In the second of a new series of reviews from the Observer archive, Martin Amis marvels at the third instalment of John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ series

The great postwar American writer John Updike won two Pulitzer prizes for the Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom tetralogy. In a 2009 tribute to his hero, Martin Amis wrote that Updike “took the novel onto another plane of intimacy”.

John Updike’s “Rabbit series” are fattening into a sequence. Rabbit, Run (1960) gave us Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom’s disastrous early marriage, Rabbit Redux (1971) his chaotic experiments with adulthood. Rabbit Is Rich, the latest, traces with appalled affection the contours of Rabbit’s maturity: it is about middle-aged spread, physical, mental and (above all) material.

Updike’s style constitutes an embarrassment of riches – alert, funny and sensuous, yet also garrulous, mawkish and crank