| Rabbit, Run | |
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First edition cover |
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| Author(s) | John Updike |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf |
| Publication date | November 12, 1960 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 265 pp |
| ISBN | NA |
| Followed by | Rabbit Redux |
Rabbit, Run is a 1960 novel by John Updike. The novel depicts five months in the life of a 26-year-old former high school basketball player named Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, and his attempts to escape the constraints of his life. It spawned several sequels, including Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit At Rest, as well as a related 2001 novella, Rabbit Remembered.
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Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is 26, has a job selling a kitchen gadget named MagiPeeler, and is married to Janice, a former salesgirl at the store where he worked. They have a two-year-old son named Nelson, and live in Mount Judge, a suburb of Brewer, Pennsylvania. He believes that his marriage is a failure and that something is missing from his life: Having been a basketball star in high school, Harry finds middle-class family life unsatisfying. On the spur of the moment, he decides to leave his family and drive south in an attempt to "escape." However, after getting lost, he returns to his home town. Not wanting to return to his family, he instead visits his old basketball coach, Marty Tothero.
That night, Harry has dinner with Tothero and two girls, one of whom, Ruth Leonard, is a part-time prostitute. Harry and Ruth begin a two-month affair, and Harry moves into her apartment. During this time, Janice moves back into her parents' house and the local Episcopal priest, Jack Eccles, befriends Harry in a futile attempt to get him to reconcile with his wife. Nonetheless, Harry remains with Ruth until the night he learns that she had a fling with his high school nemesis, Ronnie Harrison. Enraged, Harry coerces Ruth into to fellating him. The same night, Harry learns that Janice has given birth, and he leaves Ruth to visit his wife at the hospital.
Reunited with Janice, Harry returns home with her and their daughter, named Rebecca June. Harry attends church one morning and, after walking the minister's wife Lucy home, interprets an invitation from her to come in for a coffee as a sexual advance. When he refuses, she slams the door on him in apparent disgust. Harry returns to his apartment, and, happy about the birth of his daughter, tries to reconcile with Janice. He encourages her to have a whiskey, then, misreading her mood, pressures her to have sex in spite of her postnatal condition. When she refuses and accuses him of treating her like a prostitute, Harry dry humps her, punches her, then leaves her in an attempt to reunite with Ruth. Distraught, Janice gets drunk, and accidentally drowns Rebecca June in the bath tub.
Tothero visits Harry and suggests that the thing he is looking for probably does not exist. At Rebecca June's funeral, Harry's internal and external conflicts result in a sudden proclamation of his innocence in the baby's death. He then runs from the graveyard, pursued by Jack Eccles, until he becomes lost.
After wandering in the woods, Harry returns to Ruth and learns that she is pregnant by him. Though Harry is relieved to discover she has not had an abortion, he is unwilling to divorce Janice. Harry abandons Ruth, still chasing the fleeting feeling he has attempted to grasp during the course of the novel; his fate is uncertain as the novel concludes.
Margaret Kosko, a friend of Ruth's. Probably also a prostitute. She is contemptuous of Tothero.
A rabbit is "a person likened to a rabbit, typically in being timid or ineffectual; a poor or novice player"[3] and "a runner who intentionally sets a fast pace for a teammate during a long-distance race."[4]
Besides its other associations, Updike may have chosen the name Rabbit for his character for its echo of Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, whose main theme "focuses on the power of conformity, and the vacuity of middle-class American life." This is unlikely, however, as Updike claims not to have read Lewis's novel until after he wrote Rabbit at Rest.[5]
Updike said in interviews that the name Angstrom was inspired by his reading of Kierkegaard and meant to suggest 'stream of Angst'.
The text of the novel went through several rewrites. Knopf originally required Updike to cut some "sexually explicit passages," but he restored and rewrote the book for the 1963 Penguin edition and again for the 1995 Everyman's omnibus edition.[9]
Though it had been done earlier, as in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Camus' The Fall, Updike's novel is noted as being one of several well regarded, early usages of the present tense. Updike stated:
| “ | In Rabbit, Run, I liked writing in the present tense. You can move between minds, between thoughts and objects and events with a curious ease not available to the past tense. I don't know if it is clear to the reader as it is to the person writing, but there are kinds of poetry, kinds of music you can strike off in the present tense.[10] | ” |
Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.[11]
In 1970, the novel was made into a film directed by Jack Smight and starring James Caan as Rabbit, Carrie Snodgress as Janice and Jack Albertson as Marty. The script was co-written by Updike and Howard B. Kreitsek.[12][13] The poster reads, "3 months ago Rabbit Angstrom ran out to buy his wife cigarettes. He hasn't come home yet."[14]
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