Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike

Published 1982 · 467 pages · 169,049 words · about 13 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

How hard is Rabbit Is Rich to read?

Rabbit Is Rich scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
Updike captures late 1970s America with precision—oil crisis, gold coins, swinger culture, the language of prosperity and anxiety. The vocabulary is rich with period specificity.
Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
Sentences are elaborate and lyrical, with Updike's characteristic attention to physical detail and psychological nuance. The syntax is demanding but rewards attention to its rhythms.
Abstraction: 58 out of 100
The novel explores middle-age comfort and its discontents, the emptiness beneath material success, the haunting of lives not lived. These themes are embodied in Harry's restless prosperity.
Information density: 60 out of 100
The novel is packed with the textures of its moment—inflation, gold speculation, country club culture. Updike creates density through immersion in American material life.
Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
The narrative stays close to Rabbit's consciousness while seeing around his blind spots. The reader knows more than Harry about himself, about his effect on others, about his limitations.
Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
Gold becomes a symbol of Harry's need for something solid in inflationary times. The Toyota dealership represents the new America he has successfully entered. His grandchild symbolizes continuity despite failure.
Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
Updike maintains affectionate but sharp irony about Harry's material satisfactions and emotional failures. We see what Harry has and what he lacks, what success costs and what it cannot provide.
Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
The novel ends with a new life beginning—Harry's grandchild—while his own dissatisfactions continue. Resolution is partial, acknowledging that prosperity solves nothing essential.
Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
The novel follows Rabbit through a year of comfortable crisis, building through accumulated scenes. The structure is chronological, with the rhythm of American seasons.

How Rabbit Is Rich is regarded

Rabbit Is Rich holds a literary regard score of 78 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where Rabbit Is Rich sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (324 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Rabbit Is Rich scores 66 out of 100. A second mythos, irony, pulls at it with a weight of 0.3. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
a big bland good guy is how he sees himself, six three and around two fifteen by now
Symbol: Formal
Gas lines at ninety-nine point nine cents a gallon and ninety per cent of the stations to be closed for the weekend.
Mythos: Ironic Comedy i (comedy i)
Fortune's hostage, heart's desire, a granddaughter. His.
Genre: Novel + Anatomy
The Sunbeam units were most successful at opening rectangular and dented cans

Where the story of Rabbit Is Rich takes place

  • Brewer, Pennsylvania, 1979, the main setting
  • Brewer, Mt. Judge and Penn Park, Pennsylvania, June 1979-January 1980 (1979 to 1980)
  • Caribbean resort island, January 1980

5 things that are true of Rabbit Is Rich, with the passage for each

  1. Harry sold 112 new and used cars in the first five months of 1979.

    A hundred twelve units new and used moved in the first five months of 1979

  2. Nelson drives one convertible into another in the lot behind the garage.

    The Royale rams again into the side of the Mercury, which lifts up on two wheels.

  3. Harry bought thirty Krugerrands for $377.14 each, $11,314.20 in total.

    thirty Krugerrands purchased for $377.14 each, including commission and sales tax, coming to $11,314.20

  4. Harry and Janice converted their gold into 888 silver dollars at $16.50 each.

    Eight hundred eighty-eight silver dollars priced at $16.50 each

  5. Harry and Janice sign a twenty-year mortgage of $62,400 for the Penn Park house.

    a twenty-year mortgage for $62,400

Scenes in Rabbit Is Rich that Frye would name

34 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, untitled
Pru is pregnant. One of the few advantages of not having been born yesterday is that a man acquires, like a notion of tomorrow's weather Harry reads the secret of Nelson's summer in the girl's body, a recognition that pivots the plot.
Anatomy, untitled
The Sunbeam units were most successful at opening rectangular and dented cans Consumer Reports test prose is set into a sex scene, an encyclopedic catalogue of goods.
Sparagmos, untitled
She topples then twisting sideways, headfirst, the metal-edged treads ripping at her belly. Pru's fall is the near-sparagmos of the pregnant body, with the baby at risk.
Anagnorisis, untitled
And Rabbit recognizes, buried under the wrinkles and fat but with those known eyes blazing out alive, Ruth. Harry meets Ruth again after twenty years and recognizes the woman under the flesh.
Anagnorisis, untitled
When Pru fell down those stairs. I'm not sure if I gave her a push or not. I can't remember. Nelson's confession reveals the guilt behind his violence and is the nearest thing to a tragic discovery.
Pathos, untitled
Hubert Johnson, formerly of Brewer, died of gunshot wounds in General Municipal Hospital, Philadelphia Skeeter's death, reported as an anonymous clipping, is the book's sacrificial pathos and a recurring presence.

Books that share these scenes with Rabbit Is Rich

About the author

John Updike