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.