Novel: Rabbit Is Rich

Overview
"Rabbit Is Rich" follows Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom as he moves into middle age with a new kind of bounty and a new set of problems. Once a high-school basketball star and restless drifter, Rabbit now benefits from the prosperity of suburban America: he is tied by marriage and temperament to a successful car dealership and enjoys the comforts and status that money brings. Despite outward success, everyday life is crowded by anxieties about aging, desire, and the moral compromises that accompany consumer ease.

Plot
The narrative stays closely with Harry as he negotiates family obligations, social rituals, and personal appetites in a Midwestern town during the late 1970s. Scenes of domestic routine, convivial dinners, shopping excursions and dealership encounters accumulate to reveal tensions beneath the surface of material wellbeing. Several escalating crises, private temptations, intergenerational conflicts and the specter of illness and mortality, force Harry to confront the costs of complacency and the hollowness that wealth cannot hide.

Main Characters
Harry Angstrom is the worn but sharp-eyed protagonist whose nickname evokes both his youthful restlessness and his present physical bulk. Janice, his wife, embodies the uneasy comforts of suburban respectability and the resentments that grow in the seams of marriage. Their children and the extended social circle function less as fully plotted foils and more as living evidence of changing American mores; their desires, resentments and dislocations reflect the cultural shifts that complicate Harry's search for meaning.

Themes
Consumerism and identity sit at the novel's core: the automobile business symbolizes both social mobility and the commodification of desire. Prosperity proves ambiguous, offering status but amplifying small moral failures into existential threats. Aging and mortality persist as a continuous undertow, rendering past vigor fragile and highlighting how personal decay often accompanies material accumulation. Family life is examined as a site of loyalty, betrayal and compromise, where petty humiliations and tender moments coexist and repeatedly test characters' moral bearings.

Style and Tone
Updike's prose is precise, sensuous and observant, balancing satirical bite with genuine empathy. He renders domestic interiors, banal conversations and the trappings of consumption with a novelist's alertness to language, making the ordinary feel significant and the grotesque quietly comic. Point of view remains intimate, often aligning with Harry's perceptions so that the reader experiences his rationalizations and self-reproaches in close detail.

Significance
As the third novel in the Rabbit sequence, this book deepens a long-running portrait of a particular American life across decades, mapping cultural change through one man's domestic sphere. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, recognized for its moral acuity and linguistic craftsmanship. The novel's enduring power lies less in dramatic events than in its patient accumulation of small pressures and its ability to make a commonplace existence feel both emblematic and heartbreakingly particular.