[In "Rabbit Is Rich"] Updike's difficulty is to find a means of insinuating the sins of the past without recapitulating them and to make the novel something more than a job of clearing up. All his astonishing technical virtuosity as a poet, chronicler, moralist, and storyteller is called for. I detect some change of tone, but he has at any rate escaped the journalistic telegraphese that ruined, say, the later "Forsyte" and other sagas. And if "Rabbit Is Rich"...

[Rabbit is Rich] is more than the author's best work in many years. It is a beautifully written, compassionate, knowing and wise novel by an at-last mature writer working at a level he has always had the capacity to attain, but seemed destined never to reach. Even near the end, when God is once again descried by Harry Angstrom hiding in a hitherto unsuspected aperture, most readers, I think, will be sufficiently grateful and, yes, moved by what has gone before that they will grant Updike his obsessio...

[Rabbit Is Rich] 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 inflati...

Rabbit novels come out at the turn of each decade, like a series of reports on the state of America. Rabbit is rich, the third and latest…. is effortlessly informing about time and place; about smart money and car dealing, what they say about Chappaquiddick, TV ads, the contents of a bathroom cabinet. This is a corner of America in a mood of complacence ample enough to admit self-criticism, provoked in particular by the oil crisis and the queues at petrol stations…. Much scope for criticism of...

[John Updike's] Rabbit is a big man and partly unaware of his own strength—emotional strength especially—but he is not big enough to build dynasties and oppose time and tide. He knows he is a victim, but he fights on with his remaining powers. Along with those veteran show-people who so often say it, he could claim, and with the same banal justice, that he's 'a survivor'…. [In Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux Updike's] descriptions of the hypocrisy enshrine...

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 move...

Was it right to make man in the image of rabbit? For all its narrative energy and wit, [Rabbit is Rich] is an immensely depressing book, perhaps because the author refuses to be angry about a society slowly and deliberately destroying itself…. There's plenty of sex and pain: no passion, no disgust, no dignity. Updike is too important a writer to leave it at that; it's time he cleaned out the hutch. (p. 19) Judy Cooke, "Still Running," in New Statesman (©...