About this title: John Updike's highly acclaimed saga of desire and regret, first published in 1959, introduces Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a typical Middle American--small-town Protestant, former basketball star, married man intent on making a name for himself in the community--whose life begins to unravel when he falls in love and deserts his wife. Caught between ...
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Description: Good. 0449911659 NOTE PLEASE READ BEFORE PURCHASE! ! MUCH Earlier smaller reading copy only paperback same text exactly-Aside from newer introduction/afterward, the original text has not changed. Different cover. OLDER Used Condition with age discoloration, though book is holding together well for it's age. No writing or Highlighting in text, sold for content. read more
Description: Very Good. 0449911659 Paperback, Condition: Very Good; this book is in very good condition with light discoloration due to aging and other light wear. read more
Description: Very Good. 0449911659 Paperback, Condition: Very Good; this book is in very good condition with light curve to the spine / light reading creases to the covers. read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: B000IMHQ7K NOTE PLEASE READ BEFORE PURCHASE! ! MUCH Earlier smaller reading copy only paperback same text exactly-Aside from newer introduction/afterward, the original text has not changed. Different cover. OLDER Used Condition with age discoloration, lots of age tan, though book is holding together well for it's age-pages could be brittle. No writing or Highlighting in text, sold for content. read more
Binding: Perfect Bound Paper
Publisher: Fawcett
Date Published: 1963
Description: Good. Mass Market Paperback. 12mo-over 6¾"-7¾" tall. Moderate to heavy wear, light soiling, age-yellowing. Cant to spine, PON on FEP. read more
Description: New. Orders placed after Dec. 7 cannot be guaranteed delivery before Christmas. GREAT BUY. Brand New From US Distributor. WE ARE A 5 STAR SELLER with OVER 3, 500, 000 BOOKS SOLD. read more
"God, do I hate Rabbit Angstrom! How much do I hate him? If I was in a room with Hannibal Lector, the Judge from Blood Meridian, the Joker from Batman, and Rabbit Angstrom, and someone handed me a gun with only 3 bullets, I'd shoot Rabbit three times.
This is the first book by Updike I've read, and his reputation as a writer was well-earned. I'd had a vague idea that this story was about a former hot shot basketball player struggling to adjust to a regular life. I was completely unprepared for this spoiled, impulsive, selfish guy who really only cares about himself and his whims and manages to completely destroy almost everyone around him and still refuses to accept any responsibility for it.
It's obvious that Rabbit isn't meant to be a hero, or even an anti-hero. Updike does a masterful job of tricking you into initially liking Rabbit, even after he leaves his pregnant wife and son and takes up with a sorta-prostitute, but then slowly showing you Rabbit's true nature. And the trick is that it was right in front of you all along.
Brilliant book, and I'd planned to read the other Rabbit novels, but I honestly detested him so much that I don't know if I'll have the stomach for another one in the near future."
"This novel begins the great American story of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. It was the first Updike novel I ever read. I read this after reading his classic short story called "A&P" for a college lit course. I recall that the subject matter here was a little beyond my life experience but I was immediately drawn to his beautiful use of the English language. Nobody wrote like Updike. I would read and re-read his descriptions of say a widow's parlor or maybe the eighteenth hole of a local public golf course and just be tickled by his eye for descriptive detail. This novel captures Rabbit's struggle for identity and his running to and from maturity as he meets his first marriage crisis. Just the beginning of a fascinating journey."
"I didn't like this book when I first started reading it. If it hadn't been for the book club that chose this as its next read, I probably would not have gone past 100 pages, which is what I give a book before giving up on it. The language is glorious. "The cuticle moons on this fingernails are big." "His downstairs neighbor's door across the hall is shut like a hurt face." "Brewer spread(s) out below like a carpet, a red city, where they paint wood, tin, even red bricks red, an orange rose flowerpot red that is unlike the color of any other city in the world yet to the children of the county is the only color of cities, the color all cities are." "Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them." What stopped me from liking the book from the beginning was the main character, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a self-absorbed, fatuous jerk who, in a fit of contempt for all his life has become, walks out on his pregnant wife and their young son. Runs, actually. It's difficult to like a man whose main action is that of a man on the run from all his responsibilities. He takes up with a sometime prostitute named Ruth whom he literally sweeps off her feet, treats her with respect (though he does pay her that first night) and makes her feel, for the first time in a long time, like a person worthy of respect. Just by the power of his being. It's too bad, because her affection for him only reaffirms for Rabbit his righteousness. The world he left is one of confinement, stifling conformity, where responsibility to others is more important than satisfying one's own desires and urges.
The book dragged for me, until Reverend Jack Eccles appeared on the scene. He is Rabbit's wife's family's pastor (whew) and he carries the burden of bringing Rabbit back to the fold of society. Eccles is a man of principle, a man of faith, who believes in the sanctity of marriage. "Even bad marriages," he tells his wife, admitting to her that the marriage Rabbit has with Janice is, indeed, a bad one, one that should not go on. No matter. For Eccles, saving Rabbit means saving some part of himself, some part of him that has started to believe, maybe just a little, that there are no values left worth saving in the world. His wife, Lucy, is a non-believer, goes to church because her husband is the pastor, because it is her responsibility to go to church. In essence, Eccles must save Rabbit in order to save his own family life, his own wife, himself. Eccles is the calm voice of reason. He doesn't tell Rabbit that what he's doing is wrong. He becomes Rabbit's friend, gets him a job, plays golf with him once a week. In the end, he believes, Rabbit will realize on his own the err of his ways. He will return to his wife because he believes that deep down Rabbit is a good man, Rabbit understands his place in society, Rabbit will conform to what is expected of him because that is what he is supposed to do.
Eccles gave me sympathy for Rabbit, an understanding that what he feels is what we all feel, in a way. That society lays down rules and sometimes those rules are hard to follow. Taking place in an America of the 1950s gives the book that much more punch. Rabbit is the conscience of an America that is about to rise against the norms, that is about to give birth to beat poetry and free love and the civil rights movement and ERA. Rabbit is a member of a society whose sun is setting. The metaphorical conflict between Rabbit and Eccles is that of tradition versus rebellion. Eccles represents society as it is. Rabbit, in his struggle to break free, represents a society that can be. But in order for the rebellion to occur, Rabbit must break free of it. Must escape from it. Must run. I'm reminded as a write this of a 1970s science-fiction movie called Logan's Run, about a society that doesn't let anyone live past 30. When a person reaches this age, he or she is killed, promised that they will be reborn, their circle of life will continue. Logan 5 is himself both Eccles and Rabbit. He is charged by the powers that be with the task of uncovering a rebellion that threatens the stability of society, to find the underground movement known as Sanctity and destroy it. But in order to do this, he must himself become a runner, one who's time to die has come but who refuses to participate in the ritual and instead runs, attempts to escape the city and live outside. In the process of uncovering this Sanctity, he himself comes to believe that what society has told him all along may be wrong, that is is possible to live past thirty, that the norms and conformities that he has spent his life upholding may in fact be a lie. Logan 5 starts his story as Eccles, defending society, but in the end he becomes Rabbit, running because he realizes that the society in which he lives has no place for him. He must leave it in order to live.
Knowing that Updike wrote many more books about Rabbit Angstrom, I'm now interested in reading more of them. Where does Rabbit go now? How does his story match the progression of America during the latter half of the 20th Century? Because in essence that is what the book, and Rabbit's life, is about. America in the 20th Century."
""Everybody who tells you how to act has whisky on their breath."
"He wonders, is it just these people I'm outside or is it all America?"
"He wonders why there are so many signs coming back and so few going down."
Rabbit, Run has now taken a very special space on my pretty short list of Greatest American Novels. Pretty high up there. Perhaps if I wasn't raised in Salinas, John Updike may even eclipse John Steinbeck on my favorite author's list.
I have a feeling if I would have read this book at any other time in my life, I may have hated it. I can't say I relate to Rabbit, but I am on his wavelength. I don't have a wife or kids or too serious of a job or lack of a serious job, I should say. If I did I still wouldn't do what Rabbit does. But I get it. Rabbit is a jerk. He does some pretty horrible things. Is he to blame? Of course. Was there any other way around it? Probably. But not to Rabbit.
Life is short. And Rabbit wants to run. And he does.
Women:
"That wonderful way they have of coming forward around you when they want it. Otherwise just fat weight. Funny how the passionate ones are often tight and dry and the slow ones wet. They want you up and hard on their little ledge. The thing is play them until just a touch. You can tell: their skin under the fur gets all loose like a puppy's neck."
"The Mason Dixon line, The schoolroom in which he learned this recurs to him, the rooted desk rows, the scarred varnish, the milky black of the blackboard, the pieces of tight girlish ass packed all up and down the aisles in alphabetical order."
How to save your relationship:
"It was a mess as it was." "What sort of mess." "I don't know. My wife's an alcoholic." "And have you tried to help her?" "Sure. How?" "Did you drink with her?"
The Amish:
"No underpants. Fanatics. Worship manure."
Basketball:
"There was you and sometimes the ball and then the hole, the high perfect hole with its pretty skirt of net. It was you, just you and that fringed ring, and sometimes it came right down to your lips it seemed and sometimes it stayed away, hard and remote and small. It seemed silly for the crowd to applaud or groan over what you had already felt in your fingers or even in your arms as you braced to shoot or for that matter in your eyes: when he was hot he could see the separate threads wound into the strings looping the hoop.""
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