John Updike - Rabbit Run

Hello,

John Updike is some kind of a legend and Rabbit, Run is the first story I have read. in fact it is his first novel as well.

It is story based in Brewer, Pennysylvania, USA.

It is a story unwinding itself in 1959.

It is a story of Harry Rabbit Angstrom, who has had his good days as a a legendary high school basketball star. He realizes suddenly, after a chance basketball outing with kids that he is tied down in a suburban marriage to a woman who is alcoholic and has an achingly prosaic career as a kitchen gadget salesman.

He gets out of his house to get back the car and his kid and ends up abandoning his pregant wife to drive off ambiguously toward Florida. After reaching West Virginia, he changes his mind and decides to return to Brewer, Pennsylvania.

He struggles with his thoughts and ends up falling into the lap of a prostitute through his old coach who himself is a good for nothing drunkard by then.

It turns out that Rabbit has been to war and has come back to see his childhood sweetheart married to someone else. These are just mentioned in the passing.

He wants no responsibility but is also a scared cat trying to be as close to an anchor as possible. He gets bored easily and after impregnating the prostitute gets back to his wife when she gives birth to their daughter.

The fact that his misdemenour is forgiven so easily emboldens him and he also eyes the wife of the priest who has tried to bring him back to his family. He vacillates between the whore and the wife as each outdoes the other in being nice to him for all his cruelty and finally runs again.

Rabbit Angstrom, despite his grotesque immaturity and narcissism, is a very real character and you tend to hate, like and laugh at him as he goes through his idiotic inexplicable ego trips and keeps getting away with it as people seem to be too willing to forgive.

The prose is sometimes laborious as we get to know the roads and surroundings of the area although they do not seem to impact the story in any particular way. John Updike also uses an endless streams of adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases, and relative clauses and the exposition becomes compounded and bombastic when describing a small building, a backyard or a skyline. Such pages we turn to flip over quickly.

It was a revolutionary book at that time as the use of words like sex, penis, etc was taboo. It is reflected very well through Rabbit who wants oral sex with Ruth, the whore he stays with when he runs from his wife, but is not able to put it into words.

John Updike clearly brings to life the life of the 50's and 60's where frustration is growing, the white man is dominating relationships and women are turning into doormats as personal gratification becomes more important than family life and values.

It would have been a much much bettter book if the boring landscape descriptions had been edited.

Happy reading,

Manoj