TlIHROUGHOUT John Updike's novels, Harry Angstrom makes striking economic progress. By most American standards, he has found success in Rabbit Is Rich. No longer feeling the need to escape, as he did in Rabbit, Run, and having survived the collapse of marriage and the fire that destroyed home in Rabbit Redux, he now runs the family Toyota franchise and lives with reconciled wife Janice in their new suburban home. Although Rabbit the automobile dealer seems reasonably successful, in Rabbit Is Rich-and in the two earlier Rabbit novels -Updike recreates in many ways the grim world of American naturalistic novels such as McTeague, The Red Badge of Courage, or Sister Carrie. A specific parallel to McTeague may be noted, for instance, when Janice and Rabbit make love on a pile of gold coins and to An American Tragedy when Nelson pushes pregnant wife down the stairs. Indeed, Updike restricts protagonist's freedom in so many ways that Rabbit Is Rich suggests the naturalistic chronicle of decline, the reverse success story. Like Carrie Meeber in her rocking chair, Rabbit in new pink wing chair has achieved only a partial success. Caught in middle-aged complacency, Rabbit is sexually and spiritually unsettled and, more than he realizes, economically vulnerable. At the same time, Updike insists that Rabbit's only hope for freedom lies in spiritual impulses and therefore depicts Rabbit's worldly successes as not only limiting and unsatisfying but reversible. Although Updike is not a twentieth-century naturalist like Norman Mailer or James T. Farrell, the Rabbit trilogy and Rabbit Is Rich in particular resemble classic American naturalism enough to make the title Rabbit Is Rich ironic. The successful Rabbit seems rid of oppressive past. As a boy in a lower-middle class family, his life was a paltry thing