It's 1979 and Rabbit is no longer running. He's walking, and beginning to get out of breath. That's OK, though - it gives him the chance to enjoy the wealth that comes with middle age. It's all in place: he's Chief Sales Representative and co-owner of Springer motors; his wife, at home or in the club, is keeping trim; he wears good suits, and the cash is pouring in. So why is it that he finds it so hard to accept the way that things have turned out? And why, when he looks at his family, is he haunted by regrets about all ...
Read More
It's 1979 and Rabbit is no longer running. He's walking, and beginning to get out of breath. That's OK, though - it gives him the chance to enjoy the wealth that comes with middle age. It's all in place: he's Chief Sales Representative and co-owner of Springer motors; his wife, at home or in the club, is keeping trim; he wears good suits, and the cash is pouring in. So why is it that he finds it so hard to accept the way that things have turned out? And why, when he looks at his family, is he haunted by regrets about all those lives he'll never live?
Read Less
Add this copy of Rabbit is Rich to cart. $29.54, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1996 by Random House Trade Paperbacks.
Add this copy of Rabbit is Rich to cart. $29.85, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1981 by Knopf.
Add this copy of Rabbit is Rich to cart. $31.91, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1982 by Fawcett.
Add this copy of Rabbit is Rich to cart. $38.74, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2010 by Penguin Books UK.
Add this copy of Rabbit is Rich to cart. $39.32, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1982 by Andre Deutsch.
Add this copy of Rabbit is Rich to cart. $40.56, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1983 by Penguin books.
Add this copy of Rabbit is Rich to cart. $41.04, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1981 by Distributed by Random House.
Add this copy of Rabbit Is Rich to cart. $49.99, like new condition, Sold by Lionstar Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Longmont, CO, UNITED STATES, published 1981 by Knopf Publishing Group.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Fine in fine dust jacket. FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING + LIKE NEW CONDITION + ORIGINAL HARDBACK FORMAT; COLLECTING BOOKS SINCE 1988, SELLING BOOKS SINCE 2008. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. 480 p. Audience: General/trade.
Add this copy of Rabbit is Rich to cart. $50.00, very good condition, Sold by Lloyd Zimmer Books & Maps rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Chanute, KS, UNITED STATES, published 1995 by Alfred A. Knopf.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Very Good+ in Very Good+ jacket. Signed by Author Copyright and first published in 1981. This eighth printing was published February of 1995. 467 pages. Signed in name only on title page. Cloth covers are very slightly faded along upper edge. There is a group of about eight leaves with a very small corner crease. Volume is otherwise tight and clean. Dust jacket shows a few small and light handling creases. Jacket remains bright and clean, and is now in a clear Brodart protective sleeve.
Add this copy of Rabbit Is Rich to cart. $59.95, very good condition, Sold by David Segal rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Brooklyn, NY, UNITED STATES, published 1981 by Knopf Publishing Group.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Very good in very good dust jacket. Signed by author. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. 480 p. Audience: General/trade. Ships w signature confirmation. NF/NF. Sept 1981 hc stated 1st ed implicit 1st printing inscribed by the author on the ffep ("For all the B_______s, many thanks, John Updike"). Tiny stain and light tanning on white parts of dj, a bit of sunning on cover and soil on edge, else fine.
Rabbit Angstrom, the protagonist of John Updike's Rabbit quartet, is repellent in his human frailties--lust, nostalgia, resentment, evasion, abdication of adult responsibility--and can be said to mirror his own country.
Rabbit is Rich finds Harry Angstrom newly rich with his inheritance of his father-in-law's Toyota dealership amid the oil crisis of the 1970s. He and his wife belong to a country club, live with Janice's mother, and their son Nelson who arrives with his pregnant wife-to-be Pru. There is a Caribbean idyll in which wives are swapped, a visit to an old lover Ruth, now gone to seed, and a grandchild.
From these simple plot elements, the author inhabits the fully realized eponymous character, whose perspective dominates the novel, with epic amplitude and scope. Updike's baroque style is best served by being filtered through Rabbit's consciousness in all its crudity. The male gaze is relentless. Yet Updike has created a character who, to me, is quintessentially American in his careless racial epithets, his endless sexualizing of women, his bewildered homophobia, his habitual dwelling in pastness. He is a man who is "a failed boy."
The author's manipulation of time in the novel is masterful and seemingly without effort. It is fair to say that the interiority of the women characters is given short shrift, but these after all are Rabbit's books.
Updike's depiction of marriage, sex, intergenerational strife, aging and American working lives is immensely compelling and persuasive. Paradoxically, the limitations of Rabbit's point of view opens up the author's vision of America over a four-decade span in the four novels.
What major writer would allow his main character to engage in a reverie about the disco queen Donna Summer, as Updike does here? The absorption of Seventies pop culture is quite remarkable. If Rabbit's attitudes are often provincial, sour, constricted and jaundiced, at the same time the novel has a marvelous fullness and a shocking candor, especially about sex.
In Rabbit is Rich, Harry Angstrom is Huck Finn not quite grown, with a wife, a son he resents, and a granddaughter, but with no more territory to light out to. It's all closed off now, and he simply awaits another "nail in the coffin." This is a superb novel.