Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike

Rabbit is Rich is book number three in a five book series about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, once a high school basketball star. It is highly advisable to read Run, Rabbit and Rabbit Redux before Rabbit Is Rich since they set the stage for Harry's  progression through the decades. In Run, Rabbit, Harry is 26 years old, father to a toddler and husband to Janice, who is overwhelmed and bored by the mundane life of a housewife and mother. Harry feels bored and trapped and must decide between what is best for himself and what is best for the family. Needless to say, he often makes the wrong choices as does his wife, resulting in catastrophic consequences for the family. In Rabbit Redux, set 10 years later in 1969, Janice leaves Harry, and he brings a young hippie runaway white girl and a slightly older black man consumed by politics and religion into his suburban home.

All three books take place in a small town in Pennsylvania. In book 3, Harry is prosperous and happy for once. Janice's father, Mr. Springer, has died and left his Toyota dealership to Janice, making Harry the chief sales representative. Harry belongs to the country club and loves to golf with a suburban set of like-minded people. The year is 1979 and all is well in Harry's life except for the rising price of gas and the Iranians holding several American citizens hostage. Then Harry and Janice discover that their son, Nelson, is coming home with a female friend before he has finished college.

This is the second time that I have read the entire Rabbit series and it's phenomenal. I understand why Updike won a Pulitzer for this book. He is a masterful storyteller and although the book was more than 400 pages in print, I gobbled it up and am now working on the fourth book, Rabbit at Rest. Updike has a magnificent way of analyzing  our intrinsic desires and their invariable clash with social values – what I want vs. what would be best for the collective whole. He manages to dissect religion, capitalism, and the suburban family in a unique fashion. And Updike never ceases to surprise us. The ending to the first book, Run, Rabbit, is shocking. The ending to Rabbit Is Rich is much more mellow and satisfying.

My only complaint about Updike and this series is that it's hard for me to decide if we, the present-day readers, should judge an author by today's standards or by the standards of the times when he was writing. Updike is unabashedly racist, homophobic, and disgustingly misogynistic. There were many times I wanted to put this series down or scream when I was reading it, particularly Rabbit Is Rich, which was written in 1981! In 1979, I was working on behalf of the passage of The Equal Rights Amendment and Updike was calling every woman a c***.

I can only conclude that I must separate my love for the artist from my love for the art. Was Updike trying to portray Harry as some kind of Archie Bunker stereotype? Possibly. I'm not sure. I can't help but feeling that Updike also viewed women disparagingly.

However, I still loved Rabbit Is Rich. Long ago I concluded that I would have no music collection if I didn't listen to rock music by people whose actions I found personally offensive. Ditto for the Rabbit series. I'm eager to turn the page and begin Rabbit at Rest.

Five stars – highly recommended