[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" is in danger of becoming an essay in latter-day Babbittry, the author does fill out a man ashamed of his shamelessness; Rabbit is shown puzzled by his inescapable Puritan guilts, and relieved by bursts of rancor. As a onetime basketball hero, he has not much more in his head than the ethos of the "achiever": you must "win." Beyond that, he is so cloudy in mind that he never really knows whether, morally speaking, he is lighting out or lighting back. Some critics have called him a monster, but he is far from that. Even in his tiresome sexual obsession he is excusable, having come to sex later than the young do today. He is really a deedy infant, and moderately decent: he'd like to learn. If he doesn't quite know how to love his wife, he is sentimentally protective; in the common love-hate between father and son, he is honest, though his methods are risky. (p. 201)

If we look first of all at Updike as a chronicler, we have to say that he was dead right in choosing the minor provincial city of Brewer, Pennsylvania, and putting Rabbit into the motor trade. That trade is the source of inner-city decay. This kind of ad-hoc city has become international; horrible world news pours in via "the boob tube," and adds new fantasies to what one has to call the "ongoing" private stream of domestic consciousness—one recalls that in Joyce, to whom Updike has a debt, that stream mainly flowed back. The next element is native American, even though it has spread: television's real contribution to the mind comes from the Things in the commercials, with their awful jollities. Updike has the extraordinary gift of making the paraphernalia of, say, the Sears, Roebuck catalogue sound like a chant from the Book of Psalms turned into vaudeville. (p. 202)

It has always seemed to me that in his preoccupation with the stillness of domestic objects Updike is a descendant, in writing, of the Dutch genre painters, to whom everything in a house, in nature, or in human posture had the gleam of usage on it without which a deeply domestic culture could not survive its own boredom. The stress on paraphernalia, even the label on the product, has put something vivid into American comic writers as well as the serious moralists. By extension, the clothes and underclothes of people, the parts of their bodies … [are minutely noted.] I don't mean that these things are catalogued by Updike; they simply give the ripple of balladlike vividness to the stream of consciousness. If downtown Brewer look as if it had been bombed by its loving inhabitants. Updike is as exact as a war artist who rises far above the documentary and the unfelt. Like Eliot, he is moved by the waste land. Where Sinclair Lewis's clutter of mind and matter pushed at us the brutilized pathos of accepted vulgarities, Updike is a poet. He loves words and images. If his sexual curiosity runs to the clinical, he relieves us with gnomic sentences; perhaps the closeups of sex, the private porn, are "a kind of penance at your root." (pp. 202-03)

In this volume, we realize that the women, even when they are victims, are stronger than Rabbit is, for a reason he somehow stumbles on. Men are solitaries and egotists; foolish or not, they see themselves as born to be alone. The women are not solitaries. Their strength lies in their capacity for assimilating personal relationships, in living for the primacy of family and accepting its hierarchies. Rabbit may earn the money, out of compulsion; the women control the capital, real or emotional. They live by arrangements among themselves and never forget a nourishing jealousy.

The two earlier novels had a tight, dramatic tension. In the present one, the tension is looser, because the elders are getting fat and middle-aged, but there is the new drama of the puzzled father and the son who too much resembles him. (pp. 204-05)

There is nothing in this volume as searing as the Skeeter episode in "Rabbit Redux," but that in fact enhances the conviction that these three books of Updike's are a monumental portrayal of provincial and domestic manners. He is both poet and historian, so various in observation and so truthful, so inventive and adept, that he leaves one brooding on his scene and remembering his epithets. (p. 206)