[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 inflation, inflated America careening wildly like an overpressured ballon over the pit of the Seventies.

Apart from the helplessness of the characters, just as drugged by the social fix as some kid on Lenox Avenue, Updike's own proud voice rings out with a new steeliness—and pronounced lamentation—about rich, wasteful, wholly selfish, and hard-talking American whose advantage to a writer is that it...