Rabbit, Run

As a longtime admirer of his “early” short stories, forty years ago I turned to one of John Updike’s novels expecting more of the same – the same craft with words, the same attention to the mundane details of life transformed into glowing objects of beauty. I chose Of the Farm, published in 1965, the fourth of his twenty-three novels. It had the same attention to everdayness that I’d found in the stories, but, as one might expect, the pacing of the story was much more deliberate, the beautiful flourishes more widely spaced. 

I just finished reading my second Updike novel, Rabbit, Run, published in 1960 and I found it a rather hard comedown. The title refers to the nickname of Updike's hero of the story, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom and his only distinguishing feature: he runs away. He is no Huck Finn "lighting out" for the wilderness - for adventure. Nor is he Peer Gynt who abandons his home and the woman he loves to seek his fortune.

I’m not going to beat around the bush – even if it flushes out a rabbit. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is an asshole. He was intended to be a young American Everyman, circa 1959 - a former high school basketball star in his mid-twenties living in the suburbs of his mid-sized Pennsylvania hometown, in an apartment with a pregnant wife and a young son, driving a '55 Ford his father-in-law sold him at a discount, four weeks into a job demonstrating a kitchen gadget called a MagiPeeler in dime stores around town. Though Updike furnishes Angstrom's world with other characters and physical details that give it a breathing life of its own, the shadow of J. D. Salinger’s A Catcher in the Rye hangs over the story. But whereas Holden Caulfield's rebellions are fittingly those of an immature teenager, Angstrom's are merely preposterous. 

If the novel had been advertised as a comedy or even a satire (a satire that sails much too close to the reef), it might have been more palatable. Harry, whose customary reaction to the discomforts of middle class married life is to flee from them, is incapable of standing up to the pressures of having a stupid job and a pregnant alcoholic wife, incapable of resisting nearly every impulse to do and say the wrong thing when circumstances become too challenging for him, incapable of being anything close to the son that his parents - or the son-in-law for that matter that his wife’s parents - wanted, incapable of understanding that he isn’t desired by every woman he meets, incapable of facing his failure of practically everyone in his life. Updike sets us up for every one of Harry's stunts, and we are as astonished when they occur as the fictional people who witness them. (You must have a heart of stone if you fail to laugh out loud when he puts his foot in his mouth epically in the funeral scene.)

By the time he wrote Rabbit Redux in 1971, the unanticipated resumption of his chronicle of Rabbit Angstrom, Updike was well into his stride as an industrial writer of “beautiful” prose. I won’t be reading it any time soon, or any of the other Rabbit books, Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Rabbit At Rest (1990) and even Rabbit Remembered (2001). I had my say about the decline of Updike’s short stories a few years ago: 

Updike's beautiful prose, the beauty of which is by now banal, weaves a spell that sometimes illuminated the truth of a moment in time or a particular situation among his characters, but it was the beauty that drew him there and that continues to allure his readers. It is the beauty of a well-turned sentence or a pithily-expressed observation. They rarely provide enough light to illuminate the human soul. It is the beauty that moves us, not the exposed nerve, not the truth of the matter at hand. (“Leaf Season”)

Or, as Alfred Kazin said about Updike in his Bright Book of Life:

If poise is a gift, Updike is a genius. If to be "cool" is not just a social grace but awareness unlimited, Updike is the best of this cool world. All he lacks is that capacity for making you identify, for summoning up affection in the reader, which Salinger expressed when in The Catcher in the Rye he had Holden Caulfield reserve his praise for authors who make you want to call them up.