Rabbit Is Rich

John Updike

Literary fiction

First published: 1981
Print length: 423 pagesFawcett Columbine, 1996

National Book Award for Fiction, 1982

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1982

National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, 1981

Description

In 1979, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is a middle-aged former high-school basketball star living comfortably in Brewer, Pennsylvania, where he and Janice own a Toyota dealership. Prosperity has not quieted Harry’s sense of loss: his body is slowing, his marriage is strained, and memories of missed possibilities keep intruding on the life he has built. He worries about his indecisive college-age son, Nelson, while his own sexual restlessness draws him toward the young wife of a country-club acquaintance. Moving between family tensions, money, desire, and regret, the novel examines a man who has achieved conventional success without learning how to inhabit it, setting private dissatisfaction against the comforts and anxieties of late-twentieth-century American life.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Dense · Descriptive · Lyrical · Witty

Pace

Measured

Tone

Intimate · Irreverent · Melancholic · Reflective

Structure

Linear

Focus

Character · Ideas · Relationships

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 4 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

AgingFamilyMarriageMemoryMortalityWealth

About John Updike

John Updike was an American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and critic whose work ranged across fiction, verse, book reviewing, and art criticism. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker who also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books, he brought a critic’s alertness and a remarkably attentive eye to ordinary American life. His fiction is especially concerned with the pressures within marriage, family, faith, sexuality, and middle-class aspiration. The Rabbit sequence, following Harry Angstrom across several decades, gave these interests an unusually sustained form, registering personal change alongside shifts in American society. Elsewhere, novels such as Couples and The Witches of Eastwick use satire and dark comedy to examine desire, social convention, and the instability beneath prosperous communities. Updike’s characteristic method joins close description and rich imagery to a strong interest in character and relationships. His body of work is distinguished by its breadth and by the intensity with which it renders familiar settings, private compromises, and moral unease.