Rabbit, Run

Plot summary

Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, formerly a high school basketball star, is now 26, and has a job selling a kitchen gadget named MagiPeeler. He is married to Janice, who was a salesgirl at the store where he once worked, and who is now pregnant. They live in Mount Judge, a suburb of Brewer, Pennsylvania, and have a two-year-old son named Nelson. Harry believes that his marriage is corrupt, and finds middle-class family life unsatisfying. On the spur of the moment, he leaves his family and drives south, in an attempt to "escape". After getting lost, he returns to his home town, but 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 he soon 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 pressures Ruth into performing fellatio on him. The same night, Harry learns that Janice is in labor, 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 her invitation to come in for a coffee as a sexual invitation. When he declines the invitation for coffee, stating that he has a wife, she angrily slams the door on him. 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 despite her postnatal condition. When she refuses and accuses him of treating her like a prostitute, Harry leaves, yet again, in an attempt to resume his relationship with Ruth. Finding her apartment empty, he spends the night at a hotel.

The next morning, still distraught at Harry's new departure, Janice gets drunk and accidentally drowns Rebecca June in the bath tub. The other main characters in the book except Harry soon learn of the accident and gather at Janice's parents' home. Later in the day, unaware of what has happened, Harry calls Reverend Eccles to see how his return home would be received. Reverend Eccles shares the news of his daughter's death, and Harry returns home immediately, although in a somewhat aloof way. Tothero later 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.

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 missing the feeling he has attempted to grasp during the course of the novel; his fate is uncertain as the novel concludes.

Characters

Harry Angstrom - a.k.a. Rabbit, a 26-year-old man. Married to Janice Angstrom. He was a basketball star in high school and begins the novel as a kitchen gadget salesman.

Miriam Angstrom - a.k.a. Mim, Rabbit's 19-year-old sister.

Mr. Angstrom - Rabbit's father.

Mrs. Angstrom - Rabbit's mother.

Janice Angstrom - Rabbit's wife.

Nelson Angstrom - Harry and Janice's 2-year-old son.

Rebecca June Angstrom - Harry and Janice's infant daughter.

Mr. Springer - Janice's father. A used car dealer.

Mrs. Springer - Janice's mother. She is harshly critical of Harry when he leaves Janice.

Jack Eccles - a young Episcopal priest. He tries to mend Harry and Janice's broken marriage.

Lucy Eccles - Jack Eccles's wife. She blames the lack of love in her marriage with Jack on his job taking up too much of his time.

Fritz Kruppenbach - the Angstroms' Lutheran minister. He tells Jack Eccles that Harry and Janice are best left to themselves.

Ruth Leonard - Rabbit's mistress with whom he lives for three months. She is a former prostitute and lives alone in an apartment for two people. She is weight-conscious.

Margaret Kosko - a friend of Ruth's. Probably also a prostitute. She is contemptuous of Tothero.

Mrs. Smith - a widow whose garden Rabbit looks after while away from his wife. She is 73 years old.

Marty Tothero - Rabbit's former basketball coach. He was popular in high school but got dismissed from his job due to a 'scandal'. He cheats on his wife but gives marital advice to Harry. After suffering two strokes, he becomes disabled.

Ronnie Harrison - One of Rabbit's former basketball team-mates. He has slept with Margaret Kosko and Ruth Leonard.

Rabbit and Angstrom

A rabbit is "a person likened to a rabbit, typically in being timid or ineffectual; a poor or novice player" and "a runner who intentionally sets a fast pace for a teammate during a long-distance race."

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.

Updike said in interviews that the name Angstrom was inspired by his reading of Kierkegaard and meant to suggest 'stream of Angst'.

Inspiration and historical context

Updike said that when he looked around in 1959 he saw a number of scared dodgy men who could not make commitments, men who peaked in high school and existed in a downward spiral. Their idea of happiness was to be young. Thus Rabbit, Run was born.

In 1959 America the Late modernism period was coming to an end, and Updike inherited the cultural legacy of Modernism. With this legacy, that lacks spiritual vitality and potent erotic traditions, Rabbit has no vocabulary to give voice to his sexual and spiritual conundrums and feelings. In the novel the norms of Modernism are being replaced with those of a new era with a desiccated view of spirituality and a revaluation of eroticism, things previously held constant and in some cases repressed in traditional American thought. Updike creates a character that is neither an intellectual nor a poet, but simply is an average middle class man who is overwhelmed by the shifting world around him. Unable to cope with feelings he cannot accurately express and dissatisfied with religion and the moral value structure presented to him, Rabbit chooses flight.

Sex

Updike said, "About sex in general, by all means let's have it in fiction, as detailed as needs be, but real, real in its social and psychological connections. Let's take coitus out of the closet and off the altar and put it on the continuum of human behavior." Rabbit has an animalistic obsession with sex rather than a romanticized vision. He uses superficial criteria to pick his partners. He is taken with Ruth because she "feels right" as long as she doesn't use a "flying saucer" (a diaphragm), and even compels her to fellate him during a particularly intense bout of physical desire. He seems to use intense sex to replace what is missing from his work and life at home. His sexual prowess also supplies him with the sense of identity that his basketball playing gave him.

Religion

For Updike, the particular etiology of Rabbit's sickness can be perceived as his distance from God, illustrated by his cavalier conversations with Eccles. The existing framework of religion and ethics should support his devotion to his marriage, job, and life, but he finds it utterly unsatisfactory. Rabbit is clearly a sinner and in some ways he is aware of that, but he still quests for some kind of religious meaning in his life, “Well I don’t know all this about theology, but I’ll tell you. I do feel, I guess that somewhere behind all this… there’s something that wants me to find it!”

Identity

Rabbit faces a deep-seated psychological identity crisis throughout the book. This is due somewhat to his affectionless relationship with his mother, which has at the very least given him cause to imagine matricidal and suicidal acts. Rabbit hungers for something more than what he has, for a return to the golden era of his youth, for the sexual comfort of his relationship with Janice, and for a worldview that fits his tumultuous emotions.

Vision of America

Rabbit, Run is set against the background of the America of the fifties. The Eisenhower era, apart from offering tremendous consumerist possibilities, urged Americans to renegotiate themselves to the postwar reality. The cultural atmosphere of the 1950s, charged by the politics of the Cold War, thus necessitated the phenomena of self-definition at all levels and in all areas of life. Alive to the mood of inner-directedness, Updike’s Rabbit considers himself “as a person in the process of becoming”. This involves his rejection of certain traditional aspects of American life in search of a satisfactory place in the world that is never really found, as the book ends with his fate uncertain.

Transience

Rabbit is always running, searching and questing for meaning. But while at times he finds himself enthralled with people, like his relationship with Ruth, his conversations with Eccles, and his initial return to his family, in the end Rabbit is dissatisfied and takes flight. Transience appears to be implicit in the character.

Reception

Rabbit, Run established Updike as one of the major American novelists of his generation. In the New York Times he was praised for his “artful and supple” style in his “tender and discerning study of the desperate and the hungering in our midst’s” American novelist Joyce Carol Oates has written that Updike is “a master, like Flaubert, of mesmerizing us with his narrative voice even as he might repel us with the vanities of human desire his scalpel exposes.” British novelist Martin Amis has seen the hand of a master in Rabbit at Rest, 1990, marveling, “This novel is enduringly eloquent about weariness, age and disgust, in a prose that is always fresh, nubile, and unwitherable.” Updike himself said Rabbit, Run was the novel most people associate him with even though other novels in the series won Pulitzer Prizes.

Literary significance

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.

Though it had been done earlier, as in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Albert Camus' The Fall, Updike's novel is noted as being one of several well regarded, early uses of the present tense. Updike stated:

Time magazine included the novel in its Time 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

Film adaptation

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 adapted from the novel by Howard B. Kreitsek, who also served as the film's producer; the poster reads

3 months ago Rabbit Angstrom ran out to buy his wife cigarettes. He hasn't come home yet.