The book is actually quite funny and I found myself frequently laughing out loud. Harry makes another expedition down to Galilee and this time gets up enough nerve to actually knock on the door and have an extensive conversation with Ruth. Rabbit is Rich finds Angstrom roughly ten years later, reconciled with his wife Janice, co-owning and managing the car dealership that he and his wife inherited with the death of his father-in-law. Rabbit's innocence doesn't feel storm-tossed enough; if Redux was slightly too operatic, far-fetched, Rich is too placidly striated. They get a postcard from Nelson. Pru gives birth to a little girl not long after the accident.
Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inner dwindling." Still, whatever its limitations as a narrative, this is commanding work from a writer whose great, wide intelligence is probably unrivaled in American fiction: Rabbit lives, if perhaps a bit less vitally now, and most serious readers will want to keep track of him. He dreads seeing Nelson; he remembers when his home burned down, a young girl named Jill, whom Nelson had loved like a sister, had died. Thus death, plenary, is always on his mind: he searches out Ruth, the prostitute he briefly lived with in Run, in quest of a possible daughter they may have had together; though Nelson's a pain, he at least bequeathes to Rabbit a granddaughter; and the book's most luminous scene is Rabbit and Janice telling her old mother that they've bought a house of their own and are therefore clearing out of hers. Rabbit is Rich picks up the story begun in Updike's Rabbit Run (1961) and continued in Rabbit Redux (1971), of Harry Angstrom, Rabbit, in his mid-forties in the late 1970's.He is the Sales Manager and part owner of Springer Motors Toyota, in the fictional town of Brewer, PA. Harry is at the lot when two young people come in looking for a car. They swim, play golf, go sunfish sailing and generally have a wonderful time. Harry and Janice, his wife of 22 years, live comfortably, having inherited her late father's Toyota dealership.
Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike. Much of the action centers upon Rabbit's dysfunctional relationship with his college aged son and interaction between he, his wife and their country club friends. He and his wife, Janice, live with her mother, Bessie Springer, Fred Springer's widow. At dinner someone suggests they swap wives night-by-night. As soon as they get home, Nelson wants to take Harry over to the lot. It is a novel of manners and captures the small town bourgeoisie and the period of the 1970s very well. She is the mother of the girl who appeared with Jamie Nunemacher in the showroom. This may be the best of the three "Rabbit" books I've read so far. I was surprised considering when it was published.Updike has out-Roth-ed Roth. Flush with money, Rabbit navigates the world of upper-class America in his usual bumbling and yet insightful way. He falls into conversation with Annabelle, who is there with Jamie Nunemacher. Harry is quite tall, Norwegian blond, and beginning to get a little heavy. Rabbit, Run is a 1960 novel by John Updike.The novel depicts three months in the life of a 26-year-old former high school basketball player named Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom who is trapped in a loveless marriage and a boring sales job, and his attempts to escape the constraints of his life. After all, Rabbit is now "rich." Sex is on every page. She puts the new baby, his granddaughter, into his lap.At home, there is great tension because Nelson has written that he is coming home and bringing Melanie. Nelson has not forgiven him.Melanie gets a job as a waitress, and Harry takes Charlie over to the restaurant to meet her. They have a meeting with Bessie Springer and tell her that they have been looking at houses.The day eventually comes when they go to the Caribbean with their friends.
It turns out that Nelson and Melanie have arrived.