Rabbit, Run
by John Updike
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Book Reviews of Rabbit, Run
Book Review: Rabbit is Another Moriarity, or Worse?[97][T]
Summary: 5 Stars
Written on the cusp of the birth of Keroac's and Ginsberg's creation of Beat literature, this book incorporates many of their themes and delivers outright depression.
Harry Angstrom, a/k/a Rabbit is a middle 20's man whose mind is still surrounded by high school drama on the bastketball court where he excelled. Outstanding at sports, he weds - a la shotgun - a pretty and wealthy girl. In 1960, the year of the novel, his world would be declared idyllic - for Rabbit it is not.
Like Kerouac's Dean Moriarity, this guy is confused. Like Kerouac's Sal Paradise, he impregnates and delivers women to situations to which he holds no allegiance or responsibility. Rabbit, like Moriarty or Cassidy, is the kid in a man's body who refuses to acknowledge or realize that life includes acts of responsibility. Are they all cool? They are free. But, their freedom often comes at a great cost to those around them.
Rabbit's greatest demise is his wife. He flees her and shacks up with a professional woman, Ruth Leonard. The discourse between he and professional girl Ruth is amazingly well formulated and perhaps is the highlight of the book. Ruth is hard and tough. But, eventually, Rabbit ruins her life in a manner which only he can - she calls him "Death." And, a short synopsis would be to say that Rabbit, albeit attractive and personable, is precisely what any parent of a daughter would fear see coming to their home during the holiday season. He can charm many, but ultimately he will tarnish whatever good existed or exists in the women around him.
Perhaps the only character lower than Rabbit is his idol - his basketball coach, Tothero. He introduced Rabbit to Ruth and kindled the disaster of the relationship. But, unlike Rabbit, he acknowledges his frailty and never pretends to be what he is not. He knows he is a louse, and repeats this fact often and takes abuse from others about the same without reply or response in defense.
In the end, Rabbit manages to distance himself from everyone: his wife, his in-laws, his parents and his sister. He reminds me a lot of Salinger's "Cather In The Rye" Holden Caulfield. But, unlike Holden, Rabbit has looks, charisma, moxie and appeal. He is not a child infuriated by teenage angst. But, he is as hopeless as Caulfield, and maybe more tragic as he can never "grow up."
This is neither light reading nor a happy story. Like many novels of its time, it is ponderous about how the American Dream may not be a dream, but rather could be a nightmare from which we must run. And, so it is for Rabbit - the title is most appropriate.
Book Review: Surprisingly Insightful
Summary: 5 Stars
Considering Updike was 28 years old when he wrote this book, it has to be considered one of the most promising books any up and coming author has ever laid at the feet of the literate public. As much as I enjoy Tom Robbins, who graced us with Another Roadside Attraction at roughly the same age, this stands above that as a precursor to what would come later. Rabbit, Run is a great start to what turned out to be an outstanding writing career.
The book deals with middle America, the loneliness and sexual frustration which exists there. This seems a common theme for Updike, as his book Villages, written 45 years before this, addresses many of the same topics, albeit with a somewhat different twist in a similar but not identical setting. One thing we can assume is that Updike subscribes to the adage to write what you know. But then he also penned the Witches Of Eastwick as well as his latest, Terrorist. So take that for what it's worth.
In any event, Rabbit, Run deals with a Twenty something Everyman unhappy in life and unhappy in marriage, living unhappily in a blue collar Pennsylvania town. Once the star of his high school basketball team, Rabbit has not gone on to bigger and brighter things. More accurately, Rabbit is mired in a rut, burdened with the every day slump many in the same situation find themselves in. To escape this rut, he does as the title suggests. He runs.
The running is dealt with brilliantly in the pages. Human tragedy, frailty, emotion - all are covered here. The reader is squeezed through the wringer as we rise and fall with Rabbit's actions, his decisions, and his ultimate cowardess. From his wife, to another, back to his wife, then away, there is nothing for Rabbit to do, nothing he knows how to do, but run to escape his misery. Behind him, nothing remains but a path of destruction.
This book is a brilliant example of required American literature. Given the plight of society, this book - which is now 46 years old - is no less accurate than the day it was written. As we move to the later half of the book, the pages turn faster, even though they're often devoid of dialog and thick with narrative. Updike brings magic to these pages and to the actions of the Everyman Rabbit, who does not fancy himself an Everyman at all, but as unique from everyone he meets.
This is a complete book, in my opinion worthy of every accolade ever heaped upon it. While it is an old book by today's standard, it is every bit worth the read. I greatly look forward to picking up the next in the Rabbit books, Rabbit Redux.
Book Review: Still running after all these years
Summary: 4 Stars
The first Updike book I've read, and it made me want to read more. Never having heard of Updike's myth, I had very few preconceptions. I found Updike's style entrancing, powerful, beautiful.If you need to like the characters in a story in order to enjoy a book, don't read this book. If you need to read about characters who reflect your moral beliefs, don't read this book. Updike's style takes the ordinary everyday (many reviewers here have noted the mundaneness of the plot), takes the subtle evanescing experiences of life, and crystallises them, slows them down, so we can see, ponder, wonder, re-examine. Updike neither condones nor condemns any character in this story: each of them is described in a way that reveals or suggests the mystery and wonder (not necessarily wonderful!) of the universe that is a human being. Most of the characters have little self-awareness, with protagonist Rabbit having the least. Yet Rabbit has a very alert instinct that can sense attitudes and intentions behind the words and movements of others. Abandoning his prostitute companion, Rabbit returns to his wife, and contritely stays with his wife's parents while his wife is having their 2nd baby in hospital. The in-laws are glad Rabbit has returned yet still censure him in their hearts for having left in the first place. Updike describes the atmosphere in the house as a shifting in the furniture and the air to make a space where Harry can fit in, if he makes himself very small. This is how Rabbit lives: he sense things instinctively but rarely questions whether what he is doing is right or wrong. He can't, his instincts are too strong. He feels good when things "click": when he nets a perfect basket, when he hits a perfect drive in golf. When things don't go his way, he feels uncomfortable, trapped; his disappointment is instantaneous.
Despite Rabbit's unpleasant character, the dilemmas he faces are common to many (as are those of his wife and Ruth, the prostitute he shacks up with for a while): what should he do about his wife's drinking? And about his own distaste for her drunkenness? About his wife's untidiness and the distaste this arouses in Harry? Should Ruth tell Harry she's pregnant with his child? Will this make him want to stay, or run? Is the woman who invites him in flirting with him? Or is he misreading the signs? No answers are provided, rather we just see Rabbit living out his life instinctively, and while we see the mess this leads him into, I felt sad when Rabbit returned to his wife. It was like watching a wild thing returning to its cage.
Book Review: Where's the payoff?
Summary: 3 Stars
I've wanted to read Updike for a while and 'Rabbit, Run' is my first foray. It's clear from the beginning that this isn't a novel of the casual-reading variety that will allow your eyes to dance across rapidly turning pages. It doesn't pull you in like that. Updike has a gift for descriptive prose (in fact that's what you're going to get throughout the novel) and as such you have to invest time and effort to absorb and immerse yourself into the whole of it. By committing and submitting yourself to this narrative you allow Updike to use his primary vehicle for relating his characters.
The prose can be challenging, especially at first, like listening to a foreigner trying to speak English, you have to shift gears and give yourself time to attune to the flow and pattern of this delivery. As such, I viewed the approximately first 30 pages as a disembodied, boastful and self-serving exercise in prose designed to show off the prowess of a clever writer as opposed to the delight encountered upon finding a novel that has an ability to grab you right away and immediately begin advancing the story. The descriptive text can be numbing and I catch myself reading individual words and individual sentences, focusing on the wordplay instead of absorbing the character and story. I force patience in myself and as the characters and style become more familiar the verbosity of prose begins to feel less burdensome.
If you're the type of person whose heart sinks at the sight of a paragraph that extends a page or more, and there are definitely a few of those in here, then this book is probably not for you. But it's not just that the paragraphs can be (and feel) long, rather it's the feeling that each paragraph and each descriptive little nugget within seems to relate a quality or feeling of grotesqueness and distortion, and the longer the paragraph the longer you're submerged, held under, gasping for breath. Some might say 'that's the point, to be unsettled' and I can understand this argument but the story is filled primarily with this manner of textual undertow, and, combined with the accompanying tragic characters (even the children are made to feel tragic), the reader is pulled relentlessly into an unsatisfying, spiraling morass. At the end, characters' positions may change but the changes are slight and circumstantial at best (not dictated by realization or self-determination) leaving the reader to ponder only the lack of growth, reward, justice, and ultimately payoff.
Book Review: Dull as dishwater, pretentious, unimaginative, and utterly boring
Summary: 1 Stars
This novel brought tears to my eyes....of boredom and disgust !
I can't believe that they have been touting this book as one of the greatest of American literature. It is about a twenty-something guy who is married with a son. He used to be a star basketball player and now, caught in a love-hate marriage and a dead-end job, the banality and drabness of his life is getting to him.
Interesting so far, isn't it ? But Updike makes a mess of a promising plot. Here is what happens....our hero decides to run away from his family, his job, his friends, everything......he gets into the car and intends to drive someplace far away. Ah, one thinks....a great American road trip is in order.....but no such luck. He returns to his town the same night, settles down with a prostitute, and when his wife is about to deliver a baby, goes back to her, again gets tired of her, goes back to the prostitute but is not sure if he should abandon his wife, and runs again.
Sounds stupid ? It is.
And the writing is tortuously slow and maddeningly muddy. It seems that Updike wrote this novel to please his literature teachers who would prefer form over substance. He writes these long paragraphs without punctuation apparently trying to describe and mirror the random thoughts of his characters....trying to evoke a stream-of-consciousness feel about these passages but fails miserably. Such passages only make the book even more tedious and ambiguous.
Here is an example of what has been called Updike's 'Crystal-clear prose:'
"And further inside, so ghostly it comes to him last, hangs a jagged cloud, the star of an explosion, whose center is uncertain in refraction but whose arms fly from the core of pallor as straight as long eraser-marks diagonally into all planes of the cube."
And if you guys want an example of Updike's cute punctuation, here are the last few words of the novel:
"....he runs. Ah: runs. Runs."
Updike, like all bad literary-wannabe authors, keep describing the weather, the food, the scenery with great, tear-inducing meticulousness but doesn't develop his stereotypical characters even one bit during the course of the book.
This garbage is not worth anybody's time and is a good example of why such so-called literature doesn't interest the masses. This is pretentious writing without even the slightest hint of talent or creativity. Two thumbs-down !