When you tell kids they are special then they grow up to be monsters. This is the problem John Updike confronts us with in his novel Rabbit Run. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom was the star of his high school basketball team but after graduation he got married and stuck in a mundane, dead-end job. As the story begins he runs away from his pregnant and alcoholic wife, leaving her with their toddler son. When Rabbit drives off from his Pennsylvania town, he stops at a gas station and asks the attendant for directions. The man wants to know where he is going and Rabbit’s answer is that he doesn’t know. The attendant says something to the effect of, “Directions won’t do you any good if you don’t know where you are going.” This summarizes Rabbit’s whole problem; his life has no direction, no meaning, and, aside from sex, he doesn’t know what he wants out of life.
The first thing to note about this novel is Updike’s writing style. Large parts of the narrative are stream of consciousness prose inherited directly from Joyce and Proust. This prose hangs like a dense fog over the narrative, getting deflated when contrasted with the straightforward and deceptively plain dialogue the characters engage in. The writing works on a high and low level with the abstract prose being like a secret communication between the author and the audience since most of the characters do not possess enough intellect to be able to comprehend such lofty and abstract thought. The stronger part of the writing is contained in the dialogue and this is where most of the character development takes place. While the higher level prose churns along and moves slowly, the down to Earth dialogue moves the novel along at a faster pace. This is a dialogue-driven story and the characters come to life mostly when they speak. Each one of them is distinct and unique, clearly introduced into the story so that we get a clear picture of who they are. But the contrast between the abstract prose and the simpler, more accessible conversations serves to emphasize the ordinariness of the people in the story. If Updike is a master of anything, he is a master of building literary personas through what the characters say.
So Rabbit ends up returning to his home town and meeting up with his high school basketball coach, Tothero, who gives him a temporary place to stay. Tothero personifies the two end points of a continuum on which Rabbit runs back and forth, kind of like the baskets on either side of a basketball court. On one hand, Tothero counsels Rabbit to return to Janice, his wife. On the other hand, Tothero later takes him to meet his prostitute date and introduces him to another woman named Ruth. Tothero, who is married himself, knows what the right thing to do is but chooses to do the wrong thing anyways. He appears in two key turning points in the story, once when he introduces Rabbit to Ruth and later when he is in the same hospital where Janice is having her second child. In this second appearance he again counsels Rabbit to stay with Janice and support his family.
Rabbit is immediately enamored with Ruth. She is sexually uninhibited and promiscuous. Sometimes she prostitutes herself to make money. This is how Rabbit ends up at her apartment where they sleep together, only Rabbit decides to hang around and be her new boyfriend.
The other major character is Eccles, a well-meaning Methodist minister who tries to steer Rabbit back to his family responsibilities. It is through Eccles that we see how charming Rabbit can be. The minister is taken in by his self-confidence and the two become close friends and golf partners. Eccles eventually convinces Rabbit to return to Janice but his desire to see good in Rabbit blinds him to the reality of what Rabbit is all about. Eccles can not see that his wife might be easily seduced by Rabbit and he also does not address how Rabbit should handle his newfound relationship with Ruth.
Rabbit is not only charming to Eccles, he also has an easy time getting along with most everyone else. When Rabbit decides to return to Janice, she welcomes him with open arms and her family is willing to forgive him. As the other characters rally to his side, the reader can feel inspired by his desire to make amends, do the right thing, and redeem himself. Just when you feel comfortable about rooting for him, big problems arise and Rabbit lets us all down by doing what is entirely wrong. The way that Updike builds up our expectations for his redemption is what makes Rabbit such an infuriating character in the end. After finishing the book, if you don’t hate Rabbit you’ve entirely missed the whole point. Even worse, if you hate the book because you hate Rabbit then you aren’t being honest about the power of John Updike’s writing and have also entirely missed the point.
In the end, you aren’t supposed to like Rabbit because he represents everything Updike sees as being wrong in America in the post-World War II generation. He not only lacks maturity and direction but also his concepts of freedom and hedonism are driven by a lack of responsibility. What makes Rabbit even more tragic is that he is capable of living like an adult but in the end he is a coward and runs from his difficulties rather than confronting them. Just like a timid rabbit in the wild. His self-confidence is nothing but a cover for his shallowness.
But Updike doesn’t just condemn Rabbit. This novel is a portrait of a soulless American society as well, a society that is collectively failing its own citizens. Rabbit inhabits a world where work is meaningless and his marriage is like a prison. His wife is not very smart and their parents are shortsighted and lack wisdom themselves. The church is a bastion of dullness and senility, a mild entertainment for feeble-minded old ladies. We can feel an ounce of sympathy for Rabbit because he is like a drowning man who is nowhere near a life preserver so he indulges in sex because he isn’t intellectual enough to come up with any better solutions. Family, school, and church did not prepare him for life in the real world; you have to wonder why this star basketball player did not purse a career as a professional athlete. He got a job demonstrating vegetable peelers in a department store instead. So Rabbit went amok by thinking with the wrong head like so many other men throughout the ages. Though he really doesn’t have any problems that can’t be worked through with the proper amount of effort.
In writing Rabbit Run, John Updike is telling us that America, at the end of the 1950s, has gone astray. It is a country that is spiritually and psychologically dead. For people who are blindly patriotic or unwilling to confront the types of problems our nation has had and does face now, this story can be a bitter pill to swallow. There might be times when it feels like Updike is kicking you in the stomach. If you feel like you’ve been assaulted in such a way then he has succeeded in getting his point across.
Updike, John. Rabbit Run. Fawcett Crest, New York: 1982.
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