I confess I haven't read much of John Updike's work. About thirty years ago I flipped through "Couples" for the prurient interest it sparked at its publication. I laughed through "The Witches of Eastwick"--the movie, not the book. But I never read any of Updike's Rabbit Angstrom novels. My well read neighbor who is also a former professor of psychology who taught me History and Systems of Psychology recently told me I had missed out on some fine writing by neglecting Updike, particularly the Rabbit series.So, since my friend and former teacher, has never steered me wrong on a book recommendation, I picked up "Rabbit, Run" and began to read it. As he usually is, my former professor is right. I've missed out on some fine writing, a matter that I will rectify by reading the rest of the Rabbit Quartet. Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom did one thing well. He was a star basketball player in high school. Rabbit set records on the court. But those days are over. Now he demonstrates a vegetable peeler in five and dimes around his home town in Brewer, Pennsylvania. Updike introduces the reader to Rabbit Angstrom walking home from the job he hates to his wife, Janice. He will be late getting home. Angstrom comes across a group of kids playing basketball at a hoop mounted on a telephone pole. For a short time Angstrom becomes the star he once was. Updike's rendering of this scene is magical, his prose creating Rabbit's movements on the street court pure, simple, and full of a rhythm that urges the reader to speak the words to hear the lyricism of them.The end of the game draws Rabbit back into the reality of the life he does not love. He walks to his apartment to find Janice drunk. Their child is not there. Neither is his car. Janice has spent the day with her mother and left their car at her parents' house. Nelson, their son, is at Rabbit's parents' home. The woman who had won Rabbit's love during long afternoons on the bed of a friend's apartment is not as pretty as she was on those sun filled afternoons. Now her skin is sallow. Her body has lost its suppleness in Rabbit's eyes. When he leaves to get his car and his son, Rabbit decides he has lost himself. He walks to retrieve his car and drives silently away from his in-laws' home. Rabbit imagines driving through the night to end up somewhere on the gulf of Mexico looking up into a perfect sky filled with brilliant stars.Rabbit's getaway is unsuccessful. Driving into the hills of West Virginia, he ends lost on top of a mountain lovers' lane and wearily drives home, but not to his wife. Instead he seeks out his old basketball coach and asks to stay with him for a few days. His coach berates him for his immaturity but puts him up. Then, with complete inconsistency, his coach takes Rabbit with him to a date with a woman he stakes to a meal from time to time. His lady friend will bring a friend along for Rabbit, too. Rabbit's date lives in an apartment of her own, but tells him she does nothing for a living. He quickly offers to help her out with her utilities and within a day has wrangled his way into a new home, leaving his wife and son.If there is one thing that Rabbit loves more than the exhilaration of his glorious moments on the basketball court it is sex, though he justifies his lust by insisting that it is love. Written in 1960, "Rabbit, Run" is a frank portrayal of male sexuality, predatory, manipulative and selfish.Updike introduces the Episcopalian Priest, Jack Eccles, as Rabbit's conscience. Eccles will make it his mission to reunite Rabbit and Janice. An unobservant innocent, Eccles cannot see that Rabbit even sees the Reverend's wife as another woman who recognizes him as a man who loves women. The sexual tension between Rabbit and the minister's wife is palpable, whether it is real or only in Rabbit's egocentric imagination.Rabbit's life is a train wreck waiting to happen. Tragedy is inevitable. John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom is the perfect portrayal of a man at odds with himself and the world in which he lives. Rabbit runs from responsibility but he is incapable of escaping it. John Updike created an excruciatingly moving novel capturing the sense of post-modern dissatisfaction and self absorption. It is a small wonder that Updike's four volumes detailing the life of Rabbit Angstrom appear on the New York Times twenty five item list of the most influential literary works of the twentieth century.
I really didn't like this book. In fact I got to about half way and gave up in despair. I’d really wanted to like it – to love it, in fact – and so I was really disappointed to have to abandon it.I'm a big fan of American literature and gobble up books by Auster, Roth, Wolfe, Franzen and even Salinger, as well as any number of contemporary thriller writers. In fact, I've struggled with the work of very few authors from the States, with only DeLillo springing readily to mind. So I was confident I'd relish a book described by some critics as the best American post-war novel.For those who have no knowledge of this book I’ll give a brief introduction. Published in 1960 it tells of a 26 year old former high school basketball star, Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, who decides one day to run off and abandon his pregnant wife and young child. After driving all night he eventually finds himself back in his home city where he looks up his former coach. This leads to a meeting with a part-time prostitute who provides a temporary home for him. That’s pretty much where I gave up – well, in truth I ploughed on a little further but nothing much happened and after an excruciatingly dull section I was wrestled into submission.Now don't get me wrong, there's a certain lyrical rhythm about the prose and some of the sentences were extremely well crafted by a writer who obviously knew have to link words together. There were short sections that I quite enjoyed, but these were consistently followed by long rambling paragraphs that just switched me off. In concept, Rabbit himself is an actually an interesting character. He clearly dislikes his current life and can't escape the feeling that there's something better out there waiting for him, if only he can find it. There’s a feeling that his best years are already behind him, but still… why should he settle for his current mundane existence with a spouse who drinks her days away and now clearly irritates him. So what is it that failed to ignite any passion in this tale for me? I think it was the feeling of depression that imbued the whole thing, together with a preponderance of conversations and situations that just seemed to go nowhere. I didn't actually like Rabbit much (I'd guess I wasn't supposed to) but this also meant I didn't really care what became of him. And there was something about the period and the place that felt too unfamiliar, too unexciting – though I do think this would have been different for a reader who had more familiarity with either, or both.Rabbit is interested in women – very interested – and there’s quite a bit of commentary on his thoughts about just about every female he comes into contact with. Most of them lustful and very descriptive. He’s also a Christian and his meetings with Jack Eccles, a young Episcopal priest who tries to re-unite him with his wife, were some of the best sections. But I just kept thinking that if only he'd continued driving... that would be a book I'd rather read: a road tale or a story of a young man finding new experiences in a strange town miles from home. I just didn't like the way he (partially) gave up, driving back to where he came from to continue his life amongst the same people in the same place.Anyway, I think I’ll be in the minority but my overall feeling is that this book is a big ‘miss’ for me. My one star rating reflects my failure to finish it.
What do You think about Rabbit, Run (1996)?
***ALL SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW ARE HIDDEN***Never have I read a book with a more unlikable main character. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is a married man with a toddler son who despises his wife and (view spoiler)[one evening gets into his car and simply leaves them (hide spoiler)]
—Caroline
I've always hated the sort of "adult literary fiction" which deals with, mainly, unhappy marriages and adultery and gives a picture of a sort of two-dimensional world of unrelenting bleakness where no one is ever just decent to each other. This is the country where Rabbit, Run takes place, and it's always been an unrecognizable country to me, this place where "adult literary authors" live. Perhaps it's just my naturally cheerful and upbeat nature that makes such so-called darkness seem just sort of dim and creepy, more like a haunted house with peeled grapes for eyeballs and spaghetti for guts than anyplace real I've ever visited.So, that's what this book is. A creepy, unlikable narrative with creepy, unlikable characters which never lets up until you're ready to, like, drown your baby in the bathtub just so she'll never have to grow up and read such miserable stuff. Ahem. Whoops! Spoilers!Also, Updike over-describes a lot, especially towards the beginning. It makes you cringe to see it. It's like he's yelling "I'M WRITING! I'M WRITING! I'M WRITING" with every ugly adverb, every superfluous third adjective, every tortured metaphor. He settles in eventually, but if I hadn't forced myself to finish he'd have lost my interest in the first fifty or sixty pages.
—Vanessa
Former high school basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom sells kitchen gadgets called the “MagiPeels” in five and dime stores- “a noble profession.” At 26, Rabbit feels trapped in his marriage to Janice, with whom he has 2-year old son, Nelson. Now, Janice is pregnant again. “She stands up and her pregnancy infuriates him with its look of stubborn lumpiness. Just yesterday, it seems to him, she stopped being pretty.” Like Rabbit, Janice is disillusioned with marriage and attempts to stuff her emptiness with whiskey and television. Janice demands one errand too many of Rabbit. Sent out for a pack of cigarettes, Rabbit runs. Without a map or plan, Rabbit gets lost. A stranger advises: "The only way to get somewhere you know, is to figure out where you're going before you get there." Rabbit has no idea what he is looking for, he hopes to stumble across something that will fill the emptiness. Right now, the only thing that fills his mind is the thought of sex with nearly every woman he meets, interspersed with bygone memories of high school basketball. In a sense, Rabbit is on a quest for truth but his lusts distract him from the quest as he tends to conflate desire for women with vague spiritual aspirations that he cannot articulate. Rabbit expected more from life than his squalid apartment and drunken wife. Now, Rabbit is trying to follow his bliss, but “If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.” The idea of questing is an important theme in this novel, as Rabbit seems to be forever seeking something different from what he has. Demoralized and lonely, he seeks temporary refuge with his former coach and role model, Marty Tothero, who is now a washed-up old man living in a shabby room above a men's club. The coach remembers how young Rabbit never fouled in games, which is ironic because Rabbit’s life has become one giant foul. In the degenerate coach, Rabbit sees his own future writ large--a sad athlete, reminiscing about his former glory. Rabbit meets Ruth Leonard, an adventuresome girl who will do things for him that his wife, Janice, won’t. Rabbit moves in with (and promptly impregnates) Ruth, who has a strange admiration for this man who left his wife and child, ”in your stupid way you're still fighting.’ But Janice is not ready to give up her husband without a fight of her own, so she calls on the Church.Rev. Jack Eccles, an Episcopal minister, attempts to entice Rabbit to return to Janice, and dispenses spiritual counseling that some might find either banal or laden with grace--as hinted in the epigraph of the novel, a quotation from Pascal, "The motions of Grace, the hardness of heart, external circumstances."(Pensee #507) Eccles (as in "ecclesiastical") professes to be religious but does not have any faith. Eccles wrestles in the pulpit with the squeak in his voice. His eyebrows jiggle as if on fishhooks. It is an unpleasant and strained performance, contorted; somehow; he drives his car with an easier piety. Another minister rips into Eccles for “selling his message for a few scraps of gossip and a few games of golf." Even after Eccles and Rabbit become golf buddies, Rabbit lusts after Eccles’ irreligious and cynical wife. Will Rabbit choose to abandon his pregnant wife, or his pregnant girlfriend, or both? Will the birth of their second child cause Rabbit to return to Janice? If so, will he run again? A tragedy ensues that will haunt Rabbit and Janice over the entire tetralogy. (view spoiler)[Janet gets drunk, and, through inattentiveness to her infant daughter, the child drowns in bathwater left running. At the funeral, Rabbit feels like everybody silently condemns him with their eyes, so he lashes out and blames Janice before he runs away-- again. (hide spoiler)]
—Steve Sckenda
