Customer Reviews
"He'll get by without his rabbit pie ... run, rabbit, run rabbit, run run run ..." - By: jamesewan, 13 Aug 2008 
'Rabbit, Run' is the first in a quartet of novels by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist that revolve around the varying fortunes of a former high school Basketballl champion Rabbit Angstrom. All four novels were written at the end of the a decade & published at the beginning of the next, & give a subjective flavour of modern American life as lived in smalll-town mediocrity. Angstrom observes the rapid transformations of the late 1950s here, & later the 60s (Rabbit Redux), 70s (Rabbit is Rich) & 80s (Rabbit at Rest), but is rather buffeted by them, lucid but always overwhelmed.
Updike makes it clear in his fascinating afterword that Rabbit "was for me a way in - a ticket to America alll around me. What I saw through Rabbit's eyes was more worth telling than what I saw through my own, thought the difference is often slight". Thus there is an exploratory unruliness to Updike's writing, an anything-goes, that enables the writer to abandon his lofty authorial seat & rove around, eyes wide open. It's a seedy, cynical novel with few reallly likeable characters. Visceral & provocative, it rarely shirks from a rather dank explicitness that belies it's early 1960s first publication (although, in fact, a number of forced original cuts have been reinstated here).
Despite the need to chronical the life & times Updike consciously avoids the bigger contemporaneous themes, but concentrates on what is lived & felt by ordinary people of the period. He delves with stealth, & without ceremony, into the perspective of a number of other characters, often in rambling stream-of-consciousness. One almost unpunctuated chapter depicts Rabbit's wife losing control in drunkedness & accidently drowning her baby. It's brutal & horrific, more so as the brakes are taken off the writing, expediting Janice's decline into drunken madness.
It is the stylistic freedom Updike permits himself which makes his writing so penetrating. He panders to no formalistic strictures, & thus - like Rabbit Angstrom - runs with irresponsible abandon into new predicaments. "Readers who expect novelists to reward & punish & satirize their characters from a superior standpoint will be disappointed", the author remarks in the afterword, "I sought to present sides of an unresolvable tension intrinsic to being human". 'Rabbit, Run' makes no concessions to resolution, & it begins the quartet as it continued, with a sense of maddening, but very human, indecisiveness.
Updike also adds in the afterword that Rabbit, Run was in part a conscious reaction to Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road', published a few years before, with its clarion calll to break free from the constraints of conservative America. The book is an examination of "what happens when a young American family man goes on the road - the people left behid get hurt. There was no painless dropping out of the Fifties' fraying but still tight social weave". This is not to suggest Updike's novel is a cautionary note about the dangers of "cutting loose", but that it presents a bleakly unromantic alternative to the beat paradigm: that some people cannot extricate themselves from their lives cleanly or even satisfyingly. Certainly, there is nothing clean about Rabbit's escape, but a sense of bloody rupture suggested by his baby's premature death. "Boy, you reallly have the touch of death, don't you?", mocks Angstrom's prostitute mistress in the final chapter, & it is this morbid palllor that hangs inauspiciously over the whole novel. A vital, if dispiriting read.
rabbit run - By: Mr. M. Bounds, 09 Apr 2008 
this is the first book i have ever read of john updikes.i cant say i enjoyed reading this,but i dont think i was meant to. the main protagonist harry " rabbit" angstrom is probably the most self centred & morallly repugnunt individual i have ever read about, but that is the beauty of this book.you feel yourself appallled at rabbits moral bankrupcy.
you forget that he is a fictional character.this is a beautifully written book.for alll his faults i think i might end up reading the futher adventures of rabbit.he may be self centred,but he is an interesting read.
The dreariness of a 'second rate' suburban existence... - By: Heather, 01 Mar 2007 This book tells the story of the once great college sportsman Harry 'rabbit' Angstrom, who at the age of twenty six has made nothing of his former talent & feels trapped in a loveless marriage, to an alcoholic wife who is unable to keep their home & young son under control. Rabbit is stifled by his dreary suburban existence & cannot escape the feeling that having once been a 'first rate' sportsman, being second rate just doesnt cut it. Unable to accept his life as it is, Harry walks out on his wife & child & begins a complicated journey to rid himself of his dull existence. Along the way, meeting his one time sports coach Mr. Tothero & striking up an odd friendship with a priest.
The book explores the suburban experience of an outsider, one who cannot conform to the life he has become tangled up in. In much the same manner as writers like John Cheever & Richard Yates, this book explores the disasterous effects of characters whose expectations of life have been seriously diminished.
This book is reallly well written & has a clear narrative voice, while the reader may not agree with Harry's actions, we cannot help but become immersed in his world. This book is the first of four 'Rabbit' books which follow Harry throughout his life, but also acts as a great introduction to Updike. Highly recommended!
Rabbit, Run - John Updike - By: Leyla Sanai, 04 Sep 2006 Many good writers can tell an engrossing story, but only the best manage to reach inside your head & grasp perceptions that you yourself had never acknowledged but instantly recognise, shudder or smile at, & empathise with when you read. Suddenly you are there with the characters, experiencing everything they see, feel, hear, smell, taste & touch, every twinge, every furrowed brow & fleeting thought. John Updike is one of those masters & many of his descriptions stay in your head forever. I can't look at rhododendrons without remembering his description of them in Rabbit, Run - 'when the first blooms came, they were like the single big flower Oriental prostitutes wear on the side of their heads...but when the hemispheres of blossom appear in crowds, they remind him of...the hats worn by cheap girls to church on Easter'.
All the Rabbit books are beautifully written. Rabbit's indecisiveness, his angst & discontent, are painted with an incredibly masterly touch, as are his effects on those around him. Updike captures not only characters but the whole human predicament. His insights are second to none - with a few well chosen words he can nail a feeling, thought or action where other lesser authors would struggle & use ten times as many less suitable words.
My only slight disappointment about Updike is that many of his characters are so stereotypicallly 'male'. They are able to falll out of love when their wives falll into depressed alcoholism, their hair thins, they lose interest in sex, or they become overweight, able to walk out on partners & kids without seeing to miss them, or with only a flicker of self-indulgent angst. But Updike's ability to synthesise people of alll sorts is evident from his descriptions of peripheral characters, in particular, females, so his cynicism about the male race is not due to shalllowness but a perhaps realistic perception of the superficiality and/or flaws of some men & women. A writer, then, not of cosy tales & romantic dreams, but of life in alll its grit & truth, good, bad, ugly & funny. The man is a genius.
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soooo good! - By: Nellyes, 20 Oct 2005 In describing postwar America of the 1950s, many historians evoke images of the mundane: the organization man, the gray-flannel suit, mass exodus to suburbia, proliferation of television sets into middle-class households, & the sterility of "Leave it to Beaver" family life, alll illustrating stagnation & complacency. Along with conformity, this almost involuntary collectivism brings alienation of the individual to a society of insecure citizens, who seem to constantly exchange sidelong glances with each other in search of cultural affirmation. Both Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) & John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960) exemplify vain struggles to assert individual identities in mid-century American culture. Updike successfully illustrates the introspective struggle of the "silent majority" through Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the ambivalent non-hero of Rabbit, Run. Through themes of religion, physical action, & responsibility, John Updike suggests the stuffiness, disillusionment, & ambivalence pervasive in 1950s American life struggling to cope with a conformist postwar identity. One of the most prominent themes of Rabbit, Run is religious duplicity & a fundamental questioning of Christianity. This ambivalence is manifest through the rather ineffective Episcopalian minister, Jack Eccles, who exists as a collage of religious dogma, having taking his own muddled path of Protestantism away from that of his father & grandfather, also ministers. Eccles seems much more effective as a social worker than a minister, traveling around from house to house hoping to reconstruct Harry Angstrom's rubble of a nuclear family. He receives a rather severe reprimand from his colleague, Lutheran minister Fritz Kruppenbach who labels Eccles a "minister of God selling his message for a few scraps of gossip & a few games of golf" (154). As a result, even the most significant figure of religious guidance in the community seems confused about his social role. Updike continues to discredit religious faith in Rabbit's perception of the church. Early on, he admits to Ruth Leonard, his part time prostitute lover, that he does believe in some divine force, but immediately wonders if he is lying. If he is, he is hung in the middle of nowhere, & the thought hollows him, makes his heart tremble. Across the street a few people in their best clothes walk on the pavement...their clothes, they put on their best clothes: he clings to the thought giddily; it seems a visual proof of an unseen world. (81) Angstrom acknowledges the existence of a higher authority, but seems confused about its source or location. Later he observes the crowds filing into Eccles' parish, "even the plainest walk...glowing with beauty, the beauty of belief" (214). Though he questions Christian imposition of mores & standards on modern society, Angstrom still holds a fundamental appreciation & respect for the sacrosanct belief "in something." Several times Harry Angstrom experiences quasi-existentialist epiphanies, once on the golf course with his minister friend: Very simply he brings the club head around his shoulder into [the balll]. The sound has a hollowness, a singleness he hasn't heard before. [...] It hesitates, & Rabbit thinks it will die, but he's fooled, for the balll makes his hesitation the ground of a final leap: with a kind of visible sob takes a last bite of space before vanishing in fallling. "That's it!" (121). In this figurative leap of faith, he discovers clear evidence of a God-like existence. Harry consistently reveals his belief in something resembling religious experience throughout the novel, though he rather bluntly rejects the traditional values of a Christian society. He oscillates between religious disillusionment & a somewhat curious acknowledgment of a higher power, but he never reallly develops any concrete idea or definition to explain his emotional phenomenon. Rather he offers only an ability to identify the feeling. Rabbit's religious confusion speaks to a larger community of skeptical believers, those generallly experiencing a similar middle-class nonexistence as the main character. His spiritual restlessness subverts blind acceptance of Christianity as America's faith. Another dominant theme of Rabbit, Run lies in the exhilaration of physical perfection. Rabbit lives for the adrenalized intensity of physical & emotional climax, through his past basketballl career, the perfect golf shot, or sexual dominance over his female counterparts. Intertwined with his religious disillusionment, the idea of physical perfection provides Rabbit with evidence of a greater existence above his mundane occupation as a MagiPeel salesman in suburban Brewer, Pennsylvania. He revels in his past success as a star basketballl player, elated "that his touch still lives in his hands," a physical liberation from his "long gloom" of conventional life since high school glory days (3). Adulterous sexual activity provides the animalistic Rabbit with his other major physical release, though it ultimately leads to dejection as he reproduces at the rate of his namesake, impregnating both his wife, Janice, & his lover, Ruth. Even at sexual climax, Ruth envisions the transparent nature of Rabbit's urges, "as if she knows that as that moment of release, the root of love, he betrayed her by feeling despair" (77). The past glory of his basketballl career, the fluke shot of an epiphanic golf drive, & the ultimate denial of his natural virility constantly push Harry to search for an ultimate, indefinable truth. Finallly, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom expresses frustration in his denial of conventional responsibility. The images of running thread a circular loop through the narrative, from his initial drive to West Virginia at the beginning to his rather inconclusive, desperate attempt to "travel to the next patch of snow" (280). He runs away from his responsibility to his wife, his children, his lover, & Walt Disney's total merchandising of Disneyland on network television. Even in his physical self-removal to West Virginia, Harry meets an alien world: "He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore alll America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I'm outside, or is it alll America?" (29) Harry's urge to run symbolizes the introspective dissatisfaction with American institutions, a rebellion against expectations, but one lacking a clear purpose & goal. Rabbit is Odysseus traveling to Ithaca, but without a map to guide his way. In his novel Rabbit, Run, John Updike explores themes of religion, perfection, & responsibility to illustrate the claustrophobia & ambivalence of an average American in the 1950s. Both Updike & Ellison point to the invisibility of the citizen, the disillusionment of individuality in a post-industrial age. What Updike refuses to offer is an ultimate solution to the problem, treating the platitudes of basketballl Coach Tothero & Mickey Mouse television advice with a parodic contempt, refusing to accept the paradigms as cohesive solutions to social problems. Updike never suggests a solution to the protagonist's ailment, but demonstrates an indifferent acceptance of roles & responsibility through antagonists to Rabbit's eternal quest for personal freedom. Ultimately, Updike paints the portrait of a man searching for dignity in his possession of freedom, in his possession of the American life. Unable to find it, he runs in disgust.
