Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Rabbit Run by John Updike Rabbit Run by John Updike. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 6588763ffc5c0d52 • Your IP : 188.246.226.140 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Rabbit Run by John Updike. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 65887640090515f4 • Your IP : 188.246.226.140 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Rabbit, Run Summary. The novel opens, aptly enough, with a basketball game being played by a few children on a street in Mt. Judge - the suburban home of our hero, Harry Angstrom. When Harry - nicknamed "Rabbit" for his awkward looks - appears, he is wearing a business suit and is headed home. He was once the star athlete of his high school, a great basketball player prized by his team and his coach, Marty Tothero. Now he is twenty-six, stuck in an unhappy marriage and an unfulfilling job selling kitchen gadgets. He joins the game for a bit, and then continues on his way. At home, his newly pregnant wife, Janice, irritates him so much that when she sends him on an errand, Rabbit instinctively drives his car out of Mt. Judge and onto the interstate highway. He doesn't know where he's headed - he is only aware that he needs to escape. He makes it as far south as West Virginia before he finally turns around and heads home. Back in Mt. Judge, he joins Marty Tothero - now just as "washed-up" and as much of a "has-been" as Rabbit, having been fired years ago from his job at the high school due to a "scandal" - and hits the town with his former coach. He meets Ruth Leonard on a double date with Marty, and winds up spending the night with her in her apartment. He grows very affectionate of her, and, though Ruth's opinion of Rabbit fluctuates, the two live together for a solid two months. During that time, the young local minister, Jack Eccles, tries to do his part in saving Rabbit's marriage. Originally set on his trail by Janice's angry parents, Jack ends up befriending Rabbit and sincerely trying to help him become a better person. Rabbit more or less dismisses Jack's efforts, but when Janice finally goes into labor he hastily leaves Ruth and goes to the hospital. That night, after seeing Janice (and perhaps rediscovering his love for her), Rabbit feels as if he has started a new life. He thanks Eccles, and puts the affair with Ruth behind him. Things, however, rapidly go sour. The new baby girl - named Rebecca after Janice's mother - cries nonstop, and Rabbit finds himself consumed with lust for his wife, who is now more or less incapable of having sex. One night, after Rabbit tries to make love to Janice only to have her snap at him - "I'm not your whore" - he walks out and wanders the town. Janice becomes wracked with fear and despair, certain that Rabbit has left her again, maybe for good this time. She drinks excessively throughout the ensuing day, and finally, in a drunken hysteria, accidentally drowns Rebecca in the bathtub. When Rabbit hears the news, he goes to the home of Janice's parents, where she is staying. He tells her it was his fault, and the two finally seem united in a true bond. After the funeral, however, Rabbit becomes filled with the sense that he finally understands everything - a sort of skewed religious awakening - and lashes out inexplicably at his wife: "Don't look at me. I didn't kill her." He then runs away, finally winding up back at Ruth's apartment. She is pregnant, and the father, it seems, is Rabbit. He is overjoyed that she has not aborted the baby, and insists that he would love to marry her. She delivers an ultimatum: divorce Janice, or she and the baby are "dead" to him. He agrees to these terms, and runs out to grab some food. Once outside the apartment, however, doubts immediately start to plague him. How can he divorce Janice? What is to become of their son - a two year-old boy named Nelson? It all proves too much for Rabbit. With "a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter," he does what he has always done: he runs away. John Updike’s Rabbit, Run – another American story of men escaping women. I n 1960, a 28-year-old writer named John Updike published his second novel, Rabbit, Run . The New York Times called it a “shabby domestic tragedy,” but also “a notable triumph of intelligence and compassion”. It singled out his stylistic achievement in particular, praising him for having created a “perfectly pitched voice for the subject”. This early review set the tone for what would follow, and for many years Updike, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow were hailed as a kind of unquestioned trinity of the best modern American novelists. When he died in 2009, 23 novels, countless stories, essays, and a few volumes of poetry later, the New Yorker pronounced him “one of the greatest of all modern writers, the first American writer since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing.” Even bearing in mind that the New Yorker had been, in essence, Updike’s house magazine for 50 years, this remains praise of an order few writers will ever achieve. Whether it’s true is, of course, another question. It was Rabbit, Run that started it all, and now Radio 4 has decided to run Rabbit as its Book at Bedtime, giving listeners a chance to judge for themselves. Eventually Updike would write four novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, his suburban everyman. Angstrom is too intellectually limited to be considered Updike’s alter ego; call him instead Updike’s altered ego, an artfully reconstituted, carefully delimited, sometimes monstrous, sometimes pathetic, persona by means of which Updike surveyed US postwar life. The New York Times described Angstrom, a former basketball star feeling trapped by his suburban life of marriage and fatherhood, as “an older and less articulate Holden Caulfield”; it’s not a bad comparison. Updike helped map what later became known as “Cheever country”: the white, affluent, suburban landscape of stunted hopes and spiritual anomie through which Harry Angstrom will take his picaresque journey. Updike’s bitter joke, however, is that Rabbit can’t run. In this sense, Rabbit, Run is a clever subversion of an old US motif: the man on the run from the suffocating effects of society, as if a tragicomic western had lost its way and ended up trapped in southeastern Pennsylvania. But this tradition is also endlessly troped as men escaping the domestic snares of women, a tradition which Rabbit, Run cheerily joins. From Huck Finn lighting west for the Territory to escape Aunt Polly’s efforts to “sivilize” him, to Charles Ingalls, with his itch for travel and his wife who insists they build a little house on the prairie for their girls, to Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty taking off on the road: US popular culture is riddled with stories of men who yearn to be free, and the women who yearn only for them not to be. These are doubtless very enjoyable stories for men to read, but for women they can be quite irksome. Always cast as the smothering presence, the old ball-and-chain pinning men down who would otherwise roam wild, women end up symbolising dependence and paralysis while men get to symbolise independence and liberty. I know which one I prefer. At the beginning of the novel, 26-year-old Harry climbs into his car and leaves his depressed, pregnant young wife, Janice, and heads south with dreams of Floridian paradise. He stops for fuel and directions; instead of being given a map, he is given advice that sums up the novel: “The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you’re going before you go there.” Drift is not an option; Harry, who shares a rabbit’s proclivities for procreation, also shares its legendary inability to win the race after starting out in front. The imperative of the title means that some unseen voice is telling Rabbit to run, perhaps suggesting his internal compulsions, or some kind of higher power – whether of the authorial or spiritual kind – urging him on. But by 1960, there was nowhere to run: the frontier was well and truly closed, and all that was left for men was the mock heroism of suburban tragicomedy, running in circles. Part of the problem for women reading Rabbit, Run is that Updike made the decision to have Harry choose between two stereotypes: after returning home Harry leaves Janice again, this time moving in with a prostitute. Janice, the asexual mother, is small, childish, bony; the prostitute Ruth is voluptuous, large, welcoming and fecund. There are those who argue that Updike is ironising this stereotypical choice, showing how narrow and foolish it is, and it is true he gives both Ruth and Janice slightly more complex interior lives at points in the novel. But Updike doesn’t imagine them really having any desires that are not centred around domesticity or keeping a man, whether because, as in Ruth’s case, they fall madly in love with him or, as in Janice’s case, they merely want to avoid social humiliation. Either way, to judge it against a modern metric, it’s fair to say Rabbit, Run fails the Bechdel test (requiring that two or more female characters discuss a topic other than men). In 1960, Richard Gilman described Rabbit, Run as both a “grotesque allegory of American life, with its myth of happiness and success”, and a “minor epic of the spirit thirsting for room to discover and be itself”. It remains the case that only male characters get to be treated as allegories of US life, grotesque or otherwise. Mankind can denote all humanity; womankind can only denote all women. Surely part of “the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing” was its inability to recognise the full humanity of half of humanity – the female half; and if Updike is to be put in the same class as Henry James, then he should be measured by the same standards. When Henry James looked at women, he imagined that they thought like him. When Updike looked at women, he imagined that they thought about him. For me, questions about misogyny in literature are of limited efficacy at best; I prefer judging a novel by how well it thinks about the problem it has set itself. Rabbit, Run is a novel ruminating on the costs of patriarchal society that is partly limited by the very limits it depicts, but cannot quite overcome. The incompleteness remains, while the novel endures. Sarah Churchwell is professorial fellow in American literature at the University of London. Rabbit, Run is Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime until 28 April. Running away. W hen a writer you admire dies, rereading seems a normal courtesy and tribute. Occasionally, it may be prudent to resist going back: when Lawrence Durrell died, I preferred to remain with 40-year-old memories of The Alexandria Quartet rather than risk such lushness again. And sometimes the nature of the writer's oeuvre creates a problem of choice. This was the case with John Updike. I have only ever met one person – a distinguished arts journalist – who has read all Updike's 60-plus books; most of us, even long-term fans, probably score between 30 and 40. Should you choose one of those previously unopened? Or go for one you suspect you misread, or undervalued, at the time? Or one, like Couples , which you might have read for somewhat non-literary reasons? The decision eventually made itself. I had first read the Rabbit quartet in the autumn of 1991, in what felt near-perfect circumstances. I was on a book tour of the States, and bought the first volume, Rabbit, Run , in a Penguin edition at Heathrow airport. I picked up the others in different American cities, in chunky Fawcett Crest paperbacks, and read them as I criss-crossed the country; my bookmarks were the stubs of boarding passes. When released from publicity duties, I would either retreat inwards to Updike's prose, or outwards to walk ordinary American streets. This gave my reading, it felt, a deepening stereoscopy. And even when, too exhausted to do anything, I fell back on the hotel minibar and the television, I found I was only replicating Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom's preferred way of ingesting politics and current events. After three weeks, both Harry and I found ourselves in Florida, "death's favourite state", as he puts it in the final volume, Rabbit at Rest . Harry died; the book ended; my tour was over. I came home convinced that the quartet was the best American novel of the postwar period. Nearly 20 years on, with Updike newly dead, and another American journey coming up, it was time to check on that judgment. By now those four volumes had been fused into a 1,516-page hardback under the overall title Rabbit Angstrom . If the protagonist's nickname denotes a zigzagging creature of impulse and appetite, the angst of his Scandinavian surname indicates that Harry is also the bearer of a more metaphysical burden. Not that he is more than fleetingly aware of it; and the fact that he isn't makes him all the more emblematically American. John Cheever once said that Updike's characters performed their lives amid a landscape – a moral and spiritual one – of whose grandeur they were unaware. Harry is a specific American, a high-school basketball star, department-store underling, linotype operator and, finally, Toyota car salesman in the decaying industrial town of Brewer, Pennsylvania (Updike based it on Reading, Pa, which he knew as a boy). Until Rabbit starts wintering in Florida in the final volume, he scarcely leaves Brewer – a location chosen to represent middle America by a New York film company in Rabbit Redux . Harry is site-specific, slobbish, lust-driven, passive, patriotic, hard-hearted, prejudiced, puzzled, anxious. Yet familiarity renders him likeable – for his humour, his doggedness, his candour, his curiosity and his wrong-headed judgments – for example, preferring Perry Como to Frank Sinatra. But Updike was disappointed when readers went further and claimed they found Rabbit lovable: "My intention was never to make him – or any character – lovable." Instead, Harry is typical, and it takes an outsider to tell him so. An Australian doctor, asked by his wife Janice what is wrong with Rabbit's dicky heart, replies: "The usual thing, ma'am. It's tired and stiff and full of crud. It's a typical American heart, for his age and economic status etcetera." Harry's quiet role as an American everyman is publicly confirmed in Rabbit at Rest when he is chosen for his second, brief moment of public fame: dressing up as Uncle Sam for a town parade. Rereading the quartet, I was struck by how much of the book is about running away: Harry, Janice and Nelson all take off at different points, and all return defeatedly. (Updike explained that Rabbit, Run was partly a riposte to Kerouac's On the Road , and intended as a "realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road" – ie, the family gets hurt, and the deserter slinks home.) I had forgotten how harshly transactional much of the sex was; how increasingly droll Rabbit becomes as he ages (Reagan reminds him of God, in that "you never knew how much he knew, nothing or everything", while Judaism "must be a great religion, once you get past the circumcision"); how masterfully Updike deploys free indirect style, switching us in and out of the main characters' consciousness; and how, instead of making each sequel merely sequential, he is constantly back-filling previous books with new information (the most extreme example being that we only get Janice's pre-Rabbit sexual history in the 2000 follow-up novella Rabbit Remembered – 40 years after we might have learned it). What I remembered well was the audacity of Updike's starting-point. Harry is only 26, but past it: his brief years of sporting fame lie behind him, and he is already bored with Janice. On the second page, he refers to himself as "getting old" – and there are still several hundred thousand words to go. Even when he attains bovine contentment and material success in Rabbit is Rich , it is against a general background of things being over before they had really begun. Each book is purposefully set at the dying of a decade – from the 1950s to the 1980s – so there is little wider sense of fresh beginnings: the 1960s America of Rabbit Redux isn't filled with love and peace and hopefulness, but with hatred, violence and craziness as the decade sours and dies. Perhaps America is itself dying, or at least being outpaced by the world: this is what Harry, and the novel, both wonder. What is American power if it can be defeated by the Vietcong; what is American inventiveness if it can be out-invented by the Japanese; what is American wealth when national debt piles up? In Rabbit Redux Harry feels he has "come in on the end" of the American dream, "as the world shrank like an apple going bad"; by the start of Rabbit is Rich he feels "the great American ride is ending"; by the end of Rabbit at Rest "the whole free world is wearing out". Whereas in my first reading I was overwhelmed by Updike's joy of description, his passionate attentiveness to such things as "the clunky suck of the refrigerator door opening and shutting" – by what he called, in the preface to his The Early Stories , "giving the mundane its beautiful due" – in my second I was increasingly aware of this underlying sense of things being already over, of the tug of dying and death. Thus the whole trajectory of Janice's life is an attempt to expiate the sin of having accidentally, drunkenly, drowned her baby. And while Harry imagines himself a genial and harmless life-enhancer, others see him quite differently. "Boy, you really have the touch of death, don't you?" his sort-of-whore girlfriend Ruth says at the end of Rabbit, Run . "Hold still. Just sit there. I see you very clear all of a sudden. You're Mr Death himself." Harry's son Nelson agrees with this analysis. In Rabbit Redux , Harry is away on another sexual escapade when his house burns down, killing the runaway hippie Jill; teenage Nelson, equally smitten by the girl, thereafter treats his father as a simple murderer. And in Rabbit at Rest Harry fears his female-killing curse is striking a third time when his rented Sunfish capsizes and his granddaughter Judy is nowhere to be seen. This time, as it happens, the hex is reversed: Judy is only hiding beneath the sail, and the scare triggers Rabbit's first heart attack, a dry run for his death. And after death? Harry's intimations, not of immortality, but of the numinous, show up more clearly on rereading. Updike said that he couldn't quite give up on religion, because without the possibility or dream of something beyond and above, our terrestrial life became unendurable. Rabbit shares this vestigial need. "I don't not believe," he assures his dying lover Thelma, who replies, "That's not quite enough, I fear. Harry, darling." But it's all he can manage: "Hell, what I think about religion is . is without a little of it, you'll sink." But this "little" doesn't find or express itself, as did Updike's, in churchgoing. God-believers in the quartet tend to be either crazies like Skeeter, fanatics, or pious post-Narcotics Anonymous droners like Nelson. Harry is not exactly a joined-up thinker, but he has an occasionally questing mind, a sense of what it might be if there were something beyond our heavy-footed sublunary existence. It's perhaps significant that the sport at which he excelled, which he plays in both the opening and closing pages of the tetralogy, involves a leaving of the ground and a reaching-up to something higher, if only to a skirted hoop. A greater reaching- up is offered by the US space programme, whose achievements (and failures) run through the book; Harry has a couch potato's fascination for it – as he does for the fate of the Dalai Lama, with whom he bizarrely, mock-heroically identifies. But there are also moments when Harry is able to recognise his longings more precisely. Beside the big stucco house belonging to Janice's parents there grew a large copper beech, which for many years shaded Harry and Janice's bedroom. When Nelson comes into occupation of the family house, in Rabbit at Rest , he has the tree cut down. Harry doesn't argue; nor can he "tell the boy that the sound of the rain in that great beech had been the most religious experience of his life. That, and hitting a pure golf shot." In such moments Rabbit exemplifies a kind of suburban pantheism, giving the mundane its spiritual due. Rabbit Angstrom has its imperfections. The second volume is usually considered the weakest of the four; and it's true that Skeeter's mau-mauing of whitey Rabbit goes on too long, and to decreasing effect. And there is a change in register after the first volume, where the hushed Joyceanism of his early mode – when he thought of himself as a short-story writer and poet, but not yet fully as a novelist – is to the fore. (Updike didn't realise that he was heading towards a tetralogy until after the second volume.) On the other hand, it's rare for a work of this length to get even better as it goes on, with Rabbit at Rest the strongest and richest of the four books. In the last hundred pages or so, I found myself slowing deliberately, not so much because I didn't want the book to end, as because I didn't want Rabbit to die. (And when he does, his last words, to his shrieking son, are, maybe, also addressed consolingly to the reader: "All I can tell you is, it isn't so bad.") Any future historian wanting to understand the texture, smell, feel and meaning of bluey-white-collar life in ordinary America between the 1950s and the 1990s will need little more than the Rabbit quartet. But that implies only sociological rather than artistic virtue. So let's just repeat: still the greatest postwar American novel.