RABBIT IS RICH by John Updike; Knopf; 467pages; $13.95
Compared with Rabbit, Run (1960) and Rabbit Redux (1971), this third novel about the life and times of Harold C. ("Rabbit") Angstrom seems, at first, uneventful. No infants drown in bathtubs, no houses burn down, leaving innocent dead behind. The year is 1979. Skylab is falling, gas prices are rising, and Rabbit, 46, sells Toyotas for Springer Motors, the firm founded by his late father-in-law. His on-and-off marriage to Janice is on again, glumly and apparently for good. They live with her mother and sock away money. Rabbit thinks less and less about his days as a high school basketball star and the B-league scoring record he set in 1951. Even his formidable libido has begun to show signs of acting its age: "Somewhere early in the Carter Administration his interest, that had been pretty faithful, began to wobble and by now there is a real crisis of confidence."
Rabbit may be stuck in the midlife doldrums, but Rabbit Is Rich positively hums with vitality. As a novelist, John Updike has never seemed more confidently in control of his material: in this case, an eerily representative American soul undergoing a summer and winter of discontent. Catastrophe no longer dogs Rabbit's heels. He is afflicted instead with dented fenders, with enough money to know that it will not buy him what he wants, whatever that may be. He is in the process of forgetting his dream, just as his city of Brewer in southeastern Pennsylvania has paved over its past with highways that, thanks to oil prices, may lead nowhere. He peddles Japanese cars to Americans; something has gone wrong in his native land. He thinks: "The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started."
Out of such statements Updike constructs a poignant comedy of diminished expectations. Some of the laughter arises from the nagging ordinariness of Rabbit's life. His biggest problem is his son Nelson, 23, who comes home with a pregnant fiancee, announces that he does not want to finish his senior year at Kent State and begins angling for a sales job at Springer Motors. Rabbit dislikes Nelson: "I think one of the troubles between me and the kid is every time I had a little, you know, slipup, he was there to see it." Dodging his son as much as he can. Rabbit quixotically pursues an imagined daughter; he suspects that a young woman who comes to his car lot is the product of his affair, some 20 years and two novels ago, with a woman named Ruth.
The bulk of the action takes place inside Rabbit's mind, a locale that has become increasingly entertaining. Updike has mastered a supple stream of consciousness that perfectly conveys Rabbit's darting curiosity. This former high school jock may lack all but the rudiments of an education, but he is one of those, in line with Henry James' advice, on whom nothing is lost. Driving around Brewer, he registers what is playing at the four-theater movie complex (ALIEN MOONRAKER MAIN EVENT ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ); he listens to disco on the car radio and muses on the accomplishment of the Bee Gees, "white men who have done this wonderful thing of making themselves sound like black women."