Death and disappointment were suddenly everywhere — in the news every night, at the breakfast table in the morning — but rather than acknowledge the burden of such things, we’d all agreed to smile along, taking our cues from Captain Stubing and Captain Kangaroo and Cap’n Crunch. The famous yellow smiley face, that 50-year-old precursor to BuzzFeed’s yellow buttons, urged us to Have a Happy Day, which sounded to me less like a request than a command.

The next summer, after a long year spent adjusting to life without my dad in the house, I happened to pick up John Updike’s “Rabbit Is Rich.” Perhaps given the timing, it was the first novel that felt real and relatable to me, like a ticket straight into the bloodstream of another human being. And no wonder — Updike knew exactly how the intrusions of pop-culture minutiae had the power to evoke the cheery dread of Middle America.

Updike’s protagonist, Rabbit Angstrom, is a former high-school basketball star who feels hemmed in by the American dream — cornered by his alcoholic wife, Janice, and upstaged by his ineffectual, self-pitying son, Nelson. And every step of the way, Rabbit experiences his entrapment and impending death through the lens of pop trivia, snippets of experience Updike once referred to as “giv[ing] the mundane its beautiful due.”

As a result, the Rabbit tetralogy offers a slow-motion glimpse at the rise of mass culture over the course of three decades. In “Rabbit, Run” (1960), Rabbit’s argument with his wife is punctuated by Mouseketeer musical numbers and Tootsie Roll ads. As he drives out of his hometown to escape his crumbling marriage, he’s lulled by commercials for Rayco Clear Plastic Seat Covers and New Formula Barbasol Presto-Lather. In “Rabbit Redux” (1971), news that Janice might be cheating on Rabbit is interspersed with scenes from a nearby TV, where “people are trying to guess what sort of prize is hidden behind a curtain and jump and squeal and kiss each other when it turns out to be an eight-foot frozen food locker.”

By “Rabbit Is Rich” (1981), Updike’s protagonist enters a kind of pop-culture fugue state, in which a ghastly pastiche of gas lines and Chuck Wagon restaurants and Skylab mishaps and Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” on the radio blend seamlessly with his sentimentality and boredom and inescapable fear of death. Rabbit worries that “tomorrow will be the same as yesterday,” and in the background, his mother-in-law’s television blares the latest news of the Iran hostage crisis. The noisy trivia that surrounds Rabbit, with its eternal present-tense merriment, feels increasingly oppressive: “The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun just started.”

Finally, in “Rabbit at Rest” (1990), cultural tidbits start to take on the same indistinct shape as his own life’s events: “Like everything else on the news, you get bored, disasters get to seem a gimmick, like all those TV timeouts in football.” As hard as Rabbit tries to beat back his dread with the “win” signifiers of his era — wealth, an affair, a few chummy but superficial friendships, an uneven golf game — none of Rabbit’s fixes last. His powerlessness, his rampant sexual urges, his unrelenting nostalgia for his own lonely past are encapsulated and eventually superseded by a steady flow of trivial distractions. That moment in the novel when a leap of a man into the air on a Toyota commercial (“Oh, what a feeling!”) yields to the cold air above Lockerbie demonstrates exactly how the enthusiasms of American life thinly mask the specter of death. When Rabbit unceremoniously falls dead of a heart attack, it’s clear that this is how most stories will end. Even as he lies dying, his son insists on Frosted Flakes over bran cereals, and the newspaper arrives, blaring “Hugo Clobbers South Carolina.”