I’ll never hear about Consumer Reports now without thinking about this book. The third in a series, Rabbit is Rich won the Pulitzer in 1982. The first and second in the series are like watching a trainwreck. An emotional trainwreck constructed from the flawed nature of humanity. This book is not such a trainwreck, although Rabbit’s son Nelson does play the surrogate for the cringe role, it is more distant as it is not happening directly to Rabbit.
Each book in this series was published 10 years apart, 1960, 1970 and now 1980. The author has aged and the character has aged the same amount of time. I can only imagine what reading this during publishing was like. I think that’s what makes this series so good. That there was temporal distance between the sequels.