Rabbit, Run
by John Updike
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Book Reviews of Rabbit, Run
Book Review: So mixed
Summary: 4 Stars
*spoiler alert*
The reader who usually dislikes books with clogged arteries from too much description (so, 4 instead of 5 stars), might enjoy reading Rabbit's story, and understand his erratic mindset a bit when Janice turns out to be a vapid drunk and mama's girl...
... when all of a sudden the reader might be knee-capped about 50 pages from the end, upon Rabbit leaving Janice for the second time.
Updike gets into Janice's head then, and the way he describes the terror and desolation of the mommy abandoned with babies -- very, very real. The anger, the pain and worry for the children, the hemorrhaging of confidence and capabilities, the unanswered questions, the shut door and the silence, all terribly true.
But of course most abandoned mommies do not become drunks and everyone survives more or less intact. And years later, when all is more or less forgiven and forgotten, the reader might happen to be in a public place and reading this part of the book and a wound reopens as if new, you might start crying, and it is not a pretty crying, it is the crying of the lost, of the abandoned, of the forgotten, of the rejected. The rage, the hopeless way the reader with bad old memories might appear will cause those nearby to move away, to ask cautiously "are you okay?" and the reader has to marshal the forces of survival back up and say, "yeah, fine".
Don't say you haven't been warned.
Book Review: American anti-hero
Summary: 4 Stars
Harry `Rabbit' Angstrom is an anti-hero for 1960s America and for modern times: self-centred, irresponsible, sybaritic, pusillanimous. Rabbit is an ex-college basketball player. He is spoilt, though he does have an intermittently functioning conscience. And he decides his layabout wife and his job as a potato-peeler salesman are not what he expected from life: such is the premise of Rabbit, Run, a self-contained novel that became the first piece of a four-part series.
Rabbit, Run brushes aside money to suggest sport and religion are what American mores are about. For despite its premise, the book soon parts with beat-generation road-novel stereotypes. What interests Updike isn't so much that giddy ride into the unknown, but what happens back home, the tug-of-war of flight and gravity more than flight itself. Rabbit, Run thus resembles a darker version of the movie The Graduate more than On The Road. Rabbit becomes involved with a loose woman as he is chased about by a local pastor. This makes for a slow, sometimes un-engaging middle third of the story, especially since Updike's characters are meant as realistic more than appealing. Nevertheless, the novel picks up pace towards the end. And if it has mildly aged since it was written - one scene, involving fellatio, was evidently expected to shock and was indeed censored in the first edition - Rabbit, Run remains highly readable and interesting.
Book Review: Rabbit can't handle it!
Summary: 3 Stars
This is a quirky little novel about a young husband and father who simply decides he doesn't want to deal with the complications of his life anymore. What does he do? Gets in the car and drives. Just drives. No plan, no particular destination...just "away". Turns out the plan (or lack of it) is ill-conceived. After driving all night, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom turns his car around and drives back into his little Pennsylvania town. He spends the rest of the novel avoiding his (alcoholic) pregnant wife, taking up with women of questionable moral character and having chat sessions with the local priest who's trying to talk him into the right thing: returning to his family.
Rabbit is a local high school basketball hero, but he's become dissatisfied with his loss of luster in the early adult years when he's nothing more than ordinary...ordinary and saddled with too much adult responsibility. He's a bit of a cypher. His dialogue is short and clipped and he seems a bit of a dunce. The world baffles him. He's not particularly likeable.
Of the two novels I've read in the series (this and Rabbit Redux), this is the less interesting of the two. Rabbit is simply not fleshed out enough in this initial offering. There's not enough of him "there" to get interested in. It's not until "Rabbit Redux" that Harry's life becomes far more fascinating.
Book Review: A return to Rabbit
Summary: 5 Stars
I probably read "Rabbit, Run" when I was in my twenties, about fifteen years after the novel was first published, in 1960. Since then, I've read many Updike novels, included all four in the "Rabbit" Series. Recently---rest in peace, John Updike---I read it again, my way of putting flowers on his grave, I guess. I wondered if it would hold up. It did. I'd forgotten that so many passages are written in stream of consciousness, and I'd guess that readers who prefer more straightforward narration will not care much for "Rabbit, Run." I'd forgotten entirely the wry and affectionate portrait of Reverend Eccles, whose ministrations to Rabbit are for naught, and it was a pleasure to catch this on the second reading. I remembered Ruth and Janice very well, and probably had more sympathy for them than I did a few decades ago. The city of Mt. Judge, described with the clarity of a photograph and with the eye of a painter, reminded me all over again of how lovely Updike renders the most humble details of everyday life. And Rabbit? Well, he's as appealing as ever in his misery, although returning to him after knowing how his life turns out (the successful car dealership, etc. in the sequels) made him seem less lost. Don't read this novel just because it's famous. Read it for one of the truest portraits of mid-twentieth century American life you'll ever find.Book Review: Running from Reality and Responsibility
Summary: 4 Stars
Harry a.k.a., Rabbit Angstrom, in this first installment of John Updike's tetrology, is a case where fallen human nature displays itself in actions and attitudes reinforced by a number of factors. The first is the family upbringing and the kind of theology one grew up with. Here Updike alludes that theology matters. We see this from Rabbit's interaction with Jack Ecles, an Episcopalian minister who despite a sincere desire to restore his broken relationship with his wife and in-laws, fails miserably in his efforts due to a defective view of man, sin, God and atonement. The people Rabbit grew up with are also a big influence that makes him the person that he is; his buddies in the army and his high-school basketball coach Marty Tothero. All these factors seem to work together to mold Rabbit into an irresponsible person who can't stand the painful realities and responsibilities in personal relationships, specifically in marriage that tragically leads to the death of his baby. I don't view the characters in this story derisively; Rabbit, his wife Janice, his parents and in-laws, Marty, Ruth, and Jack, but with sympathy since everyone is liable to similar predicaments. From a Christian perspective, they underscore the need of the gospel of Jesus Christ that deals head-on with the fundamental problem with humanity, namely, sin.