Rabbit, Run

The Run

Harry Angstrom is playing basketball with some kids in an alley when it comes over him: the sense of his own diminishment, the gap between what he was — the best player Brewer High had seen in a decade — and what he is. He drives home. His wife Janice is drunk in front of the television. He packs a bag and drives south.

Updike narrates Rabbit, Run almost entirely in the present tense — an unusual choice in 1960, still unusual now. The effect is to trap the reader in Rabbit’s body, in his immediate sensory experience, in the present moment that is all he seems capable of inhabiting. The novel has the rhythm of flight: urgent, restless, unable to hold still.

The Trap

Rabbit does not escape. He moves between his wife, a minister named Eccles who is trying to reconcile them, and Ruth, a woman in Brewer with whom he has an affair. The world will not let him run for long. Janice gives birth, then drowns the baby in a bathtub. The baby is not Rabbit’s fault and is Rabbit’s fault. He runs again.

Rabbit, Run is the first of four novels following Harry Angstrom across four decades: Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990). Together they form one of the major sustained portraits in American fiction. The first novel is the most kinetic and the least forgiving.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Rabbit, Run apart: The present-tense narration creates a kinetic immediacy that few American novels have matched; Rabbit’s irresponsibility is rendered without excuse or condemnation — Updike trusts the reader to hold the complexity; and The Pennsylvania small-town setting — its textures, its claustrophobia, its social hierarchies — is rendered with documentary precision. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Rabbit, Run give it weight beyond its surface narrative. The athlete who peaked at eighteen carries that peak as a wound — the present is always a diminishment of a remembered past. Running is not cowardice but a form of truthfulness — Rabbit knows the life he is in is wrong even if he cannot name what would be right. The American promise of mobility and reinvention collides with the American reality of responsibility and staying. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

John Updike’s prose in Rabbit, Run is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

Rabbit’s treatment of Janice and Ruth will test the sympathy of many readers — Updike does not soften it. The novel’s refusal of resolution is appropriate but demanding for readers expecting conventional moral reckoning. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Literary fiction readers interested in postwar American life and the origins of the suburban malaise novel, and Updike readers beginning the Rabbit tetralogy.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — One of the essential American novels of the 20th century; Rabbit’s run is the run of an entire culture.

Reading Guides

• Where to Start with John Updike
• Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike — Full Review
• Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates — Full Review

Updike and the Rabbit Series

Rabbit, Run was published in 1960 as John Updike’s second novel. It introduces Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, twenty-six years old, former high school basketball star, now married to a pregnant wife he is failing to support and working as a kitchen gadget demonstrator. The impulse to run — away from the apartment, toward the ambiguous south, back to his ex-coach Tothero, toward Ruth the prostitute — is not an argument for freedom but an examination of a specific American male psychology: the man for whom the present is always inferior to a past that feels like it was the real self.

The Tetralogy’s Architecture

Updike planned the Rabbit series as a chronicle of American middle-class life from 1959 to 1989: Rabbit Redux (1971) covers the late 1960s and the moon landing; Rabbit Is Rich (1981) the late 1970s oil crisis; Rabbit at Rest (1990) the Reagan years and the AIDS crisis. Updike added a coda novella, Rabbit Remembered, in 2001. The architecture is unusual in American fiction — a forty-year project tracking the same character through his forties, fifties, and sixties, using him as a way of reading what the country was doing at each point. The series has been compared in ambition and execution to Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.

The Tetralogy and Updike’s Method

Rabbit, Run was published in 1960; Updike returned to the character in Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990), spacing the novels approximately a decade apart to track Harry Angstrom aging through the decades of his adult life. Updike described his method as wanting to show the social fabric of America through a single ordinary consciousness; each novel registers the social and political changes of its decade — the 1950s conformity of Rabbit, Run, the 1960s upheavals of Rabbit Redux — through Harry’s limited but responsive awareness.