Rabbit, Run

Book Circle Reads 96

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Book Description: Penguin's bumf--Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his — or any other — generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an

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impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty — even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path, an invisible line toward his own salvation as straight as a ruler’s edge.

Ballantine's is a little better--To millions of Americans, Rabbit Angstrom is like a member of the family. They have followed him through RABBIT, RUN, RABBIT REDUX and RABBIT IS RICH. We meet him for the first time in this novel, when he is 22, and a salesman in the local department store. Married to the second best sweetheart of his high school years, he is the father of a preschool son and husband to an alcoholic wife. The unrelieved squalor and tragedy of their lives remind us that there are such people, and that salvation, after all, is a personal undertaking.

My Review: I suspect my hostility to this book stems from a lack of respect for Rabbit Angstrom. I knew guys like this, I could have been a guy like this, and I think reading this book held up too undistorted a mirror to the facets of my own psyche that I dislike the most for me to enjoy the book as a leisure read.

So now let me get at why I gave it such a low rating: I think Updike's writing is mediocre. I think he's gotten heaps of praise for being unsparing and a brilliant observer, both of which are undeniable, and then the flat-surfaced all-nuance-low-impact writing style in this book got a pass. It's BORING. The story infuriates me, yes, my issue there; but the way it's told...! Blahblahblahblah even in the most tragic moments. Like the Peanuts cartoon adults, the entire cast of the tale seem to honk and blatt, and nothing makes one sit up and take much notice of any one of them.

Flat flat flat. Untoasted white bread spread with Miracle Whip, topped with limp outer leaves of iceberg lettuce and slices of weak-kneed, pale-pink winter tomatoes, with one piece of undrained, undercooked bacon in the middle.

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Rabbit is the most unlikable character in any book I have ever read, ever. He's moody and manic with violent outbursts. he's completely self-obsessed - either whining about how he's not getting what he wants, or being violent and angry to get it. He deals with regret over his wasted high school

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potential first by running away, then by being really mean to women, then running away, then being mean to women.. etc. If there's one thing I can say I liked about the book, it was the description of what happens to Janice (the alcoholic wife) near the end of the story - writing that part from her perspective did draw me in, but as soon as Rabbit showed up I was out again. I can't believe people like this book. It's scary that anyone could relate to it; and I would expect that the sequels presented nothing more than whining, running, and being truly hateful toward women.

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The title is a good summation of the character and plot. Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom runs: runs out on his heavily pregnant wife and two-year old son, runs to the arms of a prostitute, runs into the minister who invites him to play golf. (When Rabbit shows up at the minister's house, he slaps the ass

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of the minister's wife.) Half-way through the novel Rabbit sums up his working philosophy: "If you have the guts to be yourself," he says, "other people'll pay your price." A guy saw me reading this and asked how I liked Rabbit. "Despicable loser," I answered and he replied, "About right."

The thing is this story is all told with this incredible lyricism. Here's a passage from early on:

Tall two-petaled street sign, the cleat-gouged trunk of the telephone pole holding its insulators against the sky, fire hydrant like a golden bush: a grove. He used to love to climb the poles. To shinny up from a friend's shoulders until the ladder of spikes came to your hands, to get up to where you could hear the wires sing. Their song was a terrifying motionless whisper. It always tempted you to fall, to let the hard spikes in your palms go and feel the space on your back, feel it take your feet and ride up your spine as you fell.

It was almost worth reading the book for Updike's pretty, pretty prose. Almost. But it seemed such a mismatch for the hollow character and plot.

I read Updike's famous short story "A & P" in high school--it's memorable and much anthologized, and I've read other short stories by him I've found impressive. But I can't see ever wanting to read more of Rabbit. Updike obviously disagreed. There are three sequels.

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“Rabbit, Run” is the first of four “Rabbit” novels by John Updike. In all four novels, (”Rabbit, Run”, “Rabbit, Redux”, “Rabbit is Rich”, “Rabbit at Rest”), the main character is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.

“Rabbit, Run” was published in 1960 and therefore, this book

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marks the 1950s era. The 1950s was a very straight-laced time, so I can only imagine how shocking “Rabbit, Run” must have been at that time (it has been banned and/or challenged in the past).

Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is 26 years old. He married “relatively late” at the age of 23, to Janice, three years his junior. At the start of the novel, he has a dead-end job selling vegetable peelers. Rabbit and Janice have a toddler with a second baby on the way. Janice is quite the heavy drinker; drinking even when she is late in her pregnancy. Rabbit feels how sordid his life is — feels that Janice is losing her looks already and unpleasant to be around – so he ”runs away” (the title of the book reflects this theme). When he does, he meets a woman, Ruth, with a less than ideal background; and he immediately moves in with her.

After about two months, Rabbit leaves Ruth for his wife (when she gives birth to their baby). Soon after , when tragedy strikes in the family, he runs back to Ruth again. The end of the book leaves in question who Rabbit will commit himself to. The phrase “commitment-phobe” was probably not around in the 1950s, but certainly applies to Rabbit; at least during this period of his life.

There is much that happens in this book in between that I do not cover here, in order not to completely give away the plot. Even though Rabbit is only 26 years old, he seems to be already going through a mid-life crisis. Maybe because people tended to marry young back in the 1950s.

There are some sexual scenes in this book; which I am sure were considered scandalous during the 50s, but probably seem relatively mild today.

Some people might think, “gosh, I can see why this book has been banned; and gee, Rabbit is such a jerk. Who would want to read three more books about him?” Yet, I want to read the next book in the series! Why is that?

It’s because of the amazing writing by John Updike (at the time of this review, this book is the first Updike I’ve ever read). Also, the storyline moves along at a good pace, and never bogs down. It took me only a couple days, really, to read this book. There are so many parts I’d like to quote. Where do I start?!

When Rabbit has left Janice, he drives away from their home (a fictional town near Philadelphia) and at one point he stops at a roadside cave in West Virginia at midnight for a coffee:

“…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men sitting in zippered jackets in booths three to a girl, the girls with orange hair hanging like wiggly seaweed or loosely bound with gold barrettes like pirate treasure. At the counter middle-aged couples in overcoats bunch their faces forward into the straws of gray ice-cream sodas. In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?”

Later on, in a different restaurant– a Chinese restaurant– where he meets his soon-to-be mistress – they request to have the silverware taken away, so that they can use chopsticks:

“The waiter goes away like a bridesmaid with his bouquet of unwanted silver”.

Here is one of a few passages that might be why “Rabbit, Run” has been banned and/or challenged:

“Cupping a hand behind her hot sheltered neck, he pulls her up, and slides her slip over her head. It comes off with liquid ease. Clothes just fall from a woman who wants to be stripped. The cool hollow his hand finds in the small of her back mixes in his mind with the shallow shadows of the stretch of skin that slopes from the bones of her shoulders. He kisses this expanse. Where her skin is whiter it is cooler”.

Rabbit seems to be a man who is only able to live in the moment. He thinks he is in love with his mistress Ruth, and tells her he’ll be with her forever, but leaves her when his wife has her baby. When tragedy strikes in Rabbit’s reunited family, Rabbit goes back to Ruth, but again finds himself running away yet again.

The next book, “Rabbit Redux” was published some time later, during the Vietnam era. The Rabbit book series reflect each subsequent decade of Rabbit’s life; so I’d like to eventually read all of them so that I can see what kind of life, and person, Rabbit grows into.

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This is a Great Book - it must be - the NYT and other literary experts say so. Rabbit's life is awful - his wife's a drunk, his job sucks, nothing is really what he thought life would be. He tries to run away and fails at that too. According to Time magazine, Rabbit Angstrom is "an unflinchingly

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authentic specimen of American manhood". Yikes! Let's hope not - but maybe there is more truth in it than one likes to admit.

It's hard not to recommend reading this book even though reading it is really not an enjoyable experience. Rabbit evoked powerful emotions in this reader - especially anger and depression; maybe a little anxiety. You are almost guaranteed to feel worse after you read this book - especially if you can identify with any part Angstrom's angst. On the other hand, the mature reader (er, middle-aged) who has experienced the fullness of life's sorrows may sort of shrug at Rabbit as if to say 'what did you expect from life? Pull yourself together, son.'

Read at your own risk.

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A star high school basketball player, eight years after graduation, plays a back-alley pickup game with some kids. The years have not been kind to him, but he's still got the hoop dreams:

"He sinks shots one-handed, two-handed, underhanded, flat-footed, and out of the pivot, jump, and set. Flat and

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soft the ball lifts. That his touch still lives in his hands elates him. He feels liberated from long gloom. But his body is weighty and his breath grows short. It annoys him, that he gets winded."

Meet Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the often pathetic but always compelling hero of four novels by John Updike. Rabbit makes his first appearance in the scene quoted above from Rabbit, Run, published in 1960.

I first met Rabbit when I was a high school senior enrolled in an honors English class--you know, one of those self-designed lit courses where 17-year-olds basking in the listless days before graduation get to pick their own novels. My classmates chose such literary classics as The Outsiders, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Love Story. I, for some reason, picked up Rabbit, Run. Maybe I thought it was like that Watership Down book or maybe I was going through a Trix cereal phase….I don't know.

What I do know is that my life changed forever on that day 20 years ago when I picked up the paperback by a writer I'd never heard of. John Updike. I suppose to my 17-year-old mind, he sounded like someone who knew a thing or two about composing sentences. Little did I know.

Few other writers--apart from Richard Ford, Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver--have had a bigger impact on how I read and write. John Updike does know how to string words together and I would argue that, pound for pound, there is no modern writer who does a better job at delivering sentences that sing like a suburban opera.

When I brought Rabbit, Run to my English teacher and announced I'd chosen it for my latest book report, he raised an eyebrow and said, "Are you sure you want to pick this book?" You see, Updike had been raising eyebrows all across America since the publication of Rabbit, Run for its sexual explicitness and unapologetic portrayal of adultery.

"Yes, I'm sure this is the one," I answered. I couldn't turn back at this point because I'd already read the first 30 pages of the novel. I knew I'd stumbled upon literary greatness.

My English teacher lowered his eyebrow and nodded. "You can't go wrong with Updike." (This was the same teacher who'd been writing a novel of his own on the side, called The Scatological Implications of Bricklaying. So, I guess he knew a thing or two about being open-minded.)

I happily plunged into Rabbit, Run, hot-blooded teenager that I was. From the start, I identified with Rabbit's eternal soul-search. Here was a restless character trying to outrun the mundane, day-to-day existence of his post-high school life. I think I was just pessimistic enough to see myself slouching along in Rabbit's shoes in another 10 years.

[Happy-ever-after note: It hasn't been all that bad.]

Rabbit Angstrom has been one of the most talked-about characters in all of modern literature--right up there with his partner-in-desperation, Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman. Rabbit, in this novel at least, is the all-American sad-sack. His marriage is in the shallows, heading for the rocks; his athletic glory is fading; and then, to top it off, he goes and falls in love with a prostitute. It's a grim look at American society and, yes, the female characters aren't always presented in the best of lights. But, misogyny aside, there is so much to admire in the way Updike nails realism to the page.

Updike's strength lies in his economy. Here, for instance, is how Rabbit sees his alcoholic wife Janice: "She is a small woman whose skin tends toward olive and looks tight, as if something swelling inside is straining against her littleness. Just yesterday, it seems to him, she stopped being pretty."

I know of few other sentences in modern literature that have the kind of impact those do. There's a universe of regret in those 33 words.

One scene that still burns bright in my brain after 20 years comes early in the novel when Rabbit tries to run away from home. Driving aimlessly through southern Pennsylvania, he gets hopelessly lost, then more and more desperate as nothing looks familiar:

"The road is broad and confident for miles, but there is a sudden patched stretch, and after that it climbs and narrows. Narrows not so much by plan as naturally, the edges crumbling in and the woods on either side crowding down. The road twists more and more wildly in its struggle to gain height and then without warning sheds its skin of asphalt and worms on in dirt. By now Rabbit knows this is not the road but he is afraid to stop the car to turn it around."

I read sentences like that and all I can say is "Wow" in a reverent, hushed tone of voice.

In an introduction to the Rabbit novels, Updike described how he composed this book: "As I sat at a little upright desk in a small corner room of the first house I owned....writing in soft pencil, the present-tense sentences accumulated and acquired momentum. It was a seventeenth-century house with a soft pine floor, and my kicking feet, during those excited months of composition, wore two bare spots in the varnish."

I know exactly what he means. There were two bare spots on the tile floor under my desk in that English classroom 20 years ago.

[Note: Everyman's Library has bound all four Rabbit novels into one volume. When you combine Rabbit, Run with Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, the result is quite an astounding tome. And when I say "tome," I'm talking about 1,516 pages between two covers--the kind of book that Arnold Schwarzenegger bench-presses for 20 minutes every morning before breakfast. It's heavy reading--in more ways than one.]

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I did not finish this book. I left it out in the rain, possibly on purpose. This was my second attempt to like Updike. It will be my last.

Read similar books in plot (see Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer). Found out after it was a literary response to the ideals presented in Kerouac’s On The Road. Interesting. Works on the whole; though the priest seemed like he could’ve been drawn out a little more sensibly and profoundly as he

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presented the antithesis to Rabbit. And what happened to Ruth? Rabbit just leaves her. Sad to know he didn’t just end with him running and rather chose to do follow up books (which won awards, go figure). The best and most difficult part of the book (it took two months to read. Hey! I was busy too) was the present tense. Never come across that before and it’s jarring. Updike is deliberate in his prose and it comes across as weighty and heavy (like Ruth! A little overweight). I liked it though. Interesting scene on how self-love “never ends up where you’d think” towards pg 200. Would be good to do a literary exegesis.

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The only interesting thing about 'Rabbit, Run' is the premise - a twenty-something provincial has-been decides to blow town. Great!

The plot quickly sinks under a tsunamis of drivel. Updike's style is pretentious and precious. His descriptions are too elaborate and too dull. The writing is so

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spectacularly bad it would be funny in a less critically acclaimed book.

Rabbit could have been a great character, a blue-collar tortured soul one could identify with and root for. Instead, Updike's Rabbit is a retarded misogynistic man-child worthy only of contempt. Rabbit fails as a protagonist and as an anti-hero. He's too pathetic and boring.

Overall, a trashy novel from a hopeless hack.

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This book reinforces the negative stereotype of human males as being selfish sex-crazed narcissists who possess no feelings of empathy or loyalty for their female companions. The main character demonstrates the ultimate in immaturity and lack of responsible behavior. The women in the story show

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plenty of immaturity also, but since I'm male I'll remain politically correct and confine myself to criticism of the male behavior. Since the book follows a guy who is preoccupied with sex it follows that it is filled with descriptions of sexual encounters that are way too explicit for me.

So is there any social redeeming value to this book? John Updike certainly has a way with words. (See quotation below.) I suspect that the story being told is actually a pretty realistic description of the lives of some people. The story contains a tragedy near the end that adds some poignancy to the plot and provides sufficient heft to the novel to allow it to be called a classic literary novel. Overall this book is a portrait of a young man running away from any personal relationship that might require some responsibility and loyalty on his part. Therefore, the nickname Rabbit is an appropriately descriptive tag for this character.

The following is an example of John Updike's writing where he describes a vivid picture using less than the proverbial thousand words:

"A woman once of some height, she is bent small, and the lingering strands of black look dirty in her white hair. She carries a cane, but in forgetfulness, perhaps, hangs it over her forearm and totters along with it dangling loose like an outlandish bracelet. Her method of gripping her gardener is this: he crooks his right arm, pointing his elbow toward her shoulder, and she shakily brings her left forearm up within his and bears down heavily on his wrist with her lumpish freckled fingers. Her hold is like that of a vine to a wall; one good pull will destroy it, but otherwise it will survive all weathers."

One curious observation about the character Rabbit is that he doesn't smoke or drink, at least not very much. I usually assume anybody with such blatant lack of integrity to be a chain smoking alcoholic. John Updike provides a believable exception to that sort of stereotype.

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Can't say I'm much of a fan of Updike. I appreciate his sparse style, and I envy his prolific working ability! But ultimately, I forget his books and stories, and I feel there is a common thread that they have of disliking and even demonizing women. Not sure what that's about, but it makes me

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uneasy.

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Updike seems to touch on all the tiny but important nuances of his characters’ inner lifes. The way Rabbit wants to get away from his wife in the beginning of the novel, the way he is suspicious about his old mentor, how he estimates the hierarchy at the table when meeting two new girls, how he

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fumbles and fools around with one of them, eventually reaching intimacy. How he establishes a strange friendship with the priest that wants him to go back home, and even stranger relationships with the priest’s wife and the old lady whose garden he attends, how Rabbit is unwanted and yet wanted by his family in law, etcetera etcetera. It’s a beautiful, vivid, mysterious picture of human feelings and relationships.

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I have the older version, and it is interesting to see what the editors censored in the 60s. How many times can you say..."Classic."

RABBIT, RUN was the first Updike book I read "minny minny" years ago. I found it in the college bookstore at CMU when I was looking for something else, probably something "classic" at the time, like The Rise of Silas Lapham or The Octopus or The Sound and the Fury. While I think I did read all of

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those books eventually, they never stayed with me like Rabbit did. I was just 23 and engaged to be married when I read - no, devoured - Rabbit, Run. What was there in me back then, I wonder, that drew me to dark tales about other people's messy lives and misery? I dunno, but for some reason I loved the story of hapless Harry Angstrom, who, like a small fearful animal, "lived inside his skin." Was that a quote from the book? Maybe, it seems familiar anyway. I have read probably a dozen or more other Updike books since 1967 - certainly not all of his stuff, but enough. All four Rabbit books, of course, but I also loved Of the Farm and The Poorhouse Fair and The Witches of Eastwick. And I did a senior paper on COUPLES, a book which was thought to be quite scandalous at the time, what with all its combinations of multiple couplings, bed-hopping (and laundry pile) adultery, and a seeming obsession with oral sex. The paper I wrote was pretty awful, as I remember, but at least it gave me a valid excuse to read what was then Updike's newest offering without feeling too guilty. RABBIT, RUN became required reading in most of the English classes I taught in the early 70s. I found that many of my students didn't share my enthusiasm for Updike or his Harry creation though. I remember one male student once remarking, "Mr Bazzett, ya know how there are some books that once you pick 'em up, ya just don't wanna put 'em down? Well, this Updike book, it's like once I put it down, I didn't wanna pick it up again."

Well, I guess I understood his point of view, but I was a little hurt just the same that he didn't like one of my favorite books. And back then I was probably a little too much into exploring the "symbolism" of Updike's character names too. Eccles (Ecclesiates), Harry (a hare?), Angstrom (a tiny insignificant unit of measurement, or perhaps a "stream of angst"), Ruth ("whither thou goest - NOT!), Coach Tothero (t'other one), Mt Judge (self-explanatory), and on and on until my students probably just wanted to puke. I got out of teaching after five years, which was probably a good thing. I think I was one of those guys who ended up teaching English just because I loved literature and reading - which does NOT automatically make a good teacher. I don't cerebralize (is that a word?) the books I read much anymore. I just enjoy them. I re-read RABBIT,RUN again recently, after more than twenty years. It holds up well. It's still dark, tortured and an interesting look at the "human condition." But you know what? I don't like that kind of book so much anymore. I'd rather read a good love story, or maybe a memoir. At 65, maybe too much estrogen and not enough testosterone? Harry Angstrom is still a guy all serious students of American Lit should know though. And if you're a relatively new Lit student, here's something you might have missed. RABBIT,RUN was made into a pretty decent (if largely ignored) film around 40 years ago, with James Caan as Harry. If you haven't seen it, it's worth the rental price. Sadly, Updike finally put Rabbit to rest some years back (RABBIT AT REST) in the fourth book of the tetralogy. Personally, I think he shoulda kept him around a while. I'd like to know how he woulda been as a randy ol' septuagenarian. But that's probably just me. R.I.P., Harry. And many thanks to his master craftsman creator, John Updike. Write on, Mr. U!

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This is an excellent portrait of a young (twenties) man who is confused about his place in the world, as perhaps most young men are. He is trying to sort out his relationship with his wife, his child, his parents, and another woman. He doesn't have much awareness of how these people might feel, and

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focuses instead on his own feelings, which is not a great recipe for relationship success. Indeed, the running Rabbit ends up doing is running from all his relationships. The relationship which seems to offer most hope to Rabbit is the one he has with 'his' pastor, who loves Rabbit despite his obvious faults and sins. No one understands this love and even the pastor himself has doubts.
Rabbit isn't an attractive person but we're drawn into his life with a sort of morbid fascination, not unlike the way we stare at car accidents and other human tragedies.
Rabbit is a lousy husband, father, son, and lover. It's somewhat depressing to see myself in him, but that's the point, isn't it?
I'll be putting the remainder of the "Rabbit" series on my 'to read' list to see how Updike allows Rabbit to change as he ages and/or matures. Is there any hope in the world? At this point the answer seems to be 'no'.

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"Screw you, Janice. Just screw you."

Oh the delights of Updike. Him and Bellow are just too good to be true. 'They're the t*ts!' as my nana used to say.

You're not a true literary snob until you've read and loved this book.

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

[Rabbit, Run] is the novel that launched John Updike's long, celebrated writing career. Though not his first novel, it is the one that prompted critics and readers to take notice of the young Harvard grad and staff writer for The New Yorker. The character it

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introduced—Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom—would return (once a decade) in three more novels, two of which earned Updike Pulitzer Prizes.

Reactions to the novel were mixed then and now. It was common to dismiss Updike as a magnificent wordsmith with, well, "nothing to say." More recently, organizations given to such exercises—Time and the Modern Library—named it one of the 100 best American novels of, roughly, the 20th century. Time's citation called Rabbit "ignorant" and cited his "feeling trapped in a job, a marriage, a town, a family that bore him… Rabbit is not a character calculated to inspire affection, but he is an unflinchingly authentic specimen of American manhood, and his boorishness makes his rare moments of vulnerability and empathy that much more heartbreaking."

The story follows Rabbit through a marital crisis largely of his own making. In high school, Rabbit was a basketball star, the leading scorer on the team; in real life, he's on the bench. Shortly after high school, he got his girl-friend, the daughter of a locally prominent car dealer, pregnant. They married. Now their son is a toddler, Janice is pregnant, and Rabbit is "demonstrating" a vegetable peeler for a living. He's blithely self-centered; Janice is alcoholic. One day on his walk home from "work," he encounters a group of lads shooting hoops at a playground. He muscles in on the game and demonstrates, if only to himself, that "Wow, Man! I've still got it!" Puffed up and proud, he gets home and…his supper isn't cooking, Janice is tipsy, their son is at his parents, and their car is parked at her parents. Miffed, he walks the several blocks to the car, but instead of then picking up young Nelson, he heads away, east, to the county line, then south…running.

Rabbit drives all night and returns to town by morning, but not to his wife. Instead, he drives to the clapped-out former factory building—now a "clubhouse"—where his high school coach, now almost a bum, is living. As Rabbit approaches,

Tothero says the perfect thing. "Harry," he says, "the great Harry Angstrom." He puts out his hand for Harry to seize and with the other squeezes the boy's arm in a clasp of rigour. It comes back to Rabbit how he always had his hands on you. Tothero just stands there holding on and looking at him, smiling crookedly, the nose bent, one eye wide open and the other heavy-lidded. His face has grown more lopsided with the years. He is not going bald evenly; brushed strands of grey and pale brown streak the top of his skull.

Rabbit blurts out that he wants advice, then confesses that he what he really needs is a place to sleep. He's left his wife, he tells the coach.

"It's Janice Springer, isn't it?" Tothero asks.

"Yeah. God she's dumb. She really is."

"Harry, that's a harsh thing to say. Of any human soul."

Then Tothero says:

"You asked me for two things…Two things. A place to sleep, and advice. Now, Harry, I'll give you the place to sleep provided, provided, Harry, that when you wake up the two of us have a serious, a long and serious talk about this crisis in your marriage…"

"Yeah, but I don't think I can. I mean I'm not that interested in her. I was, but I'm not."

The coach quickly provides Rabbit a place to sleep, and that night, despite the earlier tough talk, the coach introduces Rabbit to a girl named Ruth, who is a part-time hooker. Once at her apartment he settles in.

"You were a beautiful piece," he says from the pillow listlessly, and touches her soft side. Her flesh still soaks in the act; it ebbs slower in her.

"I had forgotten," she says.

"Forgot what?"

"That I could have it too."

"What's it like?"

"Oh. It's like falling through."

"Where do you fall to?"

"Nowhere. I can't talk about it."

He kisses her lips; she's not to blame. She lazily accepts, then in an after-flurry of affection flutters her tongue against his chin.

He loops his arm around her waist and composes himself against her body for sleep.

The next day, he sneaks back to his own apartment to leave the car for Janice and to collect clothes and toiletries. As he leaves, he is accosted by a man who introduces himself as Rev. Jack Eccles. He's pastor of the church Janice's parents attend and wants to facilitate reconciliation. Eccles' efforts take him into the homes of Rabbit's parents as well as Janice's parents. When Eccles arrives at the Springer home, Mrs. Springer is watching Nelson and another toddler while their mothers are shopping. He joins her on the screened-in back porch; the two boys are in the yard.

"Nelson! Stop that this minute!" She turns rigid in the glider but does not rise to see what is making the boy cry…Mrs Springer's voice leaps to a frantic hardness and cuts through the screen: ''Did you hear me I said stop that bawling!'

"The boy's taken his truck," {Eccles} tells Mrs Springer.

"Well let him get it himself," she says. "He must learn. I can't be getting up on these legs and running outside every minute; they've been at it like that all afternoon."

At the Angstrom home, opinion is divided. Rabbit's mother defends her son, telling Eccles Rabbit has nothing to apologize for, nothing to be ashamed of. He asserts that Janice is shy.

"Shy! She wasn't too shy to get herself pregnant so poor Hassy has to marry her when he could scarcely tuck his shirt-tail in…These little women are poison. Mincing around with their sneaky eyes getting everybody's sympathy. Well she doesn't get mine; let the men weep. To hear her father-in-law talk she's the worst martyr since Joan of Arc."

"Well uh, what does Mr Ang¬strom think Harry should do?"

"Crawl back. What else? He will, too, poor boy. He's just like his father underneath. All soft heart."

When Rabbit's father arrives from work, he convinces Eccles how terrible he feels about the split.

Earl Angstrom has a grey, ragged look. This business has blighted him. He thins his lips over his slipping teeth like a man with stomach trouble biting back gas. He is being nibbled from within. Color has washed from his hair and eyes; like cheap ink. A straight man, who has measured his life with the pica-stick and locked the forms tight, he has returned in the morning and found the type scrambled.

"I just don't see how Harry could make such a mess. As a boy he was always so trim. He wasn't like other boys, sloppy. He was a neat worker…In my opinion a good swift kick is what he needs."

In the end Rabbit gets several good swift metaphorical kicks from tragedies in which he is complicit. But to no lasting effect. He goes back to Janice, he slides into a car sales job at one of his father-in-law's lots, yet he just can't be still. He drops in on Ruth and pledges his love to her. But then he runs. "Ah: runs. Runs."

But tell me, did you LIKE it? That's sort of a trick question, isn't it? The simple answer is: Yes, I did like it. I admire Updike's accomplishment.

None of the primary characters are thoroughly likable. Rabbit is certainly a dirtball. Janice is irksome. I feel oh so sorry for Ruth as she deals with Rabbit's unconscionable manipulations. But she's as undecisive as he is; come on, girl, stand up for yourself! (Oh, and stop the hooking!) Jack Eccles? He's diligent but ineffectual. Marty Tothero? Either set of parents?

None likable, but certainly all authentic. They're familiar.

The book is a tour de force in capturing the small-city culture of 1959. It hits quite a few concerns of that day (and of today), particularly related to sex—orgasm, oral sex, abortion, the suspicion of homosexuality (which of course is not openly discussed). Everyone's self-absorption, too, is out there. Lack of compassion.

Yeah, it is seemy, frustrating, revolting, angering. But it is authentic. Yeah, I like it.

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It is always hard to recommend a novel – to say that it is engrossing, that it is worth your time, that it deserves its classic status – when it is so full of uniformly unlikable characters. Rabbit is a man who leaves his pregnant wife, joins up with another girl who he makes pregnant, leaves

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that one to rejoin his wife, then leaves – you get the idea. The women have their own problems that keep them from being sympathetic saints, as do the various parents, as do Rabbit’s friends and acquaintances.

And yet, in spite of reams and reams of foibles, Updike makes us care about these people. Maybe he makes us see the little bit of each of us that resides in them. Maybe it is because we understand the hopelessness they each face. Maybe it is just that there is enough reality within them that we are naturally attracted to their humanness.

It is painful to watch Rabbit, a former high school basketball star, come to grips with a life that will never be what he wants. It hurts to watch what he does to the people in his life. It is a story that is a “downer”; yet, feels happier than it has a right to. The images and people stay with the reader in ways that make you wish they would go away.

And yet, if those images left, I would miss them.

The status of this novel is well-founded. How there can be more novels about Rabbit, I have no idea. But I will pursue them.

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It was a good book, but didn't hold my interest because of my distaste for the main character. I really just wanted someone less sophomoric. I realize that the point was that Rabbit was sophomoric, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. It's supposed to be all about Everyman America -- ya know

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them, they continue to live about ten years in the past and pretend that was their personal Nirvana, have no idea how to handle responsibilities (and no desire to) and never consider how their actions effect others? Except I don't believe Updike when he seems to imply that this is Everyman. Rabbit has no redeeming features whatsoever; he's not funny, not smart, not responsible, not kind, a bad father, worse husband, indecisive even in his irresponsibility. Most people manage to score at least one tolerable aspect, at least in my experience. Rabbit, to me, was sort of the negative image of what fanfictions refer to as a Mary Sue. 5/10

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“If you just have the guts to be yourself, other people’ll pay your price.”

'Rabbit' is a former high-schhol basketball star who suffers a crisis of confidence and eventually rebels against the mundane nature of everyday life as a potato-peeler saleman married to an alcoholic layabout wife.

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There are suggestions than time spent in the Army and away from his home environment that alters 'Rabbit' but this is never really explored in any detail.

I cannot remember the last time that I felt so little empathy for any of the characters within a book and in some ways therein lies a certain beauty, there is a total lack of either sentiment or moral stance made by the author about his characters even down to the clearly deluded priest Eccles. It is case of here they are, like them or not, I don't care.

There is a certain level of black humour within this book but Updike's writing style is methodical rather than vibrant and this is very grating at times, just as the story seems to pick up a beat he stops it dead in its tracks looking at a certain character's thoughts . Overall the text felt rather claustrophobic but as Updike paints a picture of modern American life it also feels overly cynical and pessimistic IMHO, suggesting that it is based around self-worth and religious duplicity rather than actual material wealth, an interesting viewpoint in itself. Unfortunately despite this book being written in the 50's we regularly see mirror images of 'Rabbit' walking down our streets most days of the week which is somewhat dis-spiriting.

I cannot in all honestly say that I enjoyed this book but nor did I totally dislike it but that I fear was down to Updike's writing style rather than the content. Do I want to read the rest of the books in the series? Probably not for a good while

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There are hundreds upon hundreds of classic literature novels I need to read, and the reaction I most hate to have when I read them is ambivalence. If they’re amazing, all’s good; if they suck then I can just rant about them and decry their status as icons. When you read the magnum opus of a

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man considered to be one of the 20th century’s greatest writers and your reaction is “Yeah, it was pretty good, I guess,” it’s not easy to review.

Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is a 26-year-old husband, father to a toddler, with another baby on the way. In high school he was a basketball star, a hero, but you get the impression that the big fish in the little pond wasn’t quite talented enough to make it elsewhere, which is why he’s still stuck in his hometown in Pennsylvania working as a kitchen implement salesman. One night his growing anxiety and dissatisfaction with his life reaches breaking point, and he gets in his car and drives away. He finds himself drawn back, though, and the novel covers the next few months of his life as he deals with the consequences of his actions.

I knew before reading this that Rabbit is widely considered one of the most unlikeable protagonists in fiction, and I have to say, I don’t see why. He’s certainly not likeable – he can be self-centred, obnoxious, narcissistic and demanding, not to mention the cowardice of abandoning his wife and child. But the entire point of the book is about human flaws, particularly the flaws of youth – feeling trapped, knowing there could be more out there, wanting to avoid responsibility and run away (though I did find it odd that Rabbit immediately shacks up with another woman). So while he’s not likeable, I didn’t find him unlikeable, either, and I certainly found him sympathetic. I’m actually hard-pressed to think of a fictional protagonist I 100% dislike – or a real-life person, for that matter. Maybe I’m a nice person. Or maybe I’m easily influenced and will throw my sympathies behind whoever the narrator happens to be. David Lurie in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace is also, apparently, a widely disliked figure, but I had no problem sympathising with him. Maybe I’m more capable of analysing a character’s actions and sympathising with their motives than other readers; maybe I’m mature enough to understand why people do things without necessarily condoning them. Or maybe that’s a very condescending thing to say and I’m a narcissist like Rabbit. Who knows? What a world!

Rabbit, Run also feels like a happier book than it should be. Some terrible, terrible things occur – above and beyond what Rabbit does at the beginning – yet Updike’s prose has a way of making every single thing in the universe seem beautiful, from the trees to the flowers down to the clock ticking in a waiting room at a hospital. You know how sometimes you go through your day and feel blah, and other times you’re walking down the street and every puddle, street sign and strange odour seems wonderful and make you happy to be alive? Updike writes a world of the latter, even if it does send him into purple prose territory at times.

I wasn’t blown away by Rabbit, Run the way I was hoping to be, but I did appreciate it and I do think it’s a strong novel that deserves its place in the canon. I’ll be reading Rabbit Redux down the track.

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The story line is a familiar one used by many of the Classics. Boy and girl get married. Some years later, one of them feels trapped in the marriage and disappointed that there isn't more to life. Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, The Awakening - all are books that follow a similar plot. Rabbit, Run

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follows this theme, but with one major difference. Instead of the wife being trapped in a marriage, this time it is the husband, Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom. And unlike these other heroines, he doesn't swallow poison or throw himself in front of a train. Instead, he runs. Although Rabbit is rude, obnoxious, cocky, inconsiderate and he makes some despicable choices - like leaving his pregnant wife - he also represents youth and all the possibilities that we have when we are young. I found myself cheering him on, just wanting him to run away. Good story!

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This is a brilliantly written novel that I found very difficult to like. That's not through any fault in the plotting: once you get into it, the plot carries you forward, asking at each crisis in Rabbit's life "will he? or won't he?". The problem, rather, is the characters, most of whom are very

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hard to like. Most notably, Rabbit himself, who never does (the responsible or unselfish thing, that is). This is the first Updike novel I have read, though I have read several of his short stories over the years. I have a gnawing desire to find out what happens to Rabbit, and will probably add the rest of the books to my constantly expanding "to read" list -- though I will not add them anywhere near the top.
In many ways -- brilliant writing, compelling plot, unlikable characters -- the novel reminds me of Franzen's "Freedom".

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The first 40 pages or so of this book are probably the worst 40 pages I've read since Austerlitz, which was so bad that I couldn't be bothered finishing it. Never before or since in the history of English language literature, or at least since Euphues, has an author so irritably reached after

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effect for no good reason.

"The Norway maples exhale the smell of their sticky new buds and the broad living-room windows along Wilbur Street show beyond the silver patch of a television set the warm bulbs burning in kitchens, like fires at the backs of caves." Yes, this aptly likens modern living to pre-historic living. But trees do not exhale; what colour other than silver would a television set be in the '50s?; what sort of a bulb (or anything else, for that matter) burns any way other than warmly?

"He had wondered what he was doing. But now these reflexes, shallowly scratched, are spent, and deeper instincts flood forward, telling him he is right. He feels freedom like oxygen everywhere around him... he adjusts his necktie with infinite attention, as if the little lines of this juncture of the Windsor knot, the collar of Tothero's shirt, and the base of his own throat were the arms of a star that will, when he is finished, extend outward to the rim of the universe. He is the Dalai Lama." Yes, this is faintly satirical. Yes, it's meant to show us the stupidity of Rabbit, and it does. But on the way it shows the incompetence of the narrator. What sort of a scratch is otherwise than shallow? Who 'feels' oxygen around them (air, maybe, but not unless it's particularly windy)? And clearly the simile at the end is *not* in Rabbit's head, so we can only blame Updike for seeing the universe in a tie-knot. Don't even get me started on the gobsmackingly ugly use of alliteration and assonance: scratched are spent; flood forward; feels freedom; infinite attention; little lines; will when he is finished; extend outward. That's in *half a paragraph*. And approximately 50% of the book is written in this 'style.'

And you'll be able to find your own examples, too. Here are some brief ones at random from page 86: "three long nicks, here, scratched in the wall, parallel". *Long* nicks? "the pork chops... cold as death, riding congealed grease" riding to where? what's wrong with 'sitting on'? "he takes clean Jockey pants, T-shirts and socks from a drawer" Do *you* keep your dirty underwear in your drawers? "the furniture, carpeting, wallpaper all seem darkly glazed with the murk filming his own face" Would they be transparently glazed with murk?

Thankfully, in the other half, when Updike isn't meditating his way into ecstasy over misplaced adjectives, excessive adjectives, superfluous adverbs, reified adjectives, and pointless, uninformative lists ("on the bureau there is a square glass ashtray and a pair of fingernail scissors and a spool of white thread and a needle and some hairpins and a telephone book and a Baby Ben with luminous members and a recipe she never used torn from a magazine and a necklace made of sandalwood beads carved in Java he got her for Christmas") characters actually speak to each other and display the characteristics we generally associate with human beings.

This is all the more difficult for me to cope with because the moral of the story - running away from your responsibilities is an awful thing to do and will have terrible consequences on those who care for you, and even those who don't really - needs to be said in novels more often than it is by good writers these days (and by 'these days' I mean the twentieth century). But it has to be said better than this, for goodness' sake. I really hope Rabbit, Redux has less rapture over the everyday. Please. Please.

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