The first in a tetralogy, written once every ten years, featuring Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom. The sequels are Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest.
This is a chronicle of a mid-life crisis, experienced early. When Harry Angstrom was at high school, he was a basketball star who achieved record scores. Now (1959), aged 26, he has a job demonstrating a kitchen appliance at department stores. Returning home one night, he discovers his pregnant alcoholic wife watching TV: she tells him to pick his car up from When he's asked to pick their two-year-old son up from his mother's and the car from her mother's. He collects the car and drives south and west all night. Next morning he returns to his hometown but not to his wife. Quitting his job he shacks up with another woman. Can Harry be persuaded to return to his wife and, if he does, what will be the consequences.
It's a more-or-less honest portrait of a man who is disillusioned with life: "after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate." (p 92); "What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots." (p 232). But as the author says in an afterword: "Jack Kerouac's On the Road came out in 1957 and, without reading it, I resented its apparent instruction to cut loose. Rabbit, Run was meant to be a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road - the people left behind get hurt." As Reverend Eccles tells Harry: "Right and wrong aren't dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. Invariably ... misery follows their disobedience. Not our own, often not at first our own." (p 240)
Rabbit is on the run from the realities of life after the first bloom of youth. "The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks." (p 194) Getting old sucks, and Rabbit, unable to come to terms with this, runs. But he doesn't know where he's going. Other men, perhaps acting the part of the wise sage encountered on the journey, give him advice. "The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there." (p 26) he is told, early on. Later: "All vagrants think they're on a quest. At least at first." (p 110) Nevertheless, he can't settle down.
In part, the book is about the relations between the sexes. Sex and marital infidelity are frankly reported (though it is by no means explicit, judging by today's standards). Rabbit, as the nickname suggests, uses women: he abandons his wife and persuades another woman to have sex with him for money; he slaps the vicar's wife on the bottom; he sees sex as a biological relief, trying to penetrate his wife days after she has given birth. He is, according to an obstetrician "just another in the parade of more or less dutiful husbands whose brainlessly sown seed he [the obstetrician] spends his life trying to harvest." (p 173) But the reader is made aware of the fundamental misogyny of the protagonist (and other men). Rabbit's mistress has almost the last word, and she berates him. In a key symbolic scene, Rabbit is taking leave of an old widow who has employed him to care for the rhododendrons her husband loved. In her house are two paintings. One is a portrait of the woman when young, of which she observes: "Why did he have to make me look so irritable? I didn't like him a whit and he knew it. A slick little Italian. Thought he knew about women." (p 191) The other is a painting of Leda and the swan, a reference to Zeus, king of the Olympian gods and a serial rapist, who disguised himself as a swan and forced himself on Leda. I think Updike is saying that male mistreatment and subjugation of women is timeless. He might have a male protagonist but Rabbit is by no means a hero.
The story is told in the present tense, which was very unusual at the time (the author says he only encountered it in Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson), mostly, but not entirely, from Rabbit's perspective. There are passages of internal monologue bordering on stream of consciousness:
"Brown legs probably, bitty birdy breasts. Beside a swimming pool in France. Something like money in a naked woman, deep, millions. You think of millions as being white. Sink all the way in softly still lots left. Rich girls frigid? Nymphomaniacs? Must vary. Just women after all, descended from some old Indian-cheater luckier than the rest, inherit the same stuff if they lived in a slum. Glow all the whiter there, on drab mattresses."
There are also lists. American novelists seem to love lists. For example, when Rabbit is driving through the night, there is a long paragraph listing what he hears on the radio: titles of song after song, commercials for plastic seat covers, and TVs, and cream rinse, and clothes, and table napkins, and wax ... news about Eisenhower and Macmillan and the Dalai Lama ... I suppose the purpose is to anchor the story in a specific time and culture. Since it doesn't record Rabbit's reaction to these stimuli, it doesn't tell us anything about his character, but it offers a context for his life, so that we might more clearly understand what is driving him.
These things, and the frank discussion of sex, made it disruptive and avant garde in its time, launching the career of the author as a novelist, although the prose style and narrative would nowadays be regarded as very conventional. Today we are more shocked by the use of the c-word and the n-word and Rabbit's fundamental misogyny. And, of course, today's society offers many more opportunities to both men and women than were available then. So it can seem dated. Nevertheless, the fundamental issue of how you cope when youthful dreams are wrecked against the rocks of reality, remains the same.
And one thing you can't take away from the book is how well it is written. It is full of incident, from the inciting moment when Rabbit starts his quest to the final scene and those last words: "he runs. Ah: runs. Runs." (p 264) And there are moments of glorious description:
- "In the top of the windshield the telephone wires continually whip the stars." (p 30)
- "Eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men sitting in zippered jackets in booths three to a girl." (p 30)
- "A slash in a window blind throws a long knife of sun on a side wall." (p 40)
- "An airplane goes over, rapidly rattling the air." (p 97) They used propellers in those days.
- "His eyebrows jiggle as if on fishhooks." (p 203)
- "In the street under glaring hardtops drivers bake in stalled traffic." (p 231)
Other selected quotes:
- "You become like to these kids just one more piece of the sky of adults that hangs over them in the town" (p 7)
- "Naturals know. It's all in how it feels." (p 7)
- "If you have the guts to be yourself ... other people'll pay your price." (p 129)
- "His sins a conglomerate of flight, cruelty, obscenity, and conceit; a black clot embodied in the entrails of his birth." (p 169)
- "He lacks the mindful will to walk the straight line of a paradox." (p 203)
- "The sight of his parents makes him wonder why he was afraid of them." (p 250)
Page numbers refer to the 2006 Penguin Classics edition
October 2023; 264 pages
Chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best novels since Time began (1923)
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