Updike's Rabbit Still Running in My Brain

A star high school basketball player, eight years after graduation, plays a back-alley pickup game with some kids. The years have not been kind to him, but he's still got the hoop dreams:

"He sinks shots one-handed, two-handed, underhanded, flat-footed, and out of the pivot, jump, and set. Flat and soft the ball lifts. That his touch still lives in his hands elates him. He feels liberated from long gloom. But his body is weighty and his breath grows short. It annoys him, that he gets winded."

Meet Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the often pathetic but always compelling hero of four novels by John Updike. Rabbit makes his first appearance in the scene quoted above from Rabbit, Run, published in 1960.

I first met Rabbit when I was a high school senior enrolled in an honors English class--you know, one of those self-designed lit courses where 17-year-olds basking in the listless days before graduation get to pick their own novels. My classmates chose such literary classics as The Outsiders, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Love Story. I, for some reason, picked up Rabbit, Run. Maybe I thought it was like that Watership Down book or maybe I was going through a Trix cereal phase….I don't know.

What I do know is that my life changed forever on that day 20 years ago when I picked up the paperback by a writer I'd never heard of. John Updike. I suppose to my 17-year-old mind, he sounded like someone who knew a thing or two about composing sentences. Little did I know.

Few other writers--apart from Richard Ford, Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver--have had a bigger impact on how I read and write. John Updike does know how to string words together and I would argue that, pound for pound, there is no modern writer who does a better job at delivering sentences that sing like a suburban opera.

When I brought Rabbit, Run to my English teacher and announced I'd chosen it for my latest book report, he raised an eyebrow and said, "Are you sure you want to pick this book?" You see, Updike had been raising eyebrows all across America since the publication of Rabbit, Run for its sexual explicitness and unapologetic portrayal of adultery.

"Yes, I'm sure this is the one," I answered. I couldn't turn back at this point because I'd already read the first 30 pages of the novel. I knew I'd stumbled upon literary greatness.

My English teacher lowered his eyebrow and nodded. "You can't go wrong with Updike." (This was the same teacher who'd been writing a novel of his own on the side, called The Scatological Implications of Bricklaying. So, I guess he knew a thing or two about being open-minded.)

I happily plunged into Rabbit, Run, hot-blooded teenager that I was. From the start, I identified with Rabbit's eternal soul-search. Here was a restless character trying to outrun the mundane, day-to-day existence of his post-high school life. I think I was just pessimistic enough to see myself slouching along in Rabbit's shoes in another 10 years.

[Happy-ever-after note: It hasn't been all that bad.]

Rabbit Angstrom has been one of the most talked-about characters in all of modern literature--right up there with his partner-in-desperation, Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman. Rabbit, in this novel at least, is the all-American sad-sack. His marriage is in the shallows, heading for the rocks; his athletic glory is fading; and then, to top it off, he goes and falls in love with a prostitute. It's a grim look at American society and, yes, the female characters aren't always presented in the best of lights. But, misogyny aside, there is so much to admire in the way Updike nails realism to the page.

Updike's strength lies in his economy. Here, for instance, is how Rabbit sees his alcoholic wife Janice: "She is a small woman whose skin tends toward olive and looks tight, as if something swelling inside is straining against her littleness. Just yesterday, it seems to him, she stopped being pretty."

I know of few other sentences in modern literature that have the kind of impact those do. There's a universe of regret in those 33 words.

One scene that still burns bright in my brain after 20 years comes early in the novel when Rabbit tries to run away from home. Driving aimlessly through southern Pennsylvania, he gets hopelessly lost, then more and more desperate as nothing looks familiar:

"The road is broad and confident for miles, but there is a sudden patched stretch, and after that it climbs and narrows. Narrows not so much by plan as naturally, the edges crumbling in and the woods on either side crowding down. The road twists more and more wildly in its struggle to gain height and then without warning sheds its skin of asphalt and worms on in dirt. By now Rabbit knows this is not the road but he is afraid to stop the car to turn it around."

I read sentences like that and all I can say is "Wow" in a reverent, hushed tone of voice.

In an introduction to the Rabbit novels, Updike described how he composed this book: "As I sat at a little upright desk in a small corner room of the first house I owned....writing in soft pencil, the present-tense sentences accumulated and acquired momentum. It was a seventeenth-century house with a soft pine floor, and my kicking feet, during those excited months of composition, wore two bare spots in the varnish."

I know exactly what he means. There were two bare spots on the tile floor under my desk in that English classroom 20 years ago.

[Note: Everyman's Library has bound all four Rabbit novels into one volume. When you combine Rabbit, Run with Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, the result is quite an astounding tome. And when I say "tome," I'm talking about 1,516 pages between two covers--the kind of book that Arnold Schwarzenegger bench-presses for 20 minutes every morning before breakfast. It's heavy reading--in more ways than one.]