Rabbit, Run
by John Updike
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Book Reviews of Rabbit, Run
Book Review: Updike, Run
Summary: 4 Stars
Updike certainly turns out the anti-hero in Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, a misogynistic 26-year old ex-basketball player who hasn't grown up. Love, for Harry, ebbs away with every ejaculation and is restored only when his resevoirs fill up. Yet women fall for him, forgive him, hate him and hate themselves for their vulnerability, while Harry's foil, the Rev Jack Eccles, who is truly on a mission to save souls, is despised by his wife Lucy. And yet it was the Eccles's of this world, the organizational men (and women), who built post-war America. I wonder how this book was received when it first came out?
Updike was also lucky to be writing this novel before the literary writing classes and editors became more established in the land. The book is loaded with the how-not-to's that contemporary literary courses teach us: word repetitions, tense changes, sudden point-of-view shifts, first person/third person confusion, unecessary adverbs,run-on sentences, lack of punctuation, multiple pronouns in a sentence refering to different characters and confusing the reader...the list goes on. Some scenes run forever and Updike is [...] (pardon the pun) on detail, even when he goes to great pains to disguise the "unatural" sex acts that Rabbit demands of his women. And yet he was able to hold my attention with his snappy dialogue, with dramatic scenes such as Janice's alcoholic misadventure with her baby, and with dysfunctional characters such as Harry and Jack.
I got the impression that,like his protagonist, Updike was running free of his contemproaries, the critics and the editors, writing this book and determined to preserve his distinct voice (whether we like it or not). Perhaps the title of this book should have been "Updike, Run".
Shane Joseph www.shanejoseph.com
Book Review: One man's struggle toward adulthood in 50s America.
Summary: 5 Stars
As "Rabbit, Run" opens, it is the late 50s and Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is eight years out of high school, where he was a basketball hero. He is in a marriage that is heading toward the rocks with much speed.After reading this novel you may not like Rabbit, but he will have led you on an emotional and spiritual journey that will leave you asking many questions -- questions about the book as well as questions about yourself.
Rabbit has a limited intellectual and emotional range, so why would Updike expend his considerable talent in detailing the life of so common a person? For one thing, Rabbit's experience as an ordinary man is more typical than that of someone on the tails of the bell curve and this allows Updike better to capture the spirit of the times. There is perhaps no better author than Updike in capturing the zeitgeist, and "Rabbit, Run" showcases this ability, as the subsequent books in the Rabbit tetralogy illustrate to a! n even greater extent.
We are at ground zero watching Rabbit struggle with aging, religion, sexuality (particularly sexuality), nature, and the trade-offs between freedom and attachment, and rebellion and conformity. In witnessing Rabbit wrestle with these big issues in his blundering, but persistent, way, we come to understand the commonality of the human experience.
Updike's inventive and flowing prose is well displayed here. Parts of the narrative are pure poetry. The dialog is brisk and gritty and the sex scenes are graphic, especially for a mainstream novel published in 1960. The writing style itself helps create mood -- lyrical when describing a flower garden and so edgy during the climatic scene that it makes you sweat.
This is a marvelous book. That is was written by a man in his 20s is astonishing.
Book Review: the story of a coward...
Summary: 4 Stars
this is not an easy book to like. harry " rabbit " angstrom is a coward who takes the easy way out, abandoning his pregnant wife and kid and moving in with a prostitute. but when you really get into the story and get the details of his life ( his relationships with his in-laws, his parents and his wife )you understand why he hates his life. his parents wanted him to live a blue collar life. rabbit has higher goals, but he doesn't know what they are. he begins the story working as a magipeeler salesman, then later works for his father-in-law, as a used car salesman, and ends up hating the business and what he represents. the only reason he married janice was because he got her pregnant and he had to. back in those days, when a guy got a girl in trouble, he had to keep her honest, whether he liked it or not; people married and stayed married usually for the sake of their kids. with ruth, rabbit finds the joy he could never had with janice, because he never felt he had to be obligated to her. ruth likes rabbit because he makes her feel good about herself and he doesn't care that she is plump. their relationship is volatile, yet out of the inferno they find true love. updike writes in a style that's part poetry/part stream-of-consciousness. it's hard to believe he actually writes like this on purpose, beacuse it seems trippy and spontaneous, yet it works. the best passages in the book that showcase his fluid style is when he describes rabbit and ruth's first sexual encounter and later, when janice goes on a drunken bender. it's not the brady bunch, you'll either love it or hate it. i don't think updike really wanted anyone to love rabbit, but wanted to show what happens when people live their lives for others and not for themselves.Book Review: Compassionate realism: a young man reaches the end of youth
Summary: 5 Stars
What makes "Rabbit, Run" such a staggering masterpiece is -- paradoxically -- its very ordinariness.The novel is about a former high school basketball star, now married, with a family, who is finding his adult life claustrophobic. He misses his youth -- the adrenaline rush of sports, the sense that life is full of possibilities. He doesn't know what to do about it. He tries to make some kind of change, with what's left of his youthful energy. He's self-centered, but he's also a dreamer.
The book is sad, in that it offers no "solution" to the frustration of leaving youth behind. But it's also reassuring and poignant, because the theme is so universal.
Updike manages to keep this apparently ordinary story interesting without being philosophical or tedious. His vivid, compassionate descriptions of characters and their neighborhoods are phenomenal. He has a way of illuminating the inner workings of American optimism (sports heroes, suburban consumer culture) without looking down on it. In fact, he seems to cherish it, focusing his lens on the unspoken dreams that make our society and our personalities what we are.
This book -- along with its sequels -- is one of the great pieces of American literary art.
PS If that's not enough to grab you, read it for Updike's incomparable descriptions of lovemaking. Arrestingly specific and vivid. Only a handful of authors can actually describe sex -- I mean, really describe it -- and show the way people's personalities are played out in bed just like they are anywhere else. The main character is a charismatic, self-absorbed yearner, in search of his lost youth at all times -- even during sex. In Updike's world, sex isn't pornographic -- it's part of life.
Book Review: The Sin of Moral Irresponsibility
Summary: 5 Stars
The novel is great: well thought-out plot, psychological profundity in portrayal of its characters and their relations, language splendor and richness of images and similes are hallmarks of the oeuvre of John Updike, one of the best writers of the century. The use of present tense in the novel makes its readers not onlookers but participants of the tragical events.The author does not despise his main character Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom but tries to depict impartially and understand him. Rabbit, a man who once was a first-rate basketball player, in the beginning of his mature life becomes an apprehensive son, indifferent father, inattentive husband, lustful but callous lover. He thinks only about himself, he is ready to run from any obstacle or trouble (his wife, his lover or any person who does not want to do what Harry desires), 'he doesn't care who he hurts or how much'. Gratifying his selfishness and feebleness in solving ethical problems, he leaves behind only disenchantment, pain and even death. His former lover fairly tells him: 'You're Mr.Death himself. You're not just nothing, you're worse than nothing. You're not a rat, you don't stink, you're not enough to stink.'
One of the main characters of the novel is a priest, there are a lot of church-goers (including Rabbit himself) on its pages, they speak about God but do not have faith. Their sanctimony corrupts people. Even such unbelievers as Ruth, a call girl and Rabbit's lover, and Lucy, priest's willful wife, look more sincere than their pious milieu (Lucy about Rabbit: 'If he's a Christian thank God I'm not one').
So, who is Rabbit? A monster? No, the author tells us, he is just an ordinary modern man devoided of moral responsibility.