Rabbit Novels: Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest

by John Updike

The third and fourth novel in John Updike's acclaimed quartet of Rabbit books -- now in one marvelous volume.

RABBIT IS RICH
Winner of the American Book Award and
the National Book Critics Circle Award

"Dazzlingly reaffirms Updike's place as master chronicler of the spiritual maladies and very earthly pleasure of the Middle-American male."
Vogue

"A splendid achievement!"
The New York Times


RABBIT AT REST
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and
the National Book Critics Circle Award

"Brilliant . . . It must be read. It is the best novel about America to come out of America for a very, very long time."
The Washington Post Book World

"Powerful . . . John Updike with his precision's prose and his intimately attentive yet cold eye is a master."
The New York Times Book Review

Genres: Fiction

912 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

John Hoyer Updike was an American writer. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike is well known for his careful craftsmanship and prolific writing, having published 22 novels and more than a dozen short story collections as well as poetry, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker since the 1950s. His works often explore sex, faith, and death, and their inter-relationships.

He died of lung cancer at age 76.

Reviews

[Woowoo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Updike is an amazingly talented author who develops characters so precisely, so deeply that the reader feels an intimate knowledge about the characters. The books are told through the point of view of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the tertiary characters become intimate; their motives and interactions consistent throughout the 40 year span in the Rabbit series.

Rabbit himself is a flawed, very human man. The likability of the protagonist is arguable. As arguable as liking humans themselves.

Updike presents feelings, thoughts and moral currency for Rabbit. Subsequently, he produces complex descriptions of experience and personal logic and innermost thoughts. Without appearing to 'author' the inner workings of Rabbit's mind, Updike writes of the entwined movements of emotional thrust and social obligation to try to conform.

Updike is a master at concise yet amazingly thorough description that transforms the mundane into almost screenplay detail while avoiding boring the reader.

I love the writing and love to read the characters grow and transform throughout the four expressive novels. The story is about life, written as life reveals itself. There are no boiling points or climaxes that couldn't be found during a non-spectacular lifetime. The beauty of these books is in getting into the human, being, and experiencing life with them.

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

16 August 2010. Finished Rabbit is Rich today. Updike has an amazing voice. He's been able to capture generations and American middle class nuance with the same character. I will begin Rabbit at Rest tomorrow.

5 September 2010. Finished Rabbit at Rest. Wow. He's got it all. He's got nothing. It's life. Beautiful.

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think: "He doesn’t regret the life he led, though Brewer isn’t New York New York or Chicago my kind of town the way SInatra grinds it out. What he enjoyed most, it turns out in retrospect, and he didn’t know it at the time, was standing around in the showroom, behind the dusty big window with the banners, bouncing on the balls of his feet to keep up his leg muscles, waiting for a customer, shooting the bull with Charlie or whoever, earning his paycheck, filling his slot in the big picture, doing his bit, getting a little recognition. That’s all we want from each other, recognition. Your assigned place in the rat race. In the Army too, you had it: your number, your bunk, your assigned duties, your place in line, your pass for Saturday night, four beers and fuck a whore in a ranch house. Honey you didn’t pay to be no two-timer. There’s more to being a human being than having your own way. Fact is, it has come to Rabbit this late in life, you didn’t have a way apart from what other people tell you. Your mother first, and poor Pop, then the Lutheran minister, that tough old heinie Fritz Krupenbach, you had to respect him though, he said what he believed, and then all those schoolteachers, Marty Tothero and the rest, trying to give you an angle to work from, and now all these talk-show hosts. Your life derives, and has to give. Maybe if your mother was in the fast lane like Annabelle’s you are naturally leery of the opposite sex. We haven’t set these kids terrific examples." and I'm screaming, crying, throwing up.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

For all of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom’s faults, you can’t help but enjoy the third and fourth Rabbit novels. I think I got sold on reading these novels because of how descriptive they are. My only issue while reading these novels was my continual disgust for Nelson’s character. It got to the point where if his character would say anything, I’d have to skim over it.

In “Rabbit is Rich”, Rabbit is now running the Springer Motors dealership and is navigating upper-class America with his wife Janice. And his son Nelson has returned home with a girl in tow completely undecided about his future which rekindles past father-son troubles.

In “Rabbit at Rest”, Rabbit at 55 is feeling the pains of a lifetime of beer-drinking and cholesterol-laden foods. While on an outing with his granddaughter, he suffers his first heart attack and begins his trip down memory lane.

[Patricia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Way, way too much sex and misogyny. I did enjoy the many pop culture references I’m mystified by the great ratings and glowing reviews.

[Pixie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me awhile to get used to this author's writing style, some very long sentences with dangling trails and lots of commas, but once you get accustomise to that, it's a good solid read about modern American mid-western culture in a small town, and almost painterly in its character descriptions and their actions. I thought it showed some of the shallowness and lack of morals that can permeate American culture. There's a bit of the Sinclair Lewis 'Babbit town' about the book but Updike has created an updated version that brings in some of the changing values and mod-cons of a mid-20th century American lifestyle without making it some sort of economical or political science diatribe, and instead intensely focusses on the characterisations at hand in the storyline, that show some levels of personal self-awareness and reflection as the storyline develops to its credible but utterly mundane end.

[Maggard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Okay this is Review 1/2 as I still have to chew my way through Rabbit at Rest, though given the below I'm likely going to come back to it much later in 2019.

Rabbit is Rich was surprisingly filthy, enough so that I felt weird reading it in the house around my family. The plot was non-existent, the characters aside from Rabbit were undeveloped, and the gravitational pull of Rabbit on several other characters was inexplicable. Maybe more of this was fleshed out in the earlier two books (I vaguely remember reading one of them in college) but for a stand-alone Pulitzer winner, this was a massive disappointment. Maybe white [upper]middle class ennui was more revelatory at the time of publication but I got almost nothing out of this.

Also, I realized I've been confusing John Updike with John Irving my entire life. Sorry, Johns.

[Dan Lalande · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rabbit Angstrom, the fallen, philandering, small-town basketball star, has settled into a sour stability: harried husband, beleaguered father, pushy businessman. And if that life subscribes to the stuff of maudlin TV melodrama, it's of little consequence; by these books, Updike has switched his focus to the examination of a more colourful, more cockeyed character: America. Travel on a long descriptive wave through the oil-obsessed Seventies ("Rich") to the Reaganomic Eighties ("Rest.") These are pointillist time pieces, with nary a socio-cultural instant undescribed.

[Preston · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now that I have finally finished Updike's Rabbit cycle, reading the fourth and final novel in the series, I think I truly appreciate and am awed by it's somewhat epic proportions. Not only is Updike's writing dense and beautiful, with fantastic description (he describes things in the most interesting way, yet completely familiarly and the reader knows exactly what he means --or at least this reader does) but over the course of all four novels he spans such as wide swath of American history from politics and news to popular culture and music, and weaves it into the story and to Rabbit's musings, that the outcome really is a masterpiece.

[Kevin Kizer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Rabbit novels are a collective masterpiece. It might be the first time I found something deplorable about all of the characters. While I liked the characters, I never once felt sympathetic to the plights they got themselves into. And I think that's why I liked these novels so much...the flaws are glaring and yet they are no different, no better than anyone else.

[Toby · Rating 4 out of 5]

This two volume edition is very nice.

[Nora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rabbit! So good! And, bravo to Updike for bringing us along on this character's winding life journey. Worthwhile literature.

[Ginny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got through it. Again, I don’t like Rabbit.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read Updike's Rabbit novels about 15 years ago, and liked them very much then. Just reread these (as well as Rabbit Run) and enjoyed them even more.

[Ctkruckus]

Harry Angstrom was a real piece of work.