimes I felt sorry for him and other times there was a massive urge to smack him aside the head with a two-by-four in the hopes of knocking some sense into the muddle-headed layabout. The superficial nature of this group’s middle-aged existence is consumed with posturing, sex (or lack of variety thereof), drinking, money, as well as silently fantasizing about other people’s lives and how it might be greener on the other side of the fence. It’s difficult to like any of the characters. Heck, I KNOW people who live this kind of life. It isn’t necessary to have read the two prior installments, “Rabbit, Run” and “Rabbit Redux,” but it does help in some of the references to what has happened in the past. Mr. Updike’s book resonanted much more than the previous two works probably because I’m 49 which is the same age range as Rabbit. Man, it’s a very good read but a real downer.

⭐This is the first of Updike’s works I have read, but it will most likely not be the last. There is not much of a plot and not much happens, but the characters are worth the read… Updike really delves deep into the psyche of his main characters– all of them flawed, all of them somehow still searching for meaning and for ‘real life.’ Harry Angstrom (Rabbit) seems to be the typical antihero, but mostly he’s portrayed as a vulnerable, aging man with a lot of dreams and no more possibilities or opportunities to realize those dreams. Janice is one of those modern-day housewives who seems to have no purpose of goals of her own. Nelson, a spoiled kid, who seems to be out to ruin his father, instead ends up ruining himself. All of them, including mother and Pru, seem to be stuck. There is not much glory in Updike’s novel. Instead, what the reader gets is a bunch of sad stories about life… a life that most seem to end up living.

⭐Four novels plus a novella give us over 2000 pages (over a 40 year period) about Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom and those people closest to him. All these characters are definitely flawed (especially Rabbit), but Updike helps us see how human they are. I can’t say ‘Rabbit Is Rich’ is better than the others in the series (though it did win the Pulitzer). I just recommend reading all of them, one after the other. (The novella is included in ‘Licks of Love’).

⭐Describing Rabbit’s experiences of American life in the late 70’s and early 80’s, Updike treats us to a giant banquet of a book.(Actually a series of books: I read Rabbit is Rich and then this one, virtually together)Hundreds of pages full of sumptuously meticulous observations which convey so vividly the hero’s inner narrative – all the details that in normal life remain undisclosed. Men like Rabbit don’t tend to share a lot of their intimate emotions, but, in this glorious novel, they are expertly articulated for our exquisite delight.His irritations, insecurities, deceptions, doubts, preoccupations, perceptions, loves, lusts are all here. As are his likes & dislikes, threats to his ego & boosts to it, successes & failures, sources of pride & causes of worry, aspirations & disappointments, satisfactions & frustrations . Tensions, rivalries, habits, comforts. Secret longings, secret fears, secret memories. The subtle characteristics of his companions, the unique experiences their company brings. The environmental cues which surround him, some inspiring, some depressing, but most in between, mundane yet evocative.Rabbit is certainly rich – his life, like all our lives, is chock full of poignant moments, nuances and insights that we never normally express. We rely on great authors like Updike to reassure us how rich indeed we all are.

⭐While far from being an expert on this art form, it’s obvious this is quality stuff. In England this kind of book is called” literary fiction”. The sort of writing equivalent of an “art house” film I suppose. Generally it’s a straightforward read with maybe short bits of “stream of consciousness” techniques. Their are, I think, 4 “Rabbit “novels. I have read the middle 2. In that it documents day to day life it could be said to be similar to” soap opera “But it’s deeper +more meaningful than any soap opera!

⭐We’ve moved on to the late 1970s and Rabbit is middle-aged, reasonably comfortable and reasonably affluent. He’s finally living the true American dream. The dramatic canvass of RABBIT IS RICH is smaller than that of the second in the series, and is a return to the domestic angst of the first. But it’s none the less potent for that. Harry Angstrom has finally settled down. He’s left his sometimes extreme behaviour behind him. Now he’s primarily concerned with the more quotidian aspects of life, worrying as he does about his marriage, his business, his wayward son, and his possible extra-marital fathering of another child. He’s still conflicted, although his moral dilemmas are now closer to home. He’s still flawed, but now he seems to be gaining some wisdom. Once more this is everyman stuff written in Updike’s typically lean, sharp, and insightful prose. Another essential slice of small-town Americana that packs a universal message.

⭐Laugh out loud funny. Updike is one of those author’s people recommend but I have always been put off by The Witches of Eastwick. I should’ve started with the first installment, of this series, but heard the BBC radio version narrated by Toby Jones and bought it immediately.

⭐A subtle and powerful book.Conveys middle-aged angst in immensely readable prose that can be unsentimental, funny, moving.Harry Angstrom reflects the modern condition in a consumerist, self-centred society better than any fictional character I have come across.His alpha-male impulses and ambitions are balanced by the complex realities of family life, friends and business. And above all, sex.Updike builds his character through a mix of daily events and Harry’s innermost thoughts in a kind of stream of consciousness, exposing human nature in all its shades and colours.One of the best books I’ve read in a long, long time.

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