Rabbit is Rich

Rabbit is Rich is book #3 in John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom tetraology. Harry is now half-owner of a Southeast Pennsylvania Toyota dealership, and while the energy crisis and inflation make him superficially worried that “the great American ride is ending,” he is nonetheless thriving personally. This volume features Updike at his most personal, least political, and most experimental, with long stream of consciousness passages. And Harry’s late-middle-age observations are more nostalgic than ever; here he is on his son’s pregnant fiancé:

She breathed that air he'd forgotten, of high-school loveliness, come uninvited to bloom in the shadow of railroad overpasses, alongside telephone poles, within earshot of highways with battered aluminum center strips, out of mothers gone to lard and fathers ground down by gray days of work and more work, in an America littered with bottlecaps and pull-tabs and pieces of broken muffler.