“’I’ll tell you,’ he says. ‘When I ran from Janice I made an interesting discovery.’ The tears bubble over her lids and the salty taste of the pool-water is sealed into her mouth. ‘If you have the guts to be yourself,’ he says, ‘other people’ll pay your price’” (157).
The first novel in John Updike’s celebrated Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, Rabbit, Run is, in many ways, a partly humorous, partly disturbing, character study of an American midlife crisis. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is surely one of the most flippant, disagreeable characters in all of American literature. His nickname “Rabbit” has stuck with him into adulthood, and indeed, much of his life seems to hearken back to those glory days of his youth when he was still known as “Rabbit,” a high school basketball star who set the B-League scoring record during his junior year, and then broke that record again his senior year which lasted for four years until it was broken four year prior to the events of this novel (putting the setting of Rabbit, Run, by my estimation, at about 1959-1960). With his constant backward looking disposition, suffice it to say Rabbit Angstrom has remained in an endless stage of perpetual adolescence –a frustrating state of arrested development where he finds himself longing for a new exciting and forbidden venture, one that allows him to engage his “anarchic impulse” in a way reminds him of his high school days. For example, at one point Rabbit reflects: “Today is Saturday, and the sky has that broad bright blunt Saturday quality Rabbit remembers from boyhood, when the sky of a Saturday morning was the blank scoreboard of a long game about to begin. Roofball, box hockey, tether ball, darts…” (42).
But who exactly is Rabbit Angstrom? In The New York Times in 1960, David Boroff dubbed him an “older and less articulate Holden Caulfield” and this strikes me as somewhat apt. Rabbit Angstrom is a 26-year-old suburban, middle-class man who spends his days selling a kitchen gadget called a “MagiPeeler,” which he demonstrates in “five and dime stores.” He feels he is trapped in a bitter, loveless marriage to Janice Angstrom (née Springer). Previously, she worked as a salesgirl at the store where Rabbit also worked (Kroll’s). Together, they have a 2-year-old son, Nelson, and now Janice is pregnant with a daughter. However, despite this seeming to be a happy, wholesome marriage, it is anything but. According to Rabbit, Janice is a dullard and an alcoholic, spending all her time drinking, smoking, and watching television (throughout the novel, many of the characters seem to be struggling to control their appetites, particularly to stop smoking). The Angstroms live in Mt. Judge, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Brewer (a fictional county based on Berks County, PA where Updike grew up).
The novel begins in March when “thing start anew” as Rabbit heads home from work one day and suddenly decides on a whim to join a group of boys playing basketball in the park. He then goes home to his wife where “Just yesterday, it seems to him, she stopped being pretty” (7). He notes his disgust with her wrinkles and thinning hair, her excessive drinking, and often calls her “dumb,” and “sloppy,” and a “cunt.” As they bicker, Janice asks him to go out and buy cigarettes before picking up the car as well as their son Nelson. However, apparently feeling constrained and spiritually dead, Rabbit abruptly takes off from his home –“he feels freedom like oxygen all around him” as he suddenly drives as far away from Brewer as he can. He wants to go south to lay in the sand by the Gulf of Mexico where he can see the stars and sprawling orange groves, but instead he quickly gets lost somewhere in West Virginia and, once again feeling out of place, he realizes he is trapped in the “east, the worst direction” where there is “unhealth, soot, and stink, a smothering hole where you can’t move without killing somebody” (26-27). He then drives back to Brewer’s “treeless waste of industry, shoe factories and bottling plants and company parking lots and knitting mills converted to electronics parts and elephantine gas tanks lifting above trash-filled swampland yet lower than the blue edge of the mountain from whose crest Brewer was a warm carpet woven around a single shade of brick. Above the mountain, stars fade” (41).
Why did he decide to leave? Rabbit is soon revealed to be a deeply selfish young man, unable to control his slavish impulses, a hedonist and a narcissist (as well as a bitter misogynist). He is a stand-in for Updike’s commentary on the state of middle class America. Rabbit seems to be running from something, rather than toward something, and this waywardness is even acknowledged in Updike’s title for the novel. Note the comma in “Rabbit, Run” (likely derived from the World War II song “Run, Rabbit, Run”) –it is uniquely positioned, almost as if to be an injunction instructing Rabbit to run. But where? What is Updike trying to tell us with this title?
In Rabbit’s own words, he later tells us why he is running, though he doesn’t exactly provide a fully satisfying response: “It just felt like the whole business was fetching and hauling, all the time trying to hold this mess together she was making all the time. I don’t know, it seemed like I was glued in with a lot of busted toys and empty glasses and the television going and meals late or never and no way of getting out. Then all of a sudden it hit me how easy it was to get out, just walk out, and by damn it was easy” (110).
In other words, Rabbit abruptly abandoned his family because he was feeling stifled and he found himself desperately yearning for spontaneity, creativity, and excitement in his life. However, this makes Rabbit seem almost like a sympathetic character –but he is assuredly not. From here, Rabbit pays a visit to his old high school basketball coach, Marty Tothero, a lecherous but authoritative old man, who introduces Rabbit to a pair of young women –Margaret Kosko and Ruth Leonard, the latter of whom is described as a “plump” prostitute. Rabbit quickly strikes up an affair with Ruth, she turns out to be a fairly jaded woman whose demeanor seems to vacillate between flat contempt and mild amusement with Rabbit’s grand overtures toward her. Almost immediately, Rabbit begins suggesting they should be married and that he loves her –despite the fact that he is still married to his pregnant wife Janice. These scenes cue-up Updike’s somewhat notorious penchant for overt, lengthy erotic passages that leave nothing to the imagination (an argument can be made that Rabbit sexually assaults Ruth on more than one occasion in these scenes). And Rabbit’s inner monologue exposes him to be a carnal-obsessed, debauched young man, always commenting on women’s legs and buttocks so on. Suffice it to say, I rapidly started losing interest in this novel about halfway through.
Despite bringing social disgrace on his family, Rabbit seems not to take much of this very seriously at all, at one point he tells Ruth he is a “saint” and that he “gives people hope.” Updike takes this opportunity to introduce readers to what I can only interpret as a fairly trite, tired, conservative critique of American culture in the 1960s –namely, a lament over the loss of religion. As a self-described “card-carrying Episcopalian” who was raised a Lutheran, with Presbyterian ancestors, and later became a Congregationalist before eventually settling on Episcopalianism, John Updike seems to be encouraging Rabbit (as a metaphor for the American middle class) to “run” back into the clutches of the church where his life can find a more stable, spiritual outlet (in fact, the epigraph to the novel seems to suggest as much, with it being a quotation from Pascal’s Pensees: “The motions of Grace, the hardness of the heart; external circumstances” -Pascal, Pensee 507). This moral message is perhaps best diagnosed by the character of the Episcopal Minister in the novel, Jack Eccles, who says Rabbit is suffering from “separation from God” (133). Jack Eccles is notably contrasted with Fritz Kruppenbach, the Lutheran minister (who serves the Angstroms). “’The truth is,’ Eccles tells him with womanish excitement, in a voice embarrassed but determined, ‘you’re monstrously selfish. You’re a coward. You don’t care about right or wrong; you worship nothing except your own worst instincts’” (140).
Later, Rabbit learns that Ruth has slept with many different men –including his old high school nemesis, Ronnie Henderson. In a rage, Rabbit forces Ruth to perform oral sex on him (in another rather shocking, grotesque scene of sexual abuse) before he is summoned to the hospital where his wife Janice is in labor. After she delivers their daughter, Rebecca June (“Becky”), Rabbit and Janice are again reunited as if Rabbit never really left at all. He gets a new job as a car salesman but quickly falls back into his old ways. When Janice declines to have sex with him (since she has only just delivered a baby), Rabbit grows irate and uses her buttocks to masturbate, an act which she says is “cheapening” (cue another disgusted eyeroll from readers). Rabbit then flees again while Janice turns to drinking (notably at Rabbit’s encouragement) and she accidentally drinks too much while trying to clean the apartment before her mother arrives, and in a frenzied wave of overthinking about her messy home, as well as her absentee husband, and her overbearing parents, Janice runs a bathtub and accidentally drowns her newborn Rebecca in the water –“she knows, knows, while knocks sound at the door, that the worst thing that has ever happened to any woman in the world has happened to her” (279).
At the root of Rabbit, Run, Updike offers a withering critique of middle-class America as a fundamentally lost class of people, perpetually searching for something illusory. He lays bare the American cultural obsession with youth and superficiality via a singular abhorrent character: Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Updike also explores the Western desire for conquering and exploring new frontiers, even in a 1960s suburban milieu in which there are no new frontiers to explore. Despite bearing some measure of depth and social commentary, would I return to this novel? Decidedly not. While Updike’s prose is uniquely stylistic, much of this novel is a wandering venture into moral depravity. In 1960, literary critic Richard Gilman apparently 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.” I only decided to read this series as part of my chronological Pulitzer Prize read-through, and so unfortunately I have three more novels to read in this series (Updike won two Pulitzers, one for Rabbit is Rich and the other for Rabbit at Rest). Still, I would be delighted to have my pallet expanded if a scholar on the works of John Updike decided to stumble upon this humble corner of the internet and help me understand the true depth and meaning of this novel. For now, I will prefer the writings of John Cheever and Philip Roth to what I have read from John Updike.
Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. Random House Trade Paperbacks. New York, NY, 1988, 2012 (originally published in 1960).