Rabbit, Run
by John Updike
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Book Reviews of Rabbit, Run
Book Review: I bought the Rabbit "tetralogy," and I will finish it (if it's the last thing I do)!
Summary: 3 Stars
When I was in tenth grade, my English class was assigned John Updike's "Rabbit,Run," which I found to be an unpleasant reading experience, indeed. I seem to recall thinking how strange it was that, although Updike was widely considered a classic American author, we were reading a book about a completely immoral (or, at the very least, ammoral) main character who leaves his pregnant wife, and lives with a prostitute, with whom he engages in some fairly explicitly described activities. However, even then, I figured someday I'd read it again when older and wiser.
Not quite 30 years later, while browsing at a bookstore, I came across the 1500 page "Rabbit Angstrom, The Four Novels," which I figured would serve the dual purpose of not needing to buy another book for over a month, while reading quality literature. After completing the first book, "Rabbit Run," it's not that I regret starting this lengthy work, but rather that I give more credence to my earlier self.
Now I know that Updike is considered one of the great American writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Perhaps that's true, but I don't really see it in this book. Of course, I do notice the unique use of stream of consciousness, shifting of character perspective, heavy use of metaphor and simile, and interesting descriptive observations; but I've seen it elsewhere, presented in a more compelling style. Updike reminds me a bit of Kerouak, Fitzgerald, and Tennessee Williams, all considered to be classic American writers, and all whom I think are somewhat overrated.
Let's look at a typical example of Updike's prose in "Rabbit, Run" (page 167):
"The St. Joseph's parking lot is a striped asphalt square whose sides are lined with such city trees; and above their tops, in this hard open space, he sees the moon, and for a second stops and communes with its mournful face, stops stark on his small scrabbled shadow on the asphalt to look up toward the heavenly stone that mirrors with metallic brightness the stone that has risen in his hot skin."
Okay, obviously Updike has superior descriptive writing skills, but just maybe he can do a little better with syntax, and break his thoughts down so the reader doesn't have to read the sentence three times in order to figure out what the author is trying to get across.
Then there's the story itself. I'm not usually the type of reader who needs to like the main character to enjoy the book (I'm a Harry Crews fan, for crying out loud!) but I have to understand his/her motivations and sympathize just slightly. Rabbit Angstrom exudes a self-centered "I don't care about the consequences" attitude that makes him abhorrent, even though certain people seem to like hanging out with him. Sure, we can understand why a man marrying in his early twenties to a vacuous woman (pregnant with their second child) -- already showing signs of alcoholism and losing her looks -- can feel trapped and decide to escape. I can even appreciate why he might seek solace with a prostitute. But what about pretending to fall in love with the prostitute, whose life he also almost ends up destroying? Or returning to his wife (who has given birth), only to go back to the prostitute at the first sign of trouble? Not to mention the horrible thing Rabbit says to his wife after the seminal event in the book. I'm sorry, the only rational way to deal with someone like Rabbit would be to show him complete disdain, or total rejection (think about if someone you knew behaved like this).
Enough of my stream of consciousness! I've just started book two: "Rabbit Redux," and hoping for improvement.
Book Review: Anti-Hero Trapped in Unhappy Marriage? Run!
Summary: 5 Stars
Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom was a high school superstar only a handful of years ago. Now he is a young married father, trapped in the suburban 60's, unhappy with a cluttered house, a drunken wife, and a son who will never be the athlete he was. Will this former basketball star find a way to make his life better, or will he run like a rabbit? The title says it all and Harry Angstrom does indeed run whenever things don't go his way.
Leaving the house to pick up his son, he impulsively drives from his Pennsylvania home to West Viriginia. He wants to run to the sunny shores of Florida to live the life he feels he deserves. Surely a man like Rabbit deserves more in life, or so he imagines. Unable to complete this journey, he runs to his former coach, a tired and washed-up man who introduces him to a part-time prostitute. Rabbit moves in with Ruth that very night and they begin a relationship they flaunt and thus humiliate his very pregnant wife and both sets of parents.
Is there an ounce of unselfishness in Rabbit? The reader may think so when he returns to his wife the night she goes into labor. Their reunion is bittersweet and because in large part of Rabbit's inability to see beyond his own needs, their reunion burst apart in a senseless tragedy that is horrific but so beautifully written the reader is glued to the page hoping against hope this terrible thing is not happening.
Will Rabbit be able to grow up and realize he is no longer the high school hero? Will he be able to comfort his wife, to provide a home for her and his children? Will he forsake Ruth, the hooker who accepts him as he is but is now pregnant with his child? In which direction will Rabbit run this time?
In addition to the novel's main character, Updike gives us as fine an array of secondary characters as can be found anywhere. He elevates Janice and Ruth so that they are not stereotypical "bad wife" and "good-time girl" but sympathetic characters the reader can relate to. Most notable among the secondary characters is the minister, Jack Eccles, who takes upon himself the task of saving Rabbit. He becomes Rabbit's friend and marvels at the paradox of this character. For example, after spending the first night with Ruth, Rabbit has the need to go home and get clean clothes as he cannot function unless his wardrobe is clean and pressed. The minister inquires, "Why cling to that decency if trampling on the others is so easy?" Thus lies the paradox of this restless anti-hero, one the reader cannot admire but cannot help but root for and not turn away from. It is this same minister who so succintly sums up the essence of Rabbit when he lambasts him later by saying, "The truth is you're monstrously selfish. You're a coward. You don't care about right or wrong; you worship nothing except your own worst instincts." And therein lies the crux of Rabbit's character.
The novel's second half is quite intense and on finishing it there is no way I could leave Rabbit and the supporting characters behind. I had to know what happened, so immediately began the sequel RABBIT REDUX, the second in the four-part Rabbit series. I admit that had I read this when it was first published I would have been let-down by the ending since I like tidy conclusions. Waiting 11 years to find out what happened to Rabbit would have been an eternity. I could barely wait 11 seconds, so I'm glad I discovered these books and Updike only recently.
Book Review: sad suburban story of sin and indecision
Summary: 4 Stars
For people back in 1960, when the American Dream was alive and well and everyone believed in unlimited progress and The Future, young John Updike's novel must have come on like a bombshell. Yet, for those of us who lived through the Sixties and continue to watch the ebbing away of those primary values that once underlaid our country, reading RABBIT, RUN today is small potatoes. Similarly, the sexual `explicitness' that had everyone talking back at the time of publication, would hardly raise an eyebrow today. Various sexual acts that have become part of US national lore, for better or for worse, were still not given a name in this novel. Rabbit Angstrom, a former highschool basketball star, is stuck in a boring, tawdry marriage and a dead-end job. His lower middle-class parents expect him to follow in their footsteps; his in-laws look down on him as a no-hoper. A few years later, the answer would have been obvious---tune in, turn on, and drop out ! But in those more serious times, a mere five years before the tidal wave of change began, Rabbit's flight can draw no social or political sympathy. There is no Haight-Ashbury in view. He drives into the night, only to return sheepishly. He soon takes up with Ruth, a "loose woman", who, again five years later, could have been seen as a "hip chick doing her own thing". Everyone condemns him, the woman condemns herself. She gets pregnant, but does not tell Rabbit, even when he runs from her to rejoin his wife in the hospital as she gives birth to his second child. Family grudgingly accept him back, but things have not really improved. A do-good minister with a bored, flirtatious wife tries to help Rabbit resolve his inner conflicts, but is too weak to accomplish much. A final tragedy occurs. Rabbit runs off to Ruth yet again. The ending is a little predictable. In my opinion, Updike hovers always on the edge of greatness. He is forever caught between the desire to write supremely well and to be popular. I love how he catches the feel of a small American town or city in the late `50s, the mores and expectations of the people, their goods and habits. But as a young man, perhaps, Updike loved his own skill rather too much, he loved to sit back and watch himself create these verbose passages, these descriptions of old ladies on porch gliders, of upper class gardens, or of Pennsylvania country gas stations. He revelled in those descriptions that somehow ring a mite "over-literary". His reach for the perfect word sometimes extends too far. I feel, as an older man, that Updike before 30 could see beauty only in very young women, perhaps thanks to Hollywood and the printed media. Each description of an older woman is tinged with disgust, discoloration, and deterioration. That said, Rabbit Angstrom is an unforgettable character. Updike's choice of name is very clever. If you sympathize with him at first, his utterly brainless selfishness and weak indecision, his lack of any backbone whatsoever, tend to make you despair. He is a real antidote to the American dream, to the "log cabin to White House story" that we love to love. At times, this novel annoyed me with its wordiness, but it grips you like a crazy ride on a downward spiral. There is a bit of Rabbit in everyone, but most people face the music, most people form some idea of where to go next.
Book Review: Trek to the Inevitable
Summary: 3 Stars
I read this novel for my AP English III class. Although I understand that everyone enjoys different types of reading, I find it hard to believe that anyone could truly enjoy wholeheartedly this long trek through one man's life. I chose this novel because of an excerpt from it I read that I liked. I enjoyed Updike's one-point-of-view, stream-of-consciousness style, although I found the repetitively depressing, anticlimactic events to be boring and disturbing. A man of easy caricature, Rabbit Angstrom, flows through the changes in his life brought about by marriage, the birth of a child, and the consequences the choices he makes hold. The repeated sexual references and graphic description might appeal moreso to the older reader than they might to me, yet I cannot understand how any reader would enjoy the pauses in the smooth, blanketing style of the writer's flow from one event to the other and the way it effects his character. The employment of deep emotion and feeling is prevalent in the novel, which I liked. The novel also presented many sarcastic universal truths throught the course of it in which Updike qualifies his understanding of humanity and bitterness towards it. One of the truths he states near the opening of the book, between major scenes, upon pondering right and wrong: "We're all in it together. Fraud makes the world go round. The base of our economy." Updike also seems to understand that bad luck, once begun, fails to end for a long time, but that it is brought upon by oneself. Rabbit's sexual conquests and consistent lack of responsibility for himself definitely come back to haunt him with the loss of his wife and child. Rabbit also flashes back to the past, remembering the only fond thing about his early life, basketball. This comparison of things in his current life to that before makes life appear to Rabbit as a game, and as though each step he takes in it is like a foul in the basketball games he used to star in.Perhaps the thing that Updike most fully understands, though, is the human tendancy to fear the unknown. Throughout the entire novel, there is hardly a single page that doesn't describe Rabbit's fear of any one thing, situation or person. Rabbit continues to present himself in risky situations and try his sense of right and wrong by scaring himself into doing things. When Rabbit is presented with these uncomfortable situations, his natural reaction, like that of a rabbit, is to run. Updike's flowing style and colorful descriptions make everything appear normal until he adds the element of fear into his novel, which allow for it to be interrupted, and real life to play back into the picture of Rabbit and his game of life. One of Rabbit's few statements of true contemplation is that of a flashback to his basketball coach who said "Run, run, run. Run every minute their feet are on the floor. You can't run enough...Give the boys the will to achieve. I've always liked that better than the will to win, because there can be achievement in defeat." This sums up how not only was Rabbit scarred by basketball into later life, but how his memory of "achievement in defeat" validates the presence of death, fear, and pain in Rabbit Angstrom's life.
Book Review: A true American classic, beautifully written
Summary: 5 Stars
I was more than a little amused after reading some of the other reviews. Amazing how many people don't get it. This has nothing to do with "On the Road" or "the Stranger." And I am certain that Updike did not mean to portray Harry Angstrom as Everyman. Quite the contrary.
This was a very risky book to write. I am certain that Updike must have had great trepidation showing us a "hero" who is at once immature, insensitive and narcissistic. I mean there is virtually nothing likable about this guy. Why should we care about him? He was a big fish in a tiny basketball pond in high school and drifted into marriage with a woman to whom he refers often as a "mutt." He likes the idea of being married, but not the specificity of it. I wonder if this book gave Philip Roth the courage to write Portnoy's Complaint.
One reader made reference to Updike's use of stream of consciousness, thus showing his ignorance. Clearly this reviewer never read James Joyce or Virginia Wolff and has no idea of what real stream of consciousness is.
It is Updike's portrayal of time and place that evokes such a strong feeling in us; that and the wonderful supporting cast he gives us. But it is the men who are badly damaged here as well as most of the women. The two fathers, Springer and Angstrom seem like tired, depressed old men who are just plodding along. Their wives are more sharply etched by Updike, but they only seem alive when angry. Harry's sister seems much like an empty shell. His old coach, Tothero, is a sick, depressed old man, living in the past and takes up with a woman who has contempt for him. Eccles, the reverend, is busy trying to repair the chaos in the Angstrom house while blissfully unaware of the crumbling of his own. Only his wife, Lucy has the appropriate response to Harry: she hangs up on him.
This book is a sign of its time. In 1960 when it was first published, the country was coming out of a recession and the malaise of the Eisenhower years. It had just elected a vigorous and young new president, but small town America had not quite climbed on board yet. This is not merely a novel about Harry Angstrom. It is a novel of time and place and in that regard it is very much like Jack Kerouac's first novel, "The Town and the City," although Updike's characters are more finely drawn.
The writing throughout is simply exquisite. Few American writers have been able to evoke such feeling in so few words as this sentence: "The hours that follow are so long they seem to contain the same incidents over and over."
In the Republic, Plato likens the artist to a Wizard and he says the Wizard holds a mirror to nature. That is what John Updike has done. Rabbit, Run is a mirror held up by a Wizard to a small American town in a certain time and place, warts and all.