John Updike

Rabbit, run

The first book in his award-winning 'Rabbit' series, John Updike's Rabbit, Run contains an afterword by the author in Penguin Modern Classics. It's 1959 and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, one time high school sports superstar, is going nowhere. At twenty-six he is trapped in a second-rate existence - stuck with a fragile, alcoholic wife, a house full of overflowing ashtrays and discarded glasses, a young son and a futile job. With no way to fix things, he resolves to flee from his family and his home in Pennsylvania, beginning a thousand-mile journey that he hopes will free him from his mediocre life. Because, as he knows only too well, 'after you've been first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate'. John Updike (1932-2009) was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year at Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of staff at The New Yorker. Updike was the author of twenty-one novels as well as numerous collections of short stories, poems and criticism, and is one of only three authors to win more than one Pulitzer Prize. His most famous works are the Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom series, all of which are published in Penguin Modern Classics: Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990). If you enjoyed Rabbit, Run, you might like Don DeLillo's Americana, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'It is sexy, in bad taste, violent and basically cynical. And good luck to it' Angus Wilson, Observer 'That special polish, that brilliance; Updike is among the best' Malcolm Bradbury 'Brilliant and poignant ... By his compassion, clarity of insight, and crystal-bright rose, [Updike] makes Rabbit's sorrow his and our own' Washington Post

Rabbit, Run

Andrew John Kinney

Rabbit Angstrom has a problem that most people will understand; he is bored with his life and wants to run away to a sunny place with warm sand and waves lapping at his feet. In his case, the intended destination was "the Gulf Coast", which, in 1960 when the book was written, would have offered a viable hiding place with the requisite attributes. I found myself thinking, while reading Rabbit, how much an artifact of 1960 this was; in 1960, before the internet, before cell phones, before credit cards, a person really could disappear, at least for quite a while, or longer if one continued on to Mexico, so Rabbit's desire for a new life, and his aborted stab at absconding was not unrealistic in that time. 

Rabbit is a person most of us will recognize; a charming guy who peaked in high school, and feels wronged that the working world has not yielded as easily to his charm and athletic prowess as high school girls and teachers did. He leaves his wife, finds another woman, leaves her, returns to his wife under the tutelage of the local Episcopal minister, whose wife he also has eyes for. Avoiding spoilers, a horrific event then occurs. This is basically the story, told in evocative prose by John Updike; Updike has many beautiful turns of phrase and descriptive paragraphs. Updike's descriptions of sex were scandalous at the time, though some bits now seem dated in their breathless attempts to be iconoclastic. 1960, after all, though still firmly situated in the conformist era of the fifties, was the beginning (though just the beginning) of the sexual revolution, and Updike endeavored mightily to be on the leading edge of the novelistic part of it. So his life-changing, shattering account of fellatio seems quite a bit overdone, sixty years on. But most of his prose stands up well.

The book is a page-turner, and the prose sparkles, mostly. It's Rabbit we don't like much. But that, I suppose, was Updike's point.....or was it? Because writers are entreated to write what they know, and later accounts of Updike's life indicate that he was quite a bit like Rabbit, though less overt. Perhaps he was just following the dictum of his profession.

Andrew Louis

Updike has created an anti-hero that's so disgusting and sexist that it's impossible to process whether this book has any broader points or redeeming qualities.

Simon Elliott Stegall

The first half of this book is annoying and made me mad; the second half is horrible and made me cry. That's all she wrote.