if you carried all the misery you've seen

It took me forever to finish Rabbit is Rich. Not because the book is bad, but I couldn't settle into it somehow. Updike's third volume takes Harry Angstrom into successful middle age and all that the American Dream entails: a house, a reprobate teenage son, country club golf, wife-swapping, and anal sex.

The soundtrack is disco, the malaise Carter's, the Iranians hold hostages at the American embassy. Rabbit is wealthy beyond his skills or efforts because of his wife's family business, and yet he remains restless, distracted by bourgeois concerns and a battle of wills with his son, whose behavior mirrors Angstrom's own youthful mistakes. Life accelerates beyond all comfortable reckoning.