Rabbit Is Rich

The Comfortable Man

Harry Angstrom has arrived. The Toyota dealership he inherited from his father-in-law Springer is profitable: the gas crisis of 1979 has made fuel-efficient Japanese cars desirable, and Rabbit is on the right side of history by accident. He plays golf. He has money. He is a member of the Flying Eagle Tee and Racquet Club. He is bored.

Updike’s great formal achievement in Rabbit Is Rich is rendering comfort as a form of suffering. Rabbit has everything he wanted in 1960 when he first ran, and having it is not what he imagined it would be. He is still looking for something — a woman, a sensation, a moment of the intensity that basketball once provided.

Nelson

The novel’s secondary conflict is between Rabbit and his son Nelson, who has returned from Kent State with a pregnant girlfriend, Pru, and demands a role in the dealership. Rabbit does not want him there. Their antagonism is the novel’s comic and painful engine.

Updike won the Pulitzer Prize for Rabbit Is Rich in 1982, and the novel also won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award — a rare triple. It is the tetralogy’s most formally comfortable entry, the one in which Updike and Rabbit are most at ease with each other.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Rabbit Is Rich apart: Updike’s social observation is at its peak here — the texture of American middle-class life in 1979 is rendered with extraordinary precision; The comedy is Updike’s warmest and most fully earned across the tetralogy; and The Rabbit-Nelson relationship captures a specific father-son dynamic — the successful father who cannot understand the son he has damaged. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Rabbit Is Rich give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Success does not resolve the restlessness that drove Rabbit to run — it merely gives it better furnishings. The 1979 energy crisis is Updike’s vehicle for examining a specifically American anxiety: the end of abundance. Fatherhood in the Rabbit novels is always a repetition — Rabbit does to Nelson what was done to him, without understanding how. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

John Updike’s prose in Rabbit Is Rich is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

The novel rewards readers who have read Rabbit, Run — some of its satisfactions depend on that history. Rabbit’s sexual obsessions, which Updike renders in detail, will be off-putting to some readers. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers of American literary fiction who want the definitive portrait of suburban American life in the late 1970s, and Updike readers working through the tetralogy.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — The Pulitzer-winning peak of the tetralogy; Rabbit at his most comfortable and his most restless.

Reading Guides

• Where to Start with John Updike
• Rabbit, Run by John Updike — Full Review
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen — Full Review

The Triple Award

Rabbit Is Rich was published in September 1981 and won three major prizes in 1982: the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The triple win is unusual in American literary history — no novel had won all three simultaneously before, and very few have since. Updike described the achievement with characteristic self-deprecation, suggesting that the committee members might have been voting for the accumulated weight of the series rather than for the specific volume.

Harry in the Carter Years

The novel covers 1979, the year of the Iranian hostage crisis, the gas shortages, and the final months of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Harry Angstrom, now fifty, is a Toyota dealer in Brewer, Pennsylvania — comfortably established, running his late father-in-law’s dealership in a period when Japanese cars were displacing American ones. The prosperity that has made Harry comfortable is built on exactly the kind of economic dislocation that the series has been tracking since Rabbit, Run: the decline of the industrial base, the loss of the factory jobs that supported Brewer, and the emergence of the service economy that benefits Toyota dealers more than steelworkers. Updike manages to make all of this present in Harry’s specific pleasures — the Toyota dealership, the country club, the gold coins he buys as a hedge — without ever reducing Harry to a symbol.

The Tetralogy as American Panorama

The Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy — Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Rabbit at Rest (1990) — was published complete as Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy in 1995 and is regularly cited alongside Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels as the most sustained portrait of American life in 20th-century fiction. Each novel tracks a decade of American social and political change through Harry Angstrom’s middle-class Pennsylvania life; Rabbit Is Rich’s 1979 setting encompasses the oil crisis, the Iran hostages, and the late-Carter malaise.