Volume 28, Number 18 · November 19, 1981
Easy Come, Easy Go
By Alfred Kazin
Rabbit Is Rich
by John Updike
Knopf, 467 pp., $13.95
Rabbit Is Rich, the third of John Updike's romances with his favorite hero, Harry Angstrom (and with Harry's and our acceleration from discontent to dismay), is a brilliant performance. As always, but more soberly and relevantly than in such subjective books as Couples and Marry Me, Updike revels in his great gifts of style and social—I mean domestic—observation. There have been times in the past when Updike's style was laid across the page like so many layers of marshmallow. How the prodigy loved his style! But here the always summonable Updike brightness, acuity, prancing wit are mostly on the mark. And the mark is inflation, inflated America careening wildly like an overpressured balloon over the pit of the Seventies.
Review, 1967 words
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