Thursday, 2 October 2025

"Rabbit is Rich" by John Updike

 


The third novel in the Rabbit tetralogy. Awarded the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

It's written using the interior monologue of Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, the American Leopold Bloom. He thinks of sex (he can scarcely see any woman without undressing her in this mind), the people he knows who have died, and money, even to paragraphs in which he calculates profits and margins. His conversation is of the outlook for business (the oil crisis of the mid-1970s is hitting America hard) and the shortcomings of others. I presume he represents the soulless Everyman of the USA.

The narrative sometimes slides into the thoughts of Nelson, the son whose life journey is too similar to his father's for their relationship to be anything but antagonistic. The young lion is trying to supplant the head of the pride who is using every trick in a social animal's to stay dominant.

The lives of the characters are documented with unblinking honesty to produce a bleak portrait of suburban America of that time. Is it so different today?

Trigger warning: racist words are used by racist characters.

The first two books are:

Selected quotes:
  • The great thing about the dead, they make space.” (Ch 1)
  • He and the kid years ago went through something for which Rabbit has forgiven himself but which he knows the kid never has. A girl called Jill died ... But the years have piled on, the survivors have patched things up, and so many more have joined the dead, undone by diseases for which only God is to blame, that it no longer seems so bad, it seems more as if Jill just moved to another town, where the population is growing. ... Think of all the blame God has to shoulder.” (Ch 1)
  • They say you should encourage reading, but they never say why.” (Ch 2)
  • What a threadbare thing we make of life!” (Ch 2)
  • His sentences seem to keep travelling around the corner after they are pronounced.” (Ch 2)
  • If a meaning of life was to show up you'd think it would have by now.” (Ch 3)
  • The thing about those Rotarians, if you knew them as kids you can't stop seeing the kid in them, dressed up in fat and baldness and money like a cardboard tuxedo in a play for high school assembly.” (Ch 3)
  • That's why we love disaster ... it puts us back in touch with guilt and sends us crawling back to God. Without a sense of being in the wrong with no better than animals.” (Ch 4)
In the final chapter Rabbit muses about "some professor at Princeton's theory that bin ancient times the gods spoke to people directly through the left or was it the right half of their brains, they were like robots with radios in their heads telling them everything to do, and then somehow around the time of the ancient Greeks or Assyrians the system broke up ..." I presume this is the theory advanced in 1976 by Julian Jaynes in his book The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Given that this book follows Rabbit's stream of consciousness, this theory has substantial implications for the narrative.

October 2025; 285 small print pages
First published in the USA  in 1981
My 'Rabbit Omnibus' edition was issued in the UK by Penguin in 1991.

Also by Updike and reviewed in this blog:


This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God









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