John Updike's novel, Rabbit, Run, is about a man named Harry Rabbit Angstrom. Rabbit is a brainless guy whose career as a high school basketball star peaked at age 18. In his wife's view, he was, before their early, hasty marriage, already drifting downhill. We meet him for the first time in this novel, when he is 22, and a salesman in the local department store. Married to the second best sweetheart of his high school years, he is the father of a preschool son and husband to an alcoholic wife. We are at ground zero watching Rabbit struggle with aging, religion, sexuality (particularly sexuality), nature, and the trade-offs between freedom and attachment, and rebellion and conformity. In witnessing Rabbit wrestle with these big issues in his blundering, but persistent, way, we come to understand the commonality of the human experience. Reading Updike's sentences is a breathtaking experience. He has a rare ability to transpose ordinary experiences into rarefied grounds without falsely heightening experiences themselves. Each sentence, each event in the novel is carefully considered and calibrated, so that no sentence or description seems wasteful. The technical facility of Updike is truly something to marvel at, even surpassing the lyricism of Cheever. The way he writes about sex, adultery and guilt in this book is unparalleled in 20th century American fiction, and I haven't seen any other writer come close. Taken as an individual novel, however, it fails to rise to the status of a 'great american novel.' Although the writing is unsurpassingly beautiful, the plot is a bit thin, and ideas it expresses, commonplace. Minus the prose, the story tracks the wanderlust and guilt of Harry Angstrom, a man who still wants to hold on to his glorious boyhood, and seeks to escape his oncoming adulthood and life of ordinariness. It's a well-traveled premise for a novel, but executed and polished to a hilt. As we see Rabbit Angstrom struggle to keep ...
