Rabbit, Run
by John Updike
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Book Reviews of Rabbit, Run
Book Review: Rabbit, Run
Summary: 4 Stars
`Rabbit, Run' is the first instalment in Updike's four part Rabbit series and it follows Harry `Rabbit' Angstrom as he goes through a mini mid life crisis and leaves his pregnant wife when he feel trapped by the mundanity of suburban life. This book has a main character that is hard not to like, even though he behaves in a pretty reprehensible way and it portrays the cloying nature of some marriages and the day to day grind of working life very well. You really understand why Rabbit ran and his behaviour throughout the book, although it has to be said he is a very indecisive chap! I came to Updike via his short stories and whilst I enjoyed this novel I have to say I enjoy his short stories more. This seemed to lack the melancholy and moving narrative of his short stories, although the writing here is just as stunning and his turn of phrases and descriptions are amazing, they just moved me less than his other shorter pieces. This may well be personal preference. After reading this I want to get the other `rabbit' novels to see where Rabbit's life goes and no doubt once you read this you will want to do the same. There is also an afterword by the author exploring the writing of this and the other Rabbit novels and if you are unfamiliar with them some of the points raised may go over your head, but it makes for informative reading never the less. This is a great introduction to Updike's novels, but if this fails to move you don't give up, but try one of his outstanding sort story collections instead. Whichever you read I guarantee you will be impressed.Book Review: Interesting book
Summary: 4 Stars
Rabbit, Run is one of Updike's famous books, in which he describes a 26-year-old's midlife crisis. A former high-school basketball star, Harry ("Rabbit") Angstrom realizes that his life is in a rut when he plays against some youths. It also dawns on him that his marriage is also lifeless and empty -- his pregnant wife is an alcoholic and his job is insipid.Seeing nothing for him, Rabbit's solution to the problem is to run away. Living in Pennsylvania, he drives down to West Virginia and then back to help clear his mind. He meets his former coach who introduces him to Ruth, a prostitute. Rabbit and her have a passionate relationship. This unconventional situation only rooks him into a new routine -- one that he feels he must escape from. Despite help from the local minister, Rabbit feels that people are trying to con him into a pattern into life -- one that he isn't happy with.
I couldn't make up my mind whether to root for Rabbit or look at him as a sorry individual. He is struggling for an identity, but every time he escapes, he leaves disaster and grief behind him. In addition, Updike asks the question, what moral responsibilities do people have versus their personal freedom and indentity? Updike's writing is strong and often times poetic. However, I found some of the symbolism and ephanies a little hard to grasp (even after several rereads). Some of the tense scenes were also written abstractly. This book is also not for children; there are many sexual situations.
Book Review: A Rabbit without a hole.
Summary: 3 Stars
What this patently American story of a young man refusing to grow up lacks in substance, it covers with prose. Rabbit Angstrom is a former high school basketball star whose glory days are in the past. Rabbit is a poor man's Gatsby, a man of small means and abstract dreams too large for his mind to handle. He becomes prey to the dangerous and rebellious tradition of self-exaltation - Raskolnikov without a scheme and an aim. Rabbit suffers from an early onset of mid-life crisis - one so confounding he does not know what he does or why he does it. He runs away from his family, but he can't even leave the small-town milieu. His escape is localized and small-scale, perhaps admissive of personal limitations and insignificance. Updike doesn't quite denigrate small-town America - he clearly has appreciative affection for his small town life (though he often gets a little too cathartic with his self-assurances of religious truths).
Updike's language is a slow progression of action and aimless colloquial triteness with interspersed moments of pulsing, raw but poignant stream-of-consciousness - that's when Rabbit is really on the run. In the eventlessness of small town life Updkike makes even scandals look like events of mundane existence. There is a pervasive lack of excitement; even Rabbit's moments of self-awareness, or rather its beginnings, are lethargic and ultimately ineffectual. Rabbit's rebellion is against his own long-exhausted role and purpose. He is a "flower stalk."
Book Review: America's version of "The Stranger"
Summary: 5 Stars
Besides the usual laudatory remarks about this Updike work, (which are all important and valid) i.e., preternatural description, dialogue, sense of place, character, etc., I think it is important to consider the book within the early 1960's milieu of existentialist literature. What makes Rabbit, Run a revelatory book is because we see an Everyman who is not merely alienated from 'God' but from everyone else. Rabbit sees himself as an isolated isotope in the world even though he is externally a typical representative of mid-America. When he looks at his home town from the hill, he senses the isolation of all the lives across the valley--and I believe Updike is hinting at the fact that we all feel like outsiders to a world full of 'insiders', but in feeling that isolation are stuck in its irony. 'Rabbit, Run' unmasks the 'hail fellow, well met' facade of American post-WWII culture as we see a man running from himself and perhaps running until the end, three books later. We see the sadness behind the false smile in Rabbit and by extension perhaps we can learn a bit about our culture whether it is the fulsome friendliness of morning talk shows or the upbeat nature of rah-rah politics. 'Rabbit, Run' is the ultimate expression of the plight of the minority--because we are all in the minority. The only difference is that some identify with the oppressor; others with the oppressed. The title of the book should clearly indicate which way Harry Angstrom version goes.Book Review: A lovely book, apart from the plot and the characters.
Summary: 3 Stars
Updike has a truly singular gift as a writer - he can chronicle the small pleasures and frustrations that we get from life's minutiae in gorgeous prose that's a delight to read, and makes one want to try to recapitulate the inner lives of his characters within oneself by walking around with a permanent sense of wonder. One would like to think, though, that a person could somehow manage to pull this off without becoming a totally self-absorbed, frivolous clown like Rabbit Angstrom. And all the golden epiphanies in the world can't disguise this fact about Updike's protagonist. I mean, this is a guy who runs out on his drunken wife, leaving her to look after a newborn infant unassisted, because she won't have nasty sex with him. As well as being a heel, he's also a crushing bore - his early mid-life crisis is just too predictable and timeworn a phenomenon to be made new for us by being described "from the inside." As a result this book falls into the rather suspect category of novels that Raymond Williams identified as "the fiction of special pleading." And the jury is not convinced.
The solution to this sort of problem that comes up with a style of writing like Updike's has been discovered by his most devoted apostle (and to my mind, a far superior writer) Nicholson Baker, whose books utterly forego the conventional aims of narrative and sensibly stick to the minutiae. If you have an appetite for this sort of stuff, try out his novels _Vox_ and _The Fermata_.