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In the second of a new series of reviews from the Observer archive, Martin Amis marvels at the third instalment of John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ series

The great postwar American writer John Updike won two Pulitzer prizes for the Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom tetralogy. In a 2009 tribute to his hero, Martin Amis wrote that Updike “took the novel onto another plane of intimacy”.

John Updike’s “Rabbit series” are fattening into a sequence. Rabbit, Run (1960) gave us Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom’s disastrous early marriage, Rabbit Redux (1971) his chaotic experiments with adulthood. Rabbit Is Rich, the latest, traces with appalled affection the contours of Rabbit’s maturity: it is about middle-aged spread, physical, mental and (above all) material.

Rabbit has never looked a less likely hero for an American epic. Equipped with a troublesome family and a prosperous car showroom, he is meant to seem provincial and vulgar even by the unexacting standards of suburban Pennsylvania. Rabbit’s reading consists of Consumer Reports and the odd newspaper. His mind is a jabbering mess of possessions, prejudice and pornography. But then Rabbit is an extreme middle-American, a voluble and foul-mouthed representative of the silent majority.

The time is 1979, and like its predecessors, the novel is crammed with allusive topicalities; in a few years’ time it will probably read like a minor Ben Jonson comedy. Rabbit, however, is quick to reinterpret global events in the light of his own furtive self-interest. Will the Iranian revolution give a boost to his precious-metal investments? Is Opec going to louse up his car dealership?

Rabbit is rich now, and largely protected from contingencies. His life, he feels, has devolved to an “inner dwindling”. Updike toys with plot and incident, then flirtatiously retreats. The most dramatic events in the book centre on things like car dents, mortgage rates and gold futures.

If Rabbit Is Rich has a central theme it has to do with the one-directional nature of life: life, always waiting to be death. Rabbit swans on down the long slide, clumsy, lax and brutish, but vaguely trying.

The technical problem posed by Rabbit is a familiar and fascinating one. How to see the world through the eyes of the occluded, the myopic, the wilfully blind? At its best the narrative is a rollicking comedy of ironic omission, as author and reader collude in their enjoyment of Rabbit’s pitiable constriction. Conversely, the empty corners and hollow spaces of the story fill with pathos, the more poignant for being unremarked.

Being a boor and a goon, Rabbit is on the whole a healthy influence on Updike’s style; but Updike’s style remains a difficulty. In every sense it constitutes an embarrassment of riches - alert, funny and sensuous, yet also garrulous, mawkish and crank. Like Saul Bellow, Updike often seems wantonly, uncontrollably fertile. Here is a writer who can do more or less as he likes.

Furnished with such gifts, a novelist’s main challenge is one of self-contraception. A talent like Updike’s will always tend towards the encyclopaedic. Rabbit Is Rich is a big novel and it would be churlish to wish it any thinner. But it is frequently frustrating. You feel that a better-proportioned book is basking and snoozing deep beneath its covers.

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