Rabbit is Rich (Penguin Modern Classics)
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Product Description
Product Description
It's 1979 and Rabbit is no longer running. He's walking, and beginning to get out of breath. That's OK, though - it gives him the chance to enjoy the wealth that comes with middle age. It's all in place: he's Chief Sales Representative and co-owner of Springer motors; his wife, at home or in the club, is keeping trim; he wears good suits, and the cash is pouring in. So why is it that he finds it so hard to accept the way that things have turned out? And why, when he looks at his family, is he haunted by regrets about all those lives he'll never live?
About the Author
John (Hoyer) Updike (1932-) American novelist, short story writer and poet, internationally known for his novels RABBIT, RUN (1960), RABBIT REDUX (1971), RABBIT IS RICH (1981), and RABBIT AT REST (1990). His latest novel is VILLAGES (Penguin, 2005)
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First Sentence
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. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Updike shows he is master of his subject and style here. If 'Rabbit Redux' lost its way a little after the critical triumph of 'Rabbit, Run', then here he is back on track. From the first page, with its focus on the American car industry of the 70's and early 80's, a subject that could be boring and off-putting as an opening to a novel, his mastery of both language and the subject on all levels,factual and metaphorical, is evident. The subject of the book is the mid-century male American. Rabbit is a man of limited education, heading up a Toyota dealership in Brewer, ( representing small town America), and well on his way to getting rich. He has plenty of earthly 'bread' but no spiritual sustenance whatever. He has appetites for life, sex, food and booze- all of which he satisfies readily and copiously, but his spiritual hunger is both unsatisfied and unacknowledged. Updike shows us an America getting rich as Rabbit does. The heyday of the huge gas-guzzling American car is just passing while new smaller models quickly take their place. We see the natural world continually eroded and destroyed by concrete: new roads, cheap malls and tacky ribbon developments. Rubbish from fast-food outlets and shops blows across the lots and open spaces, where odd trees endure as reminders of an older Brewer, fast disappearing and with it a way of life which, it is implied, was richer in terms of spiritual and community values. The town is evoked in layered details, where we see the older world built upon by the new, mirroring social change as well as changes in Rabbit and more distantly, the Republic itself.
Updike shows us Rabbit's friends and family as devoid of self-awareness and corrupted and alienated from their better selves, just as he is. The writing is metaphorical, lyrical and deeply satisfying. The bleakness of the subject is allieviated by the richness of the images, the profound understanding of human folly with which we all can identify and sympathise. For Rabbit is an Everyman figure, standing in for human needs during mid-twentieth century industrial development. Yet despite the pessimism that underlies the presentation of this world, we see, as Rabbit does, by glimpses, another state of being that engages, even if briefly, with the more permanent aspects of human existence. The theme of renewal and redemption is offered up as a possibility at the end of the novel by arrival of new life, Rabbit's baby grand-daughter.
Updike shows us Rabbit's friends and family as devoid of self-awareness and corrupted and alienated from their better selves, just as he is. The writing is metaphorical, lyrical and deeply satisfying. The bleakness of the subject is allieviated by the richness of the images, the profound understanding of human folly with which we all can identify and sympathise. For Rabbit is an Everyman figure, standing in for human needs during mid-twentieth century industrial development. Yet despite the pessimism that underlies the presentation of this world, we see, as Rabbit does, by glimpses, another state of being that engages, even if briefly, with the more permanent aspects of human existence. The theme of renewal and redemption is offered up as a possibility at the end of the novel by arrival of new life, Rabbit's baby grand-daughter.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Here we are back with Rabbit, and I found it a slow start after Rabbit Redux. But it all feels right - Rabbit has taken over his father-in-law's business, has moved back in with his wife and is living with his mother-in-law.
As can be expected, Rabbit is not happy, and his realisation that Nelson (his son) is encroaching on his "territory" makes him angry. A mid-life crisis? No, Rabbit has had too many crises; this is just Rabbit kicking against mortality.
His golf club cronies provide light relief, but the set piece involves them on a Caribbean vacation and more than justifies the slowness of the start. As ever, Updike's sensuous use of prose is beautiful, over-rich but it works for me.
Format:Paperback
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Rabbit is Rich
Totally trouble free transaction, provding a product that has given much enjoyment to a very close friend.
Published 20 months ago by Mr. J. Barratt
A masterpiece..........
For me this is the best of the "Rabbit" novels , it's an absolute masterpiece , so perfectly written and with rich , believable characters . Read more
Published 23 months ago by William Stephen Dalrymple
Rabbit has changed
I read the first Rabbit novel when it was published in the UK, in the 1960s I believe.
I very much enjoyed that novel but found that Rabbit and I had grown apart over... Read more
I very much enjoyed that novel but found that Rabbit and I had grown apart over... Read more
Published on 8 Oct 2009 by J. Roscoe
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