It is 1979 and Rabbit is no longer running. He has dropped to a slow walk in order to enjoy the fruits of middle-aged affluence. True, he avoids mirrors, where he used to love them, and a succession of chins ripple gently where there used to be one, but he has made it.
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It is 1979 and Rabbit is no longer running. He has dropped to a slow walk in order to enjoy the fruits of middle-aged affluence. True, he avoids mirrors, where he used to love them, and a succession of chins ripple gently where there used to be one, but he has made it.
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Dispatched, from the UK, within 48 hours of ordering. Though second-hand, the book is still in very good shape. Minimal signs of usage may include very minor creasing on the cover or on the spine.
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Good. All orders are dispatched within 1 working day from our UK warehouse. Established in 2004, we are dedicated to recycling unwanted books on behalf of a number of UK charities who benefit from added revenue through the sale of their books plus huge savings in waste disposal. No quibble refund if not completely satisfied.
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Very GOOD in NONE jacket. Size: 5x0x7; This edition by Penguin has a different cover design than the listing image-Gray-haired auto Salesman in a light blue suit with a tie sitting on the hood of a bright red Toyota. This book was the 1982 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 429 Pages are clean, unmarked, and flat with a tight spine. Two full-length creases along spine; two creases at front cover lower corner; and gutter edges of pages are tanned.
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Near Fine. Seventh edition. Trade paperback. Near fine with light edgewear. Winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1982. Inscribed by the author to Herb Yellin. Herb Yellin was the founder and publisher of Lord John Press and the most frequent of Updike's fine press collaborators. He named his press after noting that the list of authors he wanted to publish all shared the same first name, chief among them John Updike, his favorite. *Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu* became the press's first book in 1977 with 10 more to follow over the next 23 years. Yellin's friendship with Updike grew with each new limited edition benefitting his already enormous Updike collection, with Updike himself contributing copies of new editions of his books-often inscribed. In a 2010 interview with Yellin he noted that Updike "...liked that if anything ever happened to his own collection, he had my collection on the opposite side of the country." A notable association, an uncommon edition to find Inscribed.
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.
