Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
rabbit run, 10 April 2008
this is the first book i have ever read of john updikes.i cant say i enjoyed reading this,but i dont think i was meant to. the main protagonist harry " rabbit" angstrom is probably the most self centred and morally repugnunt individual i have ever read about, but that is the beauty of this book.you feel yourself appalled at rabbits moral bankrupcy.
you forget that he is a fictional character.this is a beautifully written book.for all his faults i think i might end up reading the futher adventures of rabbit.he may be self centred,but he is an interesting read.
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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The dreariness of a 'second rate' suburban existence..., 1 Mar 2007
This book tells the story of the once great college sportsman Harry 'rabbit' Angstrom, who at the age of twenty six has made nothing of his former talent and feels trapped in a loveless marriage, to an alcoholic wife who is unable to keep their home and young son under control. Rabbit is stifled by his dreary suburban existence and cannot escape the feeling that having once been a 'first rate' sportsman, being second rate just doesnt cut it. Unable to accept his life as it is, Harry walks out on his wife and child and begins a complicated journey to rid himself of his dull existence. Along the way, meeting his one time sports coach Mr. Tothero and striking up an odd friendship with a priest.
The book explores the suburban experience of an outsider, one who cannot conform to the life he has become tangled up in. In much the same manner as writers like John Cheever and Richard Yates, this book explores the disasterous effects of characters whose expectations of life have been seriously diminished.
This book is really well written and has a clear narrative voice, while the reader may not agree with Harry's actions, we cannot help but become immersed in his world. This book is the first of four 'Rabbit' books which follow Harry throughout his life, but also acts as a great introduction to Updike. Highly recommended!
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"He'll get by without his rabbit pie ... run, rabbit, run rabbit, run run run ...", 13 Aug 2008
'Rabbit, Run' is the first in a quartet of novels by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist that revolve around the varying fortunes of a former high school Basketball champion Rabbit Angstrom. All four novels were written at the end of the a decade and published at the beginning of the next, and give a subjective flavour of modern American life as lived in small-town mediocrity. Angstrom observes the rapid transformations of the late 1950s here, and later the 60s (Rabbit Redux), 70s (Rabbit is Rich) and 80s (Rabbit at Rest), but is rather buffeted by them, lucid but always overwhelmed.
Updike makes it clear in his fascinating afterword that Rabbit "was for me a way in - a ticket to America all around me. What I saw through Rabbit's eyes was more worth telling than what I saw through my own, thought the difference is often slight". Thus there is an exploratory unruliness to Updike's writing, an anything-goes, that enables the writer to abandon his lofty authorial seat and rove around, eyes wide open. It's a seedy, cynical novel with few really likeable characters. Visceral and provocative, it rarely shirks from a rather dank explicitness that belies it's early 1960s first publication (although, in fact, a number of forced original cuts have been reinstated here).
Despite the need to chronical the life and times Updike consciously avoids the bigger contemporaneous themes, but concentrates on what is lived and felt by ordinary people of the period. He delves with stealth, and without ceremony, into the perspective of a number of other characters, often in rambling stream-of-consciousness. One almost unpunctuated chapter depicts Rabbit's wife losing control in drunkedness and accidently drowning her baby. It's brutal and horrific, more so as the brakes are taken off the writing, expediting Janice's decline into drunken madness.
It is the stylistic freedom Updike permits himself which makes his writing so penetrating. He panders to no formalistic strictures, and thus - like Rabbit Angstrom - runs with irresponsible abandon into new predicaments. "Readers who expect novelists to reward and punish and satirize their characters from a superior standpoint will be disappointed", the author remarks in the afterword, "I sought to present sides of an unresolvable tension intrinsic to being human". 'Rabbit, Run' makes no concessions to resolution, and it begins the quartet as it continued, with a sense of maddening, but very human, indecisiveness.
Updike also adds in the afterword that Rabbit, Run was in part a conscious reaction to Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road', published a few years before, with its clarion call to break free from the constraints of conservative America. The book is an examination of "what happens when a young American family man goes on the road - the people left behid get hurt. There was no painless dropping out of the Fifties' fraying but still tight social weave". This is not to suggest Updike's novel is a cautionary note about the dangers of "cutting loose", but that it presents a bleakly unromantic alternative to the beat paradigm: that some people cannot extricate themselves from their lives cleanly or even satisfyingly. Certainly, there is nothing clean about Rabbit's escape, but a sense of bloody rupture suggested by his baby's premature death. "Boy, you really have the touch of death, don't you?", mocks Angstrom's prostitute mistress in the final chapter, and it is this morbid pallor that hangs inauspiciously over the whole novel. A vital, if dispiriting read.
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