Rabbit Is Rich
by John Updike, Winner of The Pulitzer Prize for Literature and National Book
Award in 1982 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_Fiction
10 out of
10
It is an
incredible catharsis, an immense joy to read a book like Rabbit Is Rich,
although if we are trying to get into the mood of this serious, but oh so
amusing magnum opus, we could get cheeky and say that the magnitude of the fun
was to be expected, given that this is the third installment in the trilogy
that has started so magnificently with Rabbit, Run http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/10/rabbit-run-by-john-updike-may-make-you.html which if I am not mistaken, is
included among The All-TIME 100 Best Novels, and hey, if it is not there, then
it damn well should be…
One other
important fact about this novel and all the others in the tetralogy – in other
words, I should edit the above, where it says trilogy, but I am not bothered,
nobody really reads this anyway – is the fact that it is such an easy read,
contrary to Kafka or Beckett…this brings to mind another amusing opus, To The
Hermitage by Malcolm Bradbury http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/09/to-hermitage-by-malcolm-bradbury-author.html where the author speaks of the
advantage that the fictional, literary world has over the ‘real’ one – unless
we are talking about the mentioned Kafka and Beckett the blague would be – in
the created universe personages are cleverer, more interesting, wiser, the
events we witness are more vibrant, compelling and we can get into this realm
without leaving the house, or indeed, the bed…
Rabbit aka
Harry Angstrom has gone through some transformations that we are familiar with
– if we have reached middle age – and some that we have not had in our own
experience, Alhamdulillah, such as the death of his infant daughter – drowned
because of the condition her mother, Janice, was in at the time, an almost
permanent intoxication, due in part at the time to the departing of her
philandering, confused husband – then the burning of Jil, the young woman with
whom our protagonist was nesting and fucking – incidentally, we should use this
type of language here, for the book has another massive merit, that it digs
into sexuality, and I mean it does impart with the audience the void of anal
sex, void not in that it is not orgasmic, but that when Harry enters that area,
he feels a void – and much, much more, swinging in the Caribbean, and a permanent
conflict with his son
On the last
part, I do not have a son, but somehow manage to antagonize for a lot of the
time my daughter, but in this real world case, it is my fault, while in Rabbit
Is Rich, Nelson does seem to be annoying and incapable of…well, live his life,
he has had a strange connection with Maggie (was that her name, by the time of
this third part, she is mentioned rarely) which means they fucked, but just as
she was a best friend for Ruth, who will marry Nelson some time in the middle
of this novel, and Maggie is at the same time getting close and then sexually
intimate with the much older Charlie Stavros, who has always had a heart murmur
and an affair with Janice, when the latter moved out and left Rabbit.
This looks
like a soap opera, now that I try and summarize it – I was going to say for
you, but since ‘you’ are not a thing, you probably do not exist at this point
in the text, in the sense of a reader that has reached this point…I was whining
about not having anyone to share these fabulous thoughts have earlier, but then
at this stage, there is clearly nobody left – but then the other view would be
that it is such a genuine reflection of things as they have been, at the time
after the Flower Power movement
Harry
Angstrom is rich now, and he has a variety of new events and experiences in his
life, including a swap on a Caribbean island, where he becomes a swinger with
his friends and has anal sex for the first time, indeed, the openness over
sexual encounters has been one of the strong points of the Trilogy, from the
first part, through Rabbit Redux http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/10/one-of-realinis-best-reads-rabbit-redux.html readers have been offered a
panoramic view into American ways, during and after the Flower Power movement,
and the characters have a web of connections, Charlie Stavros with Janice, then
with Nelson’s friend, the latter is having coitus with Nelson, who will marry
soon.
There is a
conflict between generations, Nelson feels bad about his father, blaming him
for the past, when Jil was burned together with their house, the attitude
Rabbit had towards his mother, and almost everything else the parent has done
and is doing now, they clash over the cars that are sold, the fact that Nelson
takes in a…snowmobile as a trade in, which would eventually be sold by Stavros,
the latter loses his job, because Janice and her mother decide to give Nellie
an opportunity, albeit Charlie is a key employee and he has to be brought back
eventually, when Harry is on vacation in the Caribbean…
Rabbit is
convinced that a girl that visits the dealership with a friend must be his
daughter, the one conceived years back, when he left home for a few months to
live with Ruth, and drives to the farm to see more, trying to find the truth
and maybe support the girl, help with her education, if she wants to go to
university – he is still very upset because his only son has decided to abandon
his higher studies and come live with the family, pushing Stavros out to start
on the dealership lot, where father and son do not see eye to eye, to say the least,
in fact it looks at times as if they dislike each other intensely.
However,
Harry insists that he wants his son to be happy, and does not see his marriage
as one that will ensure that, and neither will giving up higher education help
with anything, on the contrary, and we can defiantly say that the young man is
confused, does not seem to be convinced that marrying will be a dream, he has
had ‘Carnal Knowledge of his future wife’s best friend, and it seems as if
marital vows would be exchanged just because a child is on the way – if that is
not stopped by the pregnant woman’s drinking and other habits – she does take
to menthe liquor – as Rabbit observes…overall, we have the picture of a group
of people that appear representative of the American individual, the ones that
would give us a number of the members of the cult of Trump (idiots in my view,
with the needed caveats that some will just want the lower taxes, and hate some
of the extremists on the other side, but still, to vote for a monster is quite
ghastly, and the least they could do is say that he is a lesser calamity, and
not worship him) and it was a great fun to read this winner of the Pulitzer and
then start Rabbit At Rest
http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html
http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world
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