Rabbit, Run

The first 40 pages or so of this book are probably the worst 40 pages I've read since Austerlitz, which was so bad that I couldn't be bothered finishing it. Never before or since in the history of English language literature, or at least since Euphues, has an author so irritably reached after effect for no good reason.

"The Norway maples exhale the smell of their sticky new buds and the broad living-room windows along Wilbur Street show beyond the silver patch of a television set the warm bulbs burning in kitchens, like fires at the backs of caves." Yes, this aptly likens modern living to pre-historic living. But trees do not exhale; what colour other than silver would a television set be in the '50s?; what sort of a bulb (or anything show more else, for that matter) burns any way other than warmly?

"He had wondered what he was doing. But now these reflexes, shallowly scratched, are spent, and deeper instincts flood forward, telling him he is right. He feels freedom like oxygen everywhere around him... he adjusts his necktie with infinite attention, as if the little lines of this juncture of the Windsor knot, the collar of Tothero's shirt, and the base of his own throat were the arms of a star that will, when he is finished, extend outward to the rim of the universe. He is the Dalai Lama." Yes, this is faintly satirical. Yes, it's meant to show us the stupidity of Rabbit, and it does. But on the way it shows the incompetence of the narrator. What sort of a scratch is otherwise than shallow? Who 'feels' oxygen around them (air, maybe, but not unless it's particularly windy)? And clearly the simile at the end is *not* in Rabbit's head, so we can only blame Updike for seeing the universe in a tie-knot. Don't even get me started on the gobsmackingly ugly use of alliteration and assonance: scratched are spent; flood forward; feels freedom; infinite attention; little lines; will when he is finished; extend outward. That's in *half a paragraph*. And approximately 50% of the book is written in this 'style.'

And you'll be able to find your own examples, too. Here are some brief ones at random from page 86: "three long nicks, here, scratched in the wall, parallel". *Long* nicks? "the pork chops... cold as death, riding congealed grease" riding to where? what's wrong with 'sitting on'? "he takes clean Jockey pants, T-shirts and socks from a drawer" Do *you* keep your dirty underwear in your drawers? "the furniture, carpeting, wallpaper all seem darkly glazed with the murk filming his own face" Would they be transparently glazed with murk?

Thankfully, in the other half, when Updike isn't meditating his way into ecstasy over misplaced adjectives, excessive adjectives, superfluous adverbs, reified adjectives, and pointless, uninformative lists ("on the bureau there is a square glass ashtray and a pair of fingernail scissors and a spool of white thread and a needle and some hairpins and a telephone book and a Baby Ben with luminous members and a recipe she never used torn from a magazine and a necklace made of sandalwood beads carved in Java he got her for Christmas") characters actually speak to each other and display the characteristics we generally associate with human beings.

This is all the more difficult for me to cope with because the moral of the story - running away from your responsibilities is an awful thing to do and will have terrible consequences on those who care for you, and even those who don't really - needs to be said in novels more often than it is by good writers these days (and by 'these days' I mean the twentieth century). But it has to be said better than this, for goodness' sake. I really hope Rabbit, Redux has less rapture over the everyday. Please. Please. show less

Did I want to read Updike? I had a group who read him this month, and I had never read Updike before. So, I got myself excited to join. He can do prose, and he can drive a story.

John Updike turned 28 the year he published Rabbit, Run, his second novel, and first of his famous Rabbit quartet, each book from another decade. Updike had a short story collection and a well-regarded poetry collection already published. But Rabbit, oh Rabbit. Oh, fragile manhood. Rabbit is the star high school basketball player who doesn't know how to move on. He wants to keep playing. But he's married with a son and baby on the way. But Rabbit is impulsive, and only impulsive. He runs, or drives, and comes back again, and then what.

Why does anyone care about show more Rabbit? Well, first the prose is quite elegant, with alliterative sentences quietly and unobtrusively scattered in descriptions of suburbia, highways, bars and gardens. And second because he's exciting, and Updike ramps up the pace and intensity. Also, he's endearing, because he loves everyone and means it, at least in the moment. And it's either beautiful or entertaining. But mostly because we watch this wrecking ball swing in a state of horror-fascination. Can I call it gleeful horror? Sure, we must wonder why Rabbit runs. What's driving him? His manhood, his impulsiveness, his stodgy surroundings? Is Rabbit another rebel without a cause, or perhaps with one? (Updike has said he's partially modeled on Jack Kerouac). But also, 1950's comforts are no match for Rabbit's deeper impulse.

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Addendum: As Rabbit drove the Pennsylvania highways, abandoning his wife without saying anything, the parallel with a novel that came out this year, The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits, was wonderfully apparent. Markovits, who played professional basketball, wrote a homage, or perhaps an updated take on our confused concepts of masculinity. show less

***SPOILERS HIDDEN***

(Full disclosure: Book abandoned at page 134, out of 264 pages)

Reader, run (away). Few books have a more unlikable main character. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is a proudly sexist, married man with a toddler son. In the first half of Rabbit, Run, readers get to hear how much he despises his wife. When one evening he decides he can’t take it anymore, he abandons her and their son. The story’s negativity is overwhelming.

Updike didn’t make Rabbit able to be sympathized with. The man is an immature, deplorable cad, and because of that, it’s impossible to care about his story. The first time he and his wife are shown together, he’s belittling her in his head the whole time, ruminating over her “dumb mouth” show more and thinning hair and resenting her pregnancy and how clumsy it makes her. The reader is plunged into this toxicity without context. What brought this once-happy couple to this point? Why is there tension between them? Why does Janice have an alcohol problem? Updike showed none of their rocky history. The next thing readers know, Rabbit has left the scene, relieved, and Updike expected his readers to sympathize with this character, to agree with Rabbit’s belief that he had to leave “out of necessity.”

This repulsive behavior continues when Rabbit later meets a young woman, asks her her weight, forces himself upon her, watches over her in the bathroom to ensure she doesn’t insert birth control, then the next day asks her to cook (after which he leaves the premises to retrieve his car while she also cleans the dishes).

On the technical level, Updike’s writing is often bogged down by description that doesn’t always make sense because it’s so obscure. Many sentences are also too long and therefore hard to follow:

Now, after the magnolias have lost their grip but before any but the leaves of the maple have the breadth to cast much shade, the cherry trees and crabapples and, in a remote corner of the grounds, a solitary plum tree ball with bloom, a whiteness the black limbs seem to gather from the blowing clouds and after a moment hurl away, so the reviving grass is bleached by an astonishing storm of confetti.

Additionally, Updike devoted chunks of the story to driving around town (names of streets and the exact density of the surrounding brush included); a drawn-out, unexciting golf scene; and a gardening scene. Rabbit, Run has no suspense or urgency.

A good book entertains, educates, or both. All Updike managed to do was waste ink, paper, and readers’ time. Unlikable main characters can be some of the best characters. It’s common enough for readers to be attracted to and root for villains that the phenomenon has been studied. But to ensure that readers don’t hate a story through and through, the author has to include critical confrontation of the protagonist’s repellent traits. And unlikable protagonists can’t be monsters. They have to have some glint of shared humanity that allows readers to sympathize with them on some level. Whether or not Updike intended for his main character to be unlikable is beside the point, because he didn’t use this formula.

Readers who liked the idea and setting of this story but disliked its execution and nasty main character could try [b:Little Children|37426|Little Children|Tom Perrotta|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327556734l/37426._SX50_.jpg|828476] instead. It handles the same general topic—the disillusionment of married suburbanites—with likable, relatable characters and sharp, expert writing. show less

Updike’s famous novel about a young working-class man who seems to be good-hearted and moral but feels the urge to run away whenever he’s put under pressure to take responsibility in life, without actually having any clear notion of where to run to. I suspect the appeal of the book comes largely from the way we’ve all secretly wanted to run out from our lives at some point, and probably not quite had the courage (or desperation) to do so. But Updike doesn’t turn Harry Angstrom into a wish-fulfilment figure, he makes sure that every flight creates a new problem for him and the people around him.

I couldn’t help feeling that there was a patronising side to it all, though, with Updike telling his middle-class readers between the show more lines that this is the sort of thing that is going to happen to you if you’re silly enough to grow up in a small Pennsylvania industrial town and do nothing but sport at school. There’s quite a different atmosphere here from that of the working-class novels that were being written by actual working-class writers like Alan Sillitoe and Stanley Middleton around the same time in England. show less

Updike is always uttered in the same sentence as Roth. And I loved Roth, so it follows that I'd love this, right?

God no. Worst twelve hours I've endured in a long time. I will add the caveat that the audio presentation I listened to was technically competent, but somehow intensely grating - especially the character voices for women and children. Though I feel it's chicken and egg, by the end I could separate whether I hated the book or the performance.

But even without that; three main issues - the protagonist, the fact that it takes forever for anything to happen, and the writing.

Starting with the latter two points because they tie together: I don't need books to be full of action and event. I'm quite happy for characters to sit show more around not doing much. I'm fine with them pontificating, if it's interesting or amusing. It's fine for the narrator to go off exploring ideas, thoughts and observations too. I can even tolerate a bit of arty description. But Updike? - there is nothing that he doesn't chase down to the point of utter tedium; no thought, no description that isn't flogged to death with its own self-satisfaction. There are really only three main points of action that happen on the book, so that's four hours of nothingness in between, just four hours of the protagonist being a self-satisfied twat, and Updike describing things unnecessarily. How people laud his style is an utter mystery to me.

And oh but the protagonist. Just him being nicknamed Rabbit grates me. The guy is a self-involved, mediocre, pathetic, weak, indecisive arsehole. Don't get me wrong - I like protagonists who are gits, who are womanisers, whatever - but it's the way he just slinks from situation to situation, driven by whim, cowardice and something like lust, but without its force or passion. He's just pathetically contemptible, yet still every other character seems to be there for him, in desire, admiration or love - it feels like Updike relies on every other character expressing admiration for this guy to allow for him to carry on the way he does.

Now, I recognise completely that Rabbit's nature and character may in fact be deliberate - with Updike conscious he's a pathetic and quite repellant character, and exploring that being the nature of men in a society where there's nothing left to define them, where they're constantly looking for escape and hemmed in by the women around them. But it doesn't feel like it - it feels like Updike carries as much affection for his protagonist as the other characters seem to. It always feels like he's saying 'ah yeah, sure, he's a bit of a cad, but he's lovely really, eh?`

Either way, it's really hard to read such a long book about a guy who isn't anything as compelling, interesting or cool as 'bad' - who you can't root for or root against, but is just a weak, pathetic non-entity who you feel nothing for and couldn't give a crap about.

Also, who knew blowjobs were such a big deal in the 60s!? show less

I really liked the language. The way Updike weaves (or whatever I ought to call it) the sense that things are bad, that Rabbit is likeable but extremely self centered, that you even understand his need to love but not belong, which of course makes his way of loving extremely awkward and very destructive for everyone. I loved it, but I really hope I never have to meet Rabbit again. Although the book made me sometimes understand his need to get away, I really hate the guy and his utter selfishness and his unlimeted powers of indecision. Towards the end of the book I was really hoping Bruce Willis would come along and smash Rabbits face all over the street.; 0

Rabbit had a wife and kids in Pennsylvania, Jack
/:He went out for a ride, and then he went back
Then he went out for a ride, and then he went back:/ (da capo al fine)

Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom really is a spoiled little asshole, isn't he? Like a literary Al Bundy, still hung up on his brief turn as a high school star athlete, stuck in a dead-end sales job, watching his life go by as his wife expects her second child and is already slipping into permanent housewifeitis, afternoon TV and alcohol and all. Had this been a few years later, I guess the soundtrack would have been the Stones' "Mother's Little Helper". Only there's no one to really help Janice; Rabbit runs.

And then it all starts to get complicated. Wonderfully complicated, at times; show more as a story, there's not much there, but Updike's prose is (for the most part) exhilarating to read (even in the somewhat clunky translation I read). It takes a lot to have a main protagonist like Rabbit and have him carry the novel - he's not really a BAD guy as such, just doesn't think things through, not to mention being a bit of a misogynist and still expecting things to work out if he can just find the right play like he used to do in baseball. Make a few substitutions, take the penalty shot, win the game. Everyone makes a big deal about him never fouling anyone on the court; off-court, it's a different matter - with no ref to stop the game when something goes wrong, Rabbit runs too far. He can never run too far.

Updike adds a lot of depth to a fairly mundane tale and characters; discussing religion, classes, the losing side of the American dream - the people in the book are several-generation immigrants, hard-working protestants, Swedes, Germans, Anglos, doing their duty and being thoroughly miserable for it. (Yes, I quoted Springsteen for a reason.) And that's really the main problem with the novel; it's almost quite literally hopeless, a drab story told in gaudy colours. You end up wincing at almost every exquisitely worded phrase, because it's never going to end well.

It's about responsibility, isn't it? Spouses to each other, parents to children, priests to parishioners, johns to whores, man to his fellow man etc. Or perhaps rather, the lack of it. The young reverend who thinks he can make a difference, the old one who chides him for being naive.

Updike can write. DAMN, can he write. I honestly don't see how he got three more novels out of Rabbit Angstrom, but I think I'm going to find out at some point; the good description of the bad far outweighs the bad of the well-described (is that a sentence?) show less