Now read this! John Updike’s “Rabbit is Rich”

Now read this! John Updike’s “Rabbit is Rich”

Posted on March 16th, 2009 by Christopher Guerin

Of the friends I’ve asked about this, those who have read any of Updike’s four Rabbit books have either read them all, including the novella in the story collection Licks of Love, or they stopped, as I did, with the second book Rabbit Redux. The last two novels of the tetralogy either seemed just too much more Rabbit to take, or too long, more than 1,000 pages combined, to consider making the investment. I fell into the latter category until Updike passed away last January. I’ve since read Rabbit is Rich, and will eagerly move on to Rabbit at Rest soon.

If you haven’t read any of the Rabbit books, generally considered the crowning achievement of Updike’s career, you’ll probably want to start at the beginning with Rabbit, Run, though Updike took great pains to make Rabbit is Rich entirely readable without your having read its two predecessors.

“Rabbit” Angstrom is one of the great male characters of 20th century fiction, along with Gatsby, Holden Caulfield, Augie March, and Alexander Portnoy. Once a high school basketball star, Rabbit lives life as an extended coda to those fleeting moments of youthful glory, forever grappling with a difficult marriage, of which adulterous affairs seem to be a symptom rather than the cause. In Rabbit Run he encounters his first marital crisis and a terrible family tragedy. In Rabbit Redux, he spends several aimless months, again separated from his wife, in a household populated by his young son, a young black man, and a hippie chick.

All four novels are separated by a decade, the first taking place in the waning days of 50’s conservatism, the second with the lunar landing and the Vietnam War in the background. Rabbit is Rich vividly recalls the Carter years, with its long gasoline lines and the Iran hostage crisis. All too accurately (my main reason for choosing this novel this week), it also feels absolutely up-to-the-moment. The novel begins:

Running out of gas, Rabbit Angstrom thinks as he stands behind the summer-dusty windows of the Spring 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 … That’s all he has to tell 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 … He tells them, whey they buy a Toyota, they’re turning their dollars into yen. And they believe him. A hundred 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 markup of eight hundred dollars per sale. Rabbit is Rich.

Rabbit is now co-owner with his wife Janice and mother-in-law in a Toyota dealership established by his wife’s deceased father. Since the previous book, he has reconciled with his wife (in part because of the prosperity involved for Rabbit), and their marriage has achieved a balance of mutual respect and tolerance, even occasional passion. Rabbit is happy too.

At least he is until his son returns from college wanting a place at the car dealership instead of returning to finish school. Rabbit opposes the idea, though his wife and mother-in law outvote him. The arrival of the boy’s pregnant girlfriend ends in a marriage Rabbit suspects has been nothing but a trap for his son.

The book’s most powerful scenes involve the ongoing battle between father and son, and (a poignant subplot) Rabbit’s obsessive pursuit of a former lover who he suspects has been hiding from him for decades the birth of their child, now a grown daughter.

Rabbit Angstrom is a vivid and convincing creation that Updike elaborates and enriches over almost five decades — a unique feat in American letters. He is the sum of his character — randy and somewhat avaricious, but principled — and his consciousness. Rabbit notices everything — he has Updike’s eye, which revels in the minutiae of life and finds resonance, even transcendence in the smallest detail.

And, we should all have Rabbit’s guts, his sheer courage for life, which relentlessly beats at and disappoints him, but which he never ceases to love with all his being.

Other highly recommended works by Updike: The Centaur, Gertrude and Claudius, Brazil, and the three comic Henry Bech books, Bech: a Book, Bech is Back, and Bech at Bay.

Now Read This! appears every Monday. Learn about all the great books you wish you’d read. Then read them.

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Christopher Guerin

Christopher Guerin is the author of two books each of poetry and short fiction, a novel, and more than a dozen children’s books. If he hadn’t spent 26 years as an arts administrator, including 20 years as President of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, perhaps he’d have worked a little harder getting them published. His consolation resides in his fiction and poems having been published in numerous small magazines, including Rosebud, AURA, Williams and Mary Review, Midwest Quarterly, Wittenberg Review, RE: Artes Liberales, DEROS, Wind, and Wind less Orchard. His blog, Zealotry of Guerin, features his fiction and poetry, including his sonnet sequence of poems after paintings, “Brushwork." He is the V.P. of Corporate Communications at Sweetwater Sound, Inc., the national music instrument retailer.