Rabbit Is Rich
by John Updike
Summary
It is 1979 and Harry Angstrom has money for the first time in his life. He runs Springer Motors, his late father in law's Toyota dealership in Brewer, Pennsylvania, at the exact moment when petrol queues stretch around the block and small Japanese cars sell themselves. He belongs to a country club. He and Janice buy gold coins on a whim and carry them home in a sack, and there is a scene involving those coins and a bed that is either the funniest or the most vulgar thing Updike wrote.
Then Nelson comes home from Colorado, hostile, with a pregnant girlfriend he has not mentioned, wanting a place in the business and wrecking cars on the lot within the week. And on a package holiday in the Caribbean, three couples from the club agree to swap partners for a night, which is exactly as disappointing as it deserves to be.
Running under everything, Harry is looking for a daughter he thinks he may have fathered twenty years earlier, and looking at a young woman at a gas station wondering if it is her.
What gives the book its unease is that Harry is happy, possibly for the only time in the sequence, and the reader can see the terms on which the happiness was bought: a dead father in law's business, a country burning through its last cheap decade, and a son who is going to inherit both.
This is the comic one of the four Rabbit novels, written in the present tense and saturated with 1979. Skylab is coming down, the petrol queues are real, and a president is on television telling the country it has a crisis of confidence.
At about five hundred pages it is leisurely, and Updike's frankness about sex is relentless enough that some readers give up on it. Best for readers who want American prosperity described precisely, at close range, and entirely without admiration.
Historical Context & Significance
Rabbit Is Rich took the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award and the 1981 National Book Critics Circle Award, a sweep of all three major American fiction prizes that almost no book has managed.
It is the third of four novels John Updike wrote about Harry Angstrom, one per decade from Rabbit, Run in 1960 through Rabbit Redux in 1971 to Rabbit at Rest in 1990, which won him a second Pulitzer.
Updike said he used Harry, a former high school basketball player of limited imagination, as an instrument for taking the temperature of the country every ten years, and the result is the closest thing postwar American fiction has to a continuous social record. The gold buying, the petrol queues and the Toyota franchise are all precisely dated to the second oil shock of 1979.