Published 1960 / Length 320 pages
Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is a former college basketball hero with a pregnant wife and a three-year-old child. The setting is 1950s small-town America and the young marriage is not a success. Rabbit has a dead-end job and his wife spends her afternoons watching television and drinking whisky. Rabbit is restless.
The couple argue over a trivial matter and, on a whim, Rabbit walks out on his family with a romantic notion of waking up by the Gulf of Mexico. The reality is more prosaic, as he moves in with a part-time prostitute. The novel looks at how close family and the supposed pillars of the local community react to Rabbit’s absence and infidelity, and also at how Rabbit himself justifies his actions. Both the book’s subject matter and language were considered shocking upon publication. Over the years, that power to shock has faded, but there remain some graphic and loveless descriptions of lust, and a tragic conclusion. As a result, Rabbit, Run is a bitter, compelling and claustrophobic book.
‘Rabbit, Run is a tender and discerning study of the desperate and the hungering in our midst. Updike has a knack of tilting his observations just a little, so that even a commonplace phrase catches the light.’ – The New York Times
• How effective is the minister, Jack Eccles, at convincing Rabbit to return to his wife? What do you think Jack’s motives are?
• How much blame do you attribute to Janice for Rabbit walking out on his family?
• Does the book still retain some power to shock?
• The text is written in the present tense. What impact does this have on the storytelling?
• Updike wanted to create a counterpoint novel to Kerouac’s On the Road, saying in a feature article for Penguin Modern Classics: ‘What happens when a young American family man goes on the road – the people left behind get hurt.’ His book examines those repercussions.
• Several of the more sexually explicit passages were cut from the original text, but restored in subsequent editions.
• Rabbit, Run is followed by three more ‘Rabbit’ novels, all published at the start of subsequent decades.
• Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990) by JOHN UPDIKE – the three ‘Rabbit’ sequels.
• Something Happened by JOSEPH HELLER – a dark study of the American dream and a failing marriage.
• The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. SALINGER (see here) – also deals with the alienating effect of modern life.
• On the Road by JACK KEROUAC – the flip side of Rabbit, Run.