He is young, but desperation already has set in.
A few pages into Rabbit, Run, Rabbit runs from his problems, including his pregnant wife, Janice. He finds his old basketball coach; but coach, too, is unmoored these days, and scandalized.
Coach finds Rabbit a prostitute named Ruth. Ruth and Rabbit spar but seem to enjoy being together. That sours, too, and soon, at the urging of a lonely local priest, Rabbit returns to reconcile with Janice, who just gave birth to their second child. But Rabbit himself is a child still, and a monstrous one, who spoils the fragile peace at home and runs back to Ruth. That goes bad. And back at home, the new baby drowns in the bathtub as a distraught Janice binge-drinks.
John Updike was 28 when he published Rabbit, Run, his second novel. He was noticing, he thought, a lot of guys who seemed to peak in high school, so Updike wrote about that and, for his efforts, won a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a reputation as a premier American writer. Updike wrote several sequels to Rabbit, Run; many critics consider this series Updike’s most important work.
This was only the second Updike novel I have read, the first being 1965’s Of the Farm. Unlike the elegant prose in Of the Farm, the writing style in Rabbit, Run borders on stream-of-consciousness—lots of rich imagery and detail relayed in flowing, haphazardly punctuated sentences filling page-long paragraphs. And this surprised and put me off a little because my concept of Updike is of a polished Northeastern intellectual, a writer for The New Yorker, a Man of Letters and so forth. Maybe there is no inconsistency there. But the writing was good, no doubt, so I stayed with it and, into the second half, I began enjoying it.
At times I also get the impression Updike was trying to remind the reader, Remember now, these are working-class folks, not too bright. But the main struggle was Rabbit himself. I have a soft spot for self-destructive, deeply flawed characters, which Rabbit certainly is; but he is also a conceited bastard who often treats people terribly and expresses barely enough desire to do otherwise.
Here are a couple of my favorite parts. Right in the middle of the book, Rabbit and Ruth are having one of their punchy talks and Ruth says: "You're so mug, is what gets me. Don't you ever think you're going to have to pay a price?" Then a couple pages and many words pass—her thoughts of him, of what she likes about Rabbit, of her past with men from early on, of this fling and her anxiety, of how Rabbit is so screwed up. Finally, the flow of her thinking leads into Rabbit's response:
... That was the thing about him, he just lived in his skin and didn't give a thought to the consequences of anything. Tell him about the candy bars and feeling sleepy he'll probably get scared and off he'll go, him and his good clean piece and his cute little God and his cute little minister playing golf every Tuesday. For the damnedest thing about that minister was that, before, Rabbit at least had the idea he was acting wrong but now he's got the idea he's Jesus Christ out to save the world just by doing whatever comes into his head. I'd like to get hold of the bishop or whoever and tell him that minister of his is a menace. Filling poor Rabbit full of something nobody can get at and even now, filling her ear, his soft cocksure voice answers her question with an idle remote smugness that infuriates her so the tears do come.
"I'll tell you," he says. "When I ran from Janice I made an interesting discovery." The tears bubble over her lids and the salty taste of the pool water is sealed into her mouth. "If you have the guts to be yourself," he says, "other people'll pay your price."
Another good line comes when Rabbit returns after the baby has drowned, and his father in-law tells him the undertaker has the body.
Rabbit wants to cry out, it seems indecent, for the undertaker to be taking such a tiny body, that they ought to bury it in its own simplicity, like the body of a bird, in a small hole dug in the grass. But he nods. He feels he will never resist anything again.
