Rabbit, Run
by John Updike
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Book Summary Information
Author: John UpdikeEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1996-08-27
ISBN: 0449911659
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Book Reviews of Rabbit, Run
Book Review: A Literary Gem
Summary: 5 Stars
I suspect that many people don't know how to approach or evaluate a work of this type. Updike is a realist, which is to say that the fiction he writes is a reflection of the way things are, not a parable of the way the writer thinks things should be or a construction of an imaginary world. The reader will look in vain for an honorable protagonist, a fascinating mystery, many laughs, world-shaking events or major crimes. Updike's books are pretty much limited to tales of ordinary people doing ordinary things. This has brought complaints from both readers and the critics, throughout his long career, that his subject matter is trivial. But limiting the subject matter like this means that the books have to succeed based on their literary merits, and that is a very difficult thing to pull off.
Updike has wonderful skills in characterization, a poet's love of words and a musician's feel for their sound. The artistry of his prose is superb, better than that of nearly all of his contemporaries. Some of his finest phrases, although they may start out sounding rather mundane, contain delightful unexpected semantic twists that bring them to life. Two examples from Rabbit, Run are: From the first page: "The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires." From the first chapter, a sentence concerning Rabbit's intentions in his mad, aimless drive south: "He doesn't want to go down along the water anyway; his image is of himself going right down the middle, right into the broad soft belly of the land, surprising the dawn cottonfields with his northern plates."
Rabbit, Run is the first novel of the Rabbit series (there are five of them at this point by the way, not four as you might guess by the fact that only the first four have been published in the same volume) and in some ways I like it the best. Updike's trademark long run-on sentences, which can seem confusing or even annoying, are here cut to a minimum. Also I like the way he uses the mountain so effectively and consistently as a symbol of the line between innocence and vice.
As is the case in most of Updike's novels, this one has religion as one of its central themes. There is an ongoing debate in it about the existence of God. One interesting twist, though, is that the profligate, Rabbit, is the believer and the minister, Eccles, is the skeptic.
James Joyce, the pioneering twentieth-century English-language realist, whom Updike has acknowledged as one of his influences, once remarked that if the city of Dublin was destroyed it could be rebuilt from the information contained in the pages of his novel Ulysses. I'm not sure whether or not one could quite do that with the Reading, Pennsylvania area with the Rabbit novels. But I do know that, back in 1977, I was driving for only the second time in my life through southeastern Pennsylvania. I had read Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux, the only books of the series that had been written at that point. I didn't know where they had supposedly taken place. For all I knew there may really have been a Brewer, PA. But as I rounded a corner on the highway, I gasped: There, spread before me, was the flowerpot-red city nestled along the river and the mountain rising directly behind it with a hotel at the top. The city was called "Reading." When I saw on the map that the town directly on the other side of the mountain was named "Mount Penn," I was sure that it must have been the prototype for Updike's "Mount Judge." It wasn't until nearly a decade later though, after I had relocated to a city not far away, that I verified that I had been right.
All of the Rabbit books, which were written at ten-year intervals, are also fascinating encapsulations of the eras in which they were written and their effects on the characters. So it is with Rabbit, Run. If your impression of small-town American life in the 1950's is epitomized by Leave it to Beaver on the one hand and Grease on the other, this book will give you a more realistic idea of it.
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