Money helps. Just how much it helps is, perhaps, the most humorous and unfriendly revelation of middle age. It cushions every fall. As a result, Rabbit Is Rich is a more consistently comic novel, looser and easier and more cynical than its predecessors. Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux each moved with a sharp clarity of purpose to a truly harrowing catastrophe. Years after closing it, Rabbit Redux still seems to me one of the most painful books I have read. In the new book, however, the plot is diffuse, its movements multiple, its catastrophes promised and then mockingly withdrawn….

The irony is manifold and humane in this novel. Its special quality has grown steadily from its sources in Rabbit Run. Harry Angstrom's weaknesses turn out to be his strengths, and Updike never quite allows us to feel superior to him or to them. His marriage, for example, proves...