Glib Capsule Review:Rabbit cracks wise. Rabbit talks about cars. Rabbit scrutinises female anatomy. Rabbit bawls out no-good lowlife son. Rabbit’s actions receive entirely undeserved Harvard-strength descriptive torrent. Rabbit screws his wife. Rabbit fantasises about screwing his friend’s young wife. Rabbit makes racist or sexist remark. Rabbit thinks about daughter or dead Skeeter. Rabbit goes into four/five-page thought-stream with no paragraph breaks. Rabbit wants very much to have sexual in...

This is another terrific book in John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom series. Updike’s idea of revisiting Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom’s life at 10-year intervals is brilliant. Each book in the series is a detailed and intimate portrait of a short, pivotal period in Harry’s life. Every 10 years that portrait is updated and renewed. Reading the series is like checking in periodically with a friend whom you don’t see frequently and learning what’s new while you remember what you know about the friend’s past.

Pulitzer Prize winner 1982. Wow. Wow. Wow. Just finished this today, and once again, "Rabbit" Harry Angstrom has left me speechless and wanting more! This third book (in the four-book series) is the best so far. The writing is absolutely unique and mind-blowing. I can't even believe I don't get to read it tonight!As I said in my review of #2, if you're going to read this series, you must start with the first book and read in order. There were so many references to #1 and #2 in this novel, that a...

He's rich, and in the third volume he miraculously manages not kill anyone while looking for some quick sex. Who says you can't learn from experience?

"Harry Angstrom -- A Memoir of Boners"It's the late 1970s and Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is older, fatter, and still just as obsessed with his prick and where it might go as ever. Example: "He never world have given Charlie a handshake like this two weeks ago, but since fucking Thelma up the ass..."That's an actual sentence in the book (about 4/5 of the way in). He's now firmly ensconced in his role as Sales Manager for his dead father-in-law's Toyota dealership, he plays a lot of golf at the local...

Rabbit, Run (1960)/Rabbit, Redux (1971)/Rabbit is Rich (1981)/Rabbit At Rest (1990)/ Rabbit Remembered (2001) Author: John Updike Read: July-August 2020 Rating: 2.5/5 stars; 2/5 stars; 3/5 stars; 3.5/5 stars; 4/5 stars **** Spoilers **** "Rabbit is Read" (A Haibun Review) So it begins. We are unceremoniously introduced to Harry Angstrom, nicknamed "Rabbit" because he vaguely resembled the animal as a child. Right away, he isn't exactly likable. And as the book continues, this doesn't get any bet...

His own life closed in to a size his soul had not yet shrunk to fit. Rabbit is dragged kicking and screaming into middle-age. Regular people are not known to react well to this, and Rabbit is worse than regular people. This makes for an often hilarious read. Strangely enough, he toes the line for the most part but it's not because of maturity. His wife has inherited all the money he enjoys (and boy, is he smug about all the money he didn't earn) and if he leaves her, he loses the money. He like

I read this book as the third in the Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, and then Rabbit is Rich). My book group chose Rabbit, Run out of curiosity about books by the recently-deceased John Updike. I was inspired enough to continue with the series. By far, I enjoyed this book the most of the three. Rabbit has finally become a sympathetic character, taking control of his life and making decisions. The previous two books showed Rabbit as a self-consumed ass, indirectly contributing to the de...

There are two kinds of male authors you love to hate.The first is well-known and easily explicable: Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Ralph Ellison, Cormac McCarthy. Their works are all masculine self-assertion and lighting out for the territory; they describe the world of men and the world at war, a world of incised identity and imperiled honor; woman, if she appears, is just a vampire or squid, a mouth that devours, vagina dentata, sucking the vitals out of everything.The second c...

From BBC Radio 4 - Book at Bedtime:John Updike's masterful Rabbit quintet established Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom as the quintessential American White middle class male. The first book Rabbit, Run was published in 1960 to critical acclaim. Rabbit Redux was the second in the series, published in 1971 and charted the end of the sixties - featuring, among other things, the first American moon landing and the Vietnam War.This third book finds Rabbit in middle age and successful, having inherited his fat...

4.5 ⭐Oh Updike, you magnificent bastard. If this is what I have to look forward to in my 30's and 40's I'd much rather experience it from these words. How can life be this tedious, insignificant, yet so much can happen? I guess this is the reason we read literature. To know that we are not alone. Reading the account of Rabbits life feels like reading you grow up. It feels like observing your country in each decade. From the aftermath of war, from civil upheaval, from inflation, and blooming of t...

Rabbit is much more likable in this book, though he continues to desire things he can never have and follow his own thoughts in ways that he shouldn't. He objectifies women as sexual objects so completely and consistently that every encounter he has with a woman no matter how unattractive or taboo, he can't help himself. He's a lecherous old man at 46. The problem is that it rings true, from my twisted baby boomer male perspective. I think many men are the same, and it must be disorienting to a

Rabbit is Rich won a pocketful of awards, most notably the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. That doesn't mean I have to like it, and I certainly didn't. It's not that Updike's writing isn't great - no writer can do a better job of placing you uncomfortably inside a character's brain as Updike can, and no book made me want to find a plain brown wrapper to cover it like this book did. It's not that I'm unfamiliar with Harry/Rabbit Angstrom's life journey to this point, having read the first two Rabbit

DNF ~33%I don't care how many Pulitzer Prizes this series won, I can't take another minute of this disgusting, insufferable main character, the overblown self-important writing, and the truly vile descriptions of women and sex. How anybody can read this and not want to actually vomit is beyond me. I wish I had a physical copy of this book so I could set it on fire, I am that disgusted.

It's interesting that I chose to read Rabbit is Rich at the same time I decided to read Independence Day. Each book deals with a protagonist that is trying to find his way in America in his forties. The former is set in 1979, dealing with the gas crisis, the last years of the Carter presidency, and a struggle to connect with his college age son who is just as lost as he was when he was that age. The later is set in Summer of 1988 gearing up for the Dukakis vs. Bush showdown that November. As far...

This third decade of Rabbit’s shenanigans is... incredibly dull. Didn’t the 70’s include all that Disco & outrageous fashion and pre-80s outrageous & vapid opulence? It does exist in Rabbit’s (albeit OUR) America, but Rabbit has become such an old man (at the age of 46!) that he cannot enjoy his monetary glory at all. He worries still, not for the well being of his family, no, but mostly over his own selfish hide, his manly desires fulfilled (though mostly not). I hated the dialogue between the

Ah, you bad, bad boy, Mr. John Updike.It's 1979, Jimmy Carter is president, and it's a good time for selling Toyotas. Rabbit is head salesman at his late father-in-law's car dealership. He's still married to Janice. He's buddies with Charlie, his wife's former lover. And, he's rich. He belongs to a club, he drives a nice car, he's buying a house, he's taking vacations, he's ... well, he's having a swinging old time.Sounds good, right? Well, the fly in the ointment is always there for Rabbit, whe...

When Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom begins to weep at his son Nelson's wedding, the ladies stare at him with surprise and become wistful, witnessing these unlikely, raw emotions. Aw, heck, ladies would you just look at Rabbit, mid-life, becoming a big softie? One woman quickly hands him her grubby handkerchief. The poor dear!Oh, if only they knew. . . that, as the 46-year-old Rabbit stares at the page of his prayer book, which he thinks looks as “white and blank as the nape of Nelson's poor mute frail

Watching Rabbit Angstrom at almost my age was fascinating. The text is deliciously Proustian and I love the perspective on the 70s. The world microcosm Brewster is alive fascinating as a study of America in the waning years of the 20th century's hangover after the 60s. His descriptions of human relationships are among the most realistic I have ever read. A must.A much better book IHMO than Redux, Rabbit is never really rich, but the text is incredibly rich in the relationships - particularly bet...

Rabbit is the great American schlub. He's perfectly mediocre. He's one of those guys whose best days were as a high school athlete and now he's growing a beer gut. He's got an okay job, he's a pretty shitty father, he's a pig, he loves Consumer Reports, he's racist but not so racist that he thinks of himself as racist. He's an everyday asshole. Updike has managed to neither love nor hate him, just describe him. But he gets you deep enough into him that you find yourself feeling bad for him when