Rabbit, Run
Critique • Quotes
First editionFirst publication
1960
Literature form
Novel
Genre
Literary
Writing language
English
Author's country
United States
Length
Approx. 102,500 words
In praise of running away—and back
John Updike is most known for Rabbit, Run but it's not his best or best-reviewed novel. It's not even his best or best-reviewed novel in the book series it kicks off. That would be the sequel, Rabbit Redux, the one critics have called a masterpiece. Or possibly the third or fourth book in the series, Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, which both won prestigious literary awards.
Yet Rabbit, Run, introducing us to Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, made the biggest public impact when it was published in 1960 and still seems to be Updike's most read work. Why may be a bit of a mystery. Despite the endearing nickname, Angstrom is an unappealing character—petty, snivelling, self-centred, unsympathetic, without enough charming features to make even a decent antihero.
Maybe Rabbit, Run has been popular because it gave voice to people suffering through a certain cultural malaise of the 1950s which has continued to some degree through to today. The protagonist is part of a post-war generation living a relatively comfortable, middle-class existence, but he finds suburban life stultifying, his marriage unsatisfying, his sales job without purpose.
Too young to have fought in the recent global conflict and too old to be part of the emerging youth culture, Rabbit is aimless. He survives in a vague state of angst (hence the surname?), reliving his long-faded glory days as a high school basketball star.
Home and away games
So one night he runs. Drives away from his home in Pennsylvania, his family and responsibilities. Away from it all. Far, far away, into the southern United States.
And immediately he gets lost and drives all the way back.
He can't escape so easily. He has various social and sexual escapades (seemingly part of every Updike novel) and eventually returns to his wife. For a while. Nothing ever getting resolved. Lots of coming and going. Leaving and reconciling. More sordid sex. Pregnancies. A birth. Deaths. A lot of griping and harassing among the relatives. And did I mention sex?
The most generous analyses of Rabbit's behaviour hold that he's searching for something missing in his life. Some have said it's God. Discussions with a priest named Eccles have been added to inject some Christian apologetics into the story—unconvincingly.
Some have brought up the cliché that Rabbit's looking for America. Or rather looking for the sure moralities of America in the fifties and the less certain morality threatening to replace them as the sixties begin.
Most obviously, Angstrom is hoping to recover his youth, more specifically the certainties of his youth in that mid-century decade when a fine future seemed to stretch out before him. He would never have to do much to win this future. It was to be given to him, thanks to his place in the world and some god-given talents. He never had to grow up, to develop mature relationships, to strive for anything. Just show up. Or not.
Critics have drawn a line from Sinclair Lewis's character of Babbitt in the early 1920s through modern American literature to Updike's character of Rabbit. These two figures share more than a similarity of names. Both flee their relatively comfortable middle-class existence and flounder around in rebellious lifestyles, only to give in to pressures to conform and return to the fold.
The clueless male
When I first heard of this Babbitt-Rabbit comparison I rejected it. The novels the characters inhabit are so different—in setting and writing style. Babbitt is written with its creator's greater political sophistication and distancing satirical eye. Babbitt's disaffection is sparked by questioning of the American Dream. Rabbit's reactions, however, seem driven more by instinctual urges, related in a claustrophobic present tense. You never get the idea Rabbit or his author has a clue what's going on with him. He's even free of the kind of Babbitt-like rationalizations that give his behaviour a veneer of justification.
But these differences just go to show variations in how a particular phenomenon is handled by two authors of widely separated eras: Middle American men cast adrift in the supposed land of plenty.
During Updike's tenure as the chronicler of small-city, bourgeois dread, it's a theme taken up increasingly by female writers focusing on the unfulfilment of middle-class women. Novels, movies and television related the stories of wives and housewives struggling to liberate themselves from traditional roles and oppressive relationships. Their stories are of self-discovery and of finding new identities as independent women. Compared to their experiences, the grievances of Rabbit and his unawaring ilk can seem paltry.
Not that the story of men losing their moorings in the social upheavals of the latter twentieth century is not legitimate subject matter for exploring. Updike and other prominent male writers would continue that exploration, though how they handled it would evolve with the changing times. Some of which we can see in the continuation of Updike's Angstrom series.
— Eric
Critique • Quotes
