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  • Rabbit Is Rich

  • By: John Updike
  • Narrated by: William Hope
  • Length: 19 hrs and 34 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (9 ratings)

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Rabbit Is Rich

By: John Updike
Narrated by: William Hope
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Publisher's Summary

It's 1979, and Rabbit is no longer running. He's walking and beginning to get out of breath. That's okay, though - it gives him the chance to enjoy the wealth that comes with middle age. It's all in place: he's chief sales representative and co-owner of Springer motors; his wife, at home or in the club, is keeping trim; he wears good suits; and the cash is pouring in.

So why is it that he finds it so hard to accept the way that things have turned out? And why, when he looks at his family, is he haunted by regrets about all those lives he'll never live?

John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He attended Shillington High School, Harvard College and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford, where he spent a year on a Knox Fellowship. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, to which he contributed numerous poems, short stories, essays and book reviews. After 1957 he lived in Massachusetts until his death.

John Updike's first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, was published in 1959. It was followed by Rabbit, Run, the first volume of what have become known as the Rabbit books. Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990) were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

©1981 John Updike (P)2015 Audible, Ltd

Critic Reviews

"Unquestionably Updike’s finest novel.... Funny and sharp and damnably intelligent.” ( The Boston Globe)
“Dazzlingly reaffirms Updike’s place as master chronicler of the spiritual maladies and very earthly pleasures of the Middle-American male.” ( Vogue)
“Rich, funny.... Updike at the very height of his powers.” ( New York Magazine)

What listeners say about Rabbit Is Rich

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A perfect study of an American male

What John Updike achieves with words an artist achieves with paint; slowly, layer by layer the portrait of the somewhat uninspiring, often unlikable Harry Angstrom emerges.

Harry hit the giddy heights of fleeting fame in High School as a briefly shining star on the basketball court in the first novel. His life from that point on has been a disappointment.

Rabbit is Rich is the third in the series about this angst ridden man & his life. Having finally inherited his dead father-in-law’s car lot, still living with his wife, in spite of her own shortcomings & his mother-in-law & finally with sufficient personal wealth to be a regular at a local Country Club Harry still hates his life.

His college-aged son returns home for summer recess with his own basket load of troubles , mirroring so closely his Father’s youthful follies that it makes one want to shout at the book because Harry is so emotionally unaware of his son’s struggles.

I both hated & loved Harry Angstrom for his woeful lack of empathy, his self-centred attitude to everyone else’s problems, his fixation on sex & his assumptions that all women found him attractive. I followed every bemused stumble he made through middle-age & it left me wondering if he would ever grow up.

Such is the power & depth of Updike’s writing & the mesmeric interpretation of the characters by the narrator that I am hitched to the wagon that is the rest of this woeful man’s life. I want to find out if he ever grows up & learns to love his life & those around him or is he always gong to be disappointed.

I am scarcely qualified to say that this is writing at its best…but it is. Take a walk through blue collar & middle-class America with a man who is just trying to make sense of it all. & a writer who lets us see that man for who he is.

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Brilliantly crafted characters & story

Great 5 Star Read. Set from the 1960s to early 1980s America. Ascebic wit and insight into ordinary lives.

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