Analysis
The quality distinguishing John Updike’s fiction and putting him in the front rank of novelists at an unusually young age is his ability to “get into” his characters, to experience their palpable worlds as they experience them, and to convey these experiences in prose that is at once rich and translucent. He is in that stream of post-Realism that conceives life as it is broadly and inclusively, that finds in the ordinary enough of the extraordinary to excite the poetic imagination without forsaking thorough grounding in quotidian reality. Beyond this, faint but perceptible, is a tough intellectual and religious concern for values, appearing in his fiction not so much as the assertion of one given value system or the other but rather as a constant probing of conflicts of evaluation as these arise in tangible experience.
So much is Updike a novelist of experience and its normative repercussions that a plot precis as such can be misleading; Updike is concerned with experience in its fullness and not events in their succession, and what happens in his fiction is not mirrored accurately by a historical timetable. This is not to say that Updike’s fiction is the fiction of pure sensibility. Updike—partly by means of a perspective maintained carefully by an empathizing yet detached narrator—is concerned with experience: not simply what happens or what a character feels, but with the whole complex of interactions among events, perception, emotion, and reflection that makes up experience.
With these qualifications of plot in mind, the action of RABBIT, RUN can be summarized. Harry Angstrom, nicknamed “Rabbit,” was once an extraordinary high school basketball player. He is now, at age twenty-six, a salesman of a household gimmick, “Magipeel.” He has a mousy, somewhat alcoholic, pregnant wife, Janice, and a small son, Nelson. On a spring afternoon Rabbit, full of the energy of the season, stops to play basketball with a group of teenage boys. In the game, in the memories it brings to him, and in the air, there is a promise of life. At home, however, he finds his wife drinking and watching a children’s television program; she has made a stupid purchase; and she has left their son at his parents’ house and their car at hers. Rabbit goes to collect these, but, when he gets to his parents’ house, he gives in to a sudden impulse to run away. He picks up the car and begins to drive, feeling furtive, never quite free, even though he drives all the way into West Virginia; finally, for no special reason except that he does not feel the freedom he had hoped for, he turns back.
Instead of going home, he seeks out his former basketball coach, Marty Tothero, who, since Rabbit’s high school days, has been fired for being involved in a scandal and now lives in a broken-down hotel. Rabbit goes to him, presumably, for advice; Tothero seems at first willing to give it but finally does nothing more than get him a bed for the day and, for the evening, a date with Ruth Leonard, a sometime prostitute. Rabbit pays her to take him home; they make love, and he decides to move in with her.
The next morning, Palm Sunday, he goes back to his apartment to pick up some clothes. Jack Eccles, a young Episcopalian minister, is there; he has been asked by Janice’s family to help them. Rather than pressure Rabbit, however, Eccles, a progressive, “soft-sell” minister, merely talks to him and arranges a golf date for two days later.
Under the direction of Eccles, an interim arrangement is established....
(This entire section contains 1248 words.)
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Rabbit works as a gardener for Mrs. Horace Smith, plays golf with the minister, and continues to live with Ruth. Eccles, on whom the novel now begins to focus, visits Rabbit’s and Janice’s parents, searching for the core of the problem, finding nothing but inertia. Rabbit pushes Ruth toward a kind of total intimacy that finally, ironically, comes to stand between them; he also gets her pregnant. When Janice’s baby is born, Rabbit deserts Ruth, comes home, takes a new job in his father-in-law’s used-car lot, and for a short while, feels wonderful. Yet when Janice comes home, he wants to make love; she, of course, cannot. He leaves looking for Ruth but finally spends the night in a hotel, and Janice begins to drink. Finally, completely drunk, she tries to give the baby, Rebecca, a bath and accidentally drowns her. Rabbit comes back once again, but at the burial, after pleading that he is innocent, he cannot stand what he thinks are the accusing stares of the mourners, and he runs again. He goes to Ruth and pleads with her to have their baby; she too rejects him. With his guilt and responsibilities crowding him, he begins once again to run.
Rabbit Angstrom embodies a vital principle; his name suggests animal and electrical energy, unhumanized. Running is the pure expression of this energy, whether it be toward or away from something, or, as in the end, just running. Once, as a high school basketball player, Rabbit had found an organized human use for that energy; now he finds only an occasional productive outlet for it—making love, working in Mrs. Smith’s garden, hitting one good golf shot, taking care of his clothes. For the most part, he finds that human involvements frustrate his natural energies and that his gracefulness and desire for the kind of beauty he found in basketball games are resented by others.
By making the minister and his wife Lucy important characters in the novel, Updike suggests that Rabbit presents not only a social problem but also a quasi-theological one. Eccles, foolish and often ridiculous, is nevertheless a minister trying to minister, and he points to a truth about Rabbit: that Rabbit (Updike suggests this very lightly) is suffering a religious crisis, even the religious crisis, of separation from God, and the concomitant modern crisis of a lack of faith in the presence of some Grace by which God will bridge this separation. Eccles is the last of a series of should-be guides for Rabbit, following his parents and his coach. From Eccles’ point of view—and Eccles’ point of view is included in the novel—Rabbit is a special case, for Rabbit has, or seems to have, a physical and emotional, if not quite spiritual, “touch”: Rabbit has experienced some of the things that Eccles must assume. He knows Grace, at least in its physical analogues; hence the enigmatic epigram from Pascal: “The motions of Grace, the hardness of the heart; external circumstances.”
Rabbit is also the beginning of something special for Updike. In this novel, he begins to go beyond the bounds of Realism, or rather to probe for a meaningful use of both realistic and mythic materials. Here he probes the living myths of contemporary America; the belief in physicality, the paradoxes of escape and movement, the image of the athlete as the cultural hero, the legends of love. He does so with considerable success. Indeed, it is arguable, though at this early date relatively unimportant, that RABBIT, RUN is a fine work in its picture of life lived on the edge of the abyss, of youth without spiritual resource, of a society that breeds emotional waste and squalor because of its disregard for the gap between fact and value in the lives of the unready and the immature.
