Unlike Sal Paradise and Kerouac’s merry gang of contemporaries, Rabbit’s attempt at escape is an altogether unsuccessful affair. Updike, himself a 26-year-old father of two at the time of writing, uses Rabbit as a way to see parts of the country a writer like him would never venture to, “a ticket to the America all around me”.
Rather than beating morality into his readers, Rabbit gives Updike a means to explore the urges that exist in everyone – however secretly. If that seems a tad moralistic for some people’s taste, it was not intended to be. Rabbit, Run was, he said, “meant to be a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road – the people left behind get hurt”. Today it not readily possible to go dark or start up a new life.Updike said that he conceived of the novel, written in 1959, as a riposte to Jack Kerouac’s 1957 beatnik classic On the Road. I found similarly remarkable how much effort the characters had to make to get in touch with one another, and how when Rabbit leaves town at the beginning of the book, he is just able to disappear. It was pausing to read by the scenes of pregnant women drinking and everyone smoking all the time. In the sense of being self-absorbed, acting only almost only on feeling, and absconding on your loved ones and responsibilities, Rabbit was apparently (and in several ways lamentably) a trendsetter. The world from the 1950s/60s was better and worse in a lot of ways that today. dropped all my responsibilities and took to the hills, so to speak (but literally in this classic)? Whether it be to get away from a dead-end job, or a lousy family life, just go. The author does a great job getting in the minds of many of us post-modern folks who have at least once have thought: what if I just ran away. Nevertheless, the book is well written, and every so often Updike's prose hits an astonishing high. I found some of the text focused and clear, while other parts were disjointed, particularly at times dialogue between the characters. Rabbit Angstrom is a 20-something guy who walks out on his pregnant and alcoholic wife, Janice, and begins an affair with Ruth, a woman who, shall we say, has a reputation for getting around.
Nevertheless, I found it to be pretty bleak, dripping with melancholy and hopelessness. Published in 1960, the book has some prominent and explicit sex scenes. Rabbit Run appears on many 20th Century American literature lists. You don't care about right or wrong you worship nothing but your own worst instincts." "The truth is you're monstrously selfish.
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