Updike’s Rabbit novels are his most famous and highly regarded books. He started Rabbit, Run, the first of the four novels, without thought of writing a series, and I think this carelessness with the future of the franchise is a big strength of the book. There’s a genuine sense that we don’t know what outcomes are possible, for any of the characters.
Updike has always seemed like an Ivy League writer to me, all polish and gentle, crumpled irony, no dirt under the perfectly manicured fingernails. Rabbit, Run aims to be different. It’s a novel about an amoral, selfish working-class husband with very few redeeming features.
Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is married, but his marriage is falling apart, and his idealised version of his personal history as a basketball star gives an air of unreality to the way he perceives everything around him. There is a constant sense that he hasn’t achieved. The novel opens with Rabbit deciding to walk out on his entire life. He just drives straight out of his hometown with no particular plan or destination in mind.
Far from turning into a story of the road, as it initially seems it will, Harry drives around for a few hours without really coming to any conclusion about what to do with his life. It’s a kind of impotent running away that will inevitably lead to him ending up back where he started.
Unable to leave his hometown, he starts an affair with Ruth, a good-time girl who he treats with contempt, and with a particular kind of chauvinism; the kind of chauvinism one imagines a patrician author such as Updike might ascribe to a generic working-class man.
And here’s the problem with Rabbit, Run. It is rather laden down with its desire to provide a photo-sharp picture of life as a working-class man, burdened with belonging to the first generation of Americans not to have fought in World War II, and lumped with an alcoholic wife. Traits are bolted on rather than deriving from the essence of the character, and Harry is a vehicle for Updike to use to explore these areas, rather than an organic set of possibilities.
Rabbit, Run is, as you would expect of Updike, beautifully written; perhaps too beautiful for the effect I think he was trying to achieve. This beauty, and his superciliousness combine to make us feel that he is looking down on Harry rather than exploring his character, sneering at him rather than empathising with him. It’s well worth reading, but lacks a certain human sympathy that could perhaps have lifted it to genuine greatness.
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