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 America is offered, but not inadvertently, for the criticism is all made or implied in the novel itself. And Uplike's trend-spotting instincts are not just alert to news-items but sustain whole scenes of social comedy, as in the marriage preparations of Nelson, Rabbit's son and now his greatest trial. All this, even the dirty talk that grates plausibly on the ear, is so good, so alive, that one wishes Updike would stick with realism and forget about Rabbit and the meaning of life.

For Rabbit is again, as on earlier appearances, an equivocation at the heart of the novel: a holy fool, the most ordinary and average of men elevated into a state of grace. Now that he's older and richer he's still more ambiguous….

[Rabbit has an] equivocal role to play: for the worse things look in America the more gloriously Harry must stand out as the epitome of its common man. Compromised he is, and not only by wife-swapping but by making love to his wife (he is still with Janice) in a bed full of gold Krugerrands. But though 'he never reads a book, just the newspaper to have something to say to people', untutored wisdom spring to his lips…. Rabbit is not himself an interesting character. What he has is archetypal status, and the scenes he plays are archetypal ones, to do with the challenge now represented by his son; the Oedipal grudges on both sides are acted out pro forma, with all of Updike's local brilliance of timing and dialogue …; providing plenty to amuse or disgust but nothing that deeply disturbs.

Rabbit is a bit flat. The focus of a lot of sad truisms about fathers and sons, the horrors of aging, the lost innocence of America—but not a great catch as the hero of a novel. Yet here is Thelma, who has drawn him in the wife-swapping (the pleasure is mainly hers, he was hoping for Cindy), telling him in much detail that it's enough that he merely existed: 'Just existed. Just shed your light.' And we recognise a truth in this, and see that Rabbit himself recognises it. It makes him confide to Thelma 'his sense of miracle at being himself, himself instead of somebody else, and his old inkling, now fading in the energy crunch, that there was something that wanted him to find it, that he was here on earth on a kind of assignment.'…

Rabbit is now 46, and reflects that 'if a meaning of life was to show up you'd think it would have by now.' But 'at moments it seems it has,' in this novel—and it doesn't have polka dots, but looks more like a beer can: 'it is not something you dig for but sits on the top of the table like an unopened dewy beer can.' (p. 19)