Eisenhower, the search for the Dalai Lama. It is a time in which Rabbit can support his stay-at-home wife and child on his meager salary from demonstrating the MagiPeel vegetable peeler at the five-and-dime store, a time in which a Chinese dinner for four totals $9.60, monthly rent on an apartment, $110. The economic and political stability of the late 1950s provided many young white men just out of the army, as Rabbit is, with opportunities to build the American Dream.

Rabbit Angstrom, however, suffers from the angst that inhabits his name. He is a feeling, not thinking, man who is ruled by his own worse instincts. He leaves work one March evening, when "things start anew," and crashes a pick-up game of basketball. Discovering that the boys he plays with have not just forgotten him, "worse, they never heard of him," Rabbit nonetheless is elated that the touch still lives in his hands. "Liberated from long gloom," he runs home, but there he feels trapped, "glued in with a lot of busted toys and empty glasses and television going and meals late and no way of getting out." He panics, then runs. The narrative begins, then, with his walking out on his pregnant wife, Janice, his toddler son, Nelson, and his sales job at the dime store. In the balance of the novel, Updike attempts to convey both the shock and the necessity for Rabbit's running.

This ordinary man's quest for "it," for that indefinable something that he knows is missing in his seemingly adequate life, is at the heart of this novel. This psychological search is particularly significant because it takes place not in the 1960s, the turn-on, drop-out decade, but in the tranquility of the Eisenhower years. Harry defines his choices in life as a dead-end job and a burned dinner with Janice or the freedom to run but with no place to go. Updike poses this dilemma which has no good answers, only uncertainty and ambiguity. Even though Rabbit abandons his family and moves in with a prostitute, even though he blindly follows his own sexual urges with no regard to his partners' wishes, he is at times portrayed as a mystic. Mrs. Smith, an elderly woman who hires him as a gardener, explains his unique quality as the "strange gift" of life. As his lover Ruth explains, "You haven't given up. In your own stupid way you are still fighting."

Updike refuses to takes sides in his treatment of Rabbit: readers get the thrill of breaking free from stultifying domesticity, but then we are forced to experience the terrible consequences of the lives he ruins by running. Much of that ruin is the result of Rabbit's sexual urges, which are played out in what was for the time highly explicit detail.

Rabbit finds a brief glimpse of satisfaction in sexual release, but this joy, too, is fraught with danger. His wife Janice is pregnant when he leaves, and his refusal to compromise his sexual satisfaction with Ruth by allowing her to use birth control results in yet another trap, another domestic crisis. In the novel's last scene, Ruth offers him the ultimate trap: marriage to Janice or marriage to her. At the end of the novel, Rabbit runs uphill once more, feeling as though he is a "blank space in the middle of a dense net," still searching, having violated the social contract once again.

Updike revealed his fascination with the notion of a downwardly mobile ex-basketball player in two previous short works. A short story, "Ace in the Hole," originally appeared in the New Yorker and was anthologized in 1955. Ex-basketball star Ace drives home to his ineffectual wife, Even, after being fired from his job, feeling "crowded" by his mother and his wife. Running the last few blocks, he is mesmerized by the sight of a kid across the street "dribbling a basketball around a telephone pole that had a backboard and net nailed on it." This scene, with few alterations, forms the opening of the later novel.

In 1958, he published the poem, "Ex-Basketball Player," about Flick, a player "with hands like wild birds" who holds the county scoring record "still." Also lost after his early athletic success, Flick now "sells gas/Checks oil, and changes flats." He once in a while "dribbles an inner tube," but "most of us remember anyway." At the gas station, Flick "stands tall among the idiot pumps," but he spends his life vainly awaiting the missing crowd's applause.

Updike periodically revisits Rabbit throughout the rest of his life, exploring both Rabbit's inner consciousness and the social and political climate of the United States at ten-year intervals. In Rabbit Redux (1971) Updike explores the summer of 1969, complete with racial and cultural tension, as the country first puts men on the moon. Janice is the run-away this time, leaving Rabbit for another man. Rabbit and his son Nelson bring Jill, a real teenage runaway, into their home, and both soon see Jill as a member of the family. Skeeter, one of Updike's rare African-American characters, enters the narrative as a drug supplier for Jill. Ten years later, America is embroiled in an oil crisis, and Rabbit and Janice, together again, have fortunately inherited a Toyota franchise. Set during a time of sexual indulgence, Rabbit is Rich (1981) explores the territory of the wife-swapping country-club set, a fairly familiar Updike theme. The final book in the tetrology features Rabbit, age 56, dealing with Reaganomics and his own mortality. This novel, Rabbit at Rest (1990), is divided into three segments: "FL," set in the Angstrom's condo on the Gulf coast (Rabbit finally makes it to that beach he headed for in the first novel); "PA", set back in Brewer in familiar territory; and "MI," which readers come to learn is set in the strange land of "myocardial infarctions."

According to Donald Greiner in John Updike's Novels, Updike originally subtitled the manuscript of Rabbit, Run "a movie," and he wrote the opening scene of Rabbit playing basketball with two young boys after work as background for the title and credits of the film. Greiner reports that Updike later realized that the film medium could not show the ambiguous nature of Rabbit's questing and therefore abandoned the screenplay idea.

However, in 1970 Warner Brothers produced and Jack Smight directed the film version of Rabbit, Run, which starred James Caan as Rabbit. Also featured were Jack Albertson and Anjanette Comer. The film, rated R, is still offered for sale, its topic listed as "A former high-school basketball player struggling with an unhappy marriage buckles under the pressures of responsibility." The film version, perhaps because of its inability to convey the moral ambiguities of the novel, was not well received by critics or the viewing public.

Erik Kielland-Lund, in New Essays on Rabbit, Run, mentions that "John Updike has said that the book is a product of the fifties and not really in a conscious way about" that era. Yet, Kielland-Lund observes that the novel vividly captures the American experience of the time, often with striking detail. Even when it was first published, people recognized the book as highlighting the "characteristics of society at that time": individualism, immaturity, religiosity, and a love for sports. Donald J. Greiner, in John Updike's Novels, notes that Updike himself mentioned in the foreword to the Modern Library edition that it was penned in 1959, using the present tense. The period in which it was written also encompassed the period of its narrative. Thus, the songs Rabbit hears on the radio, the news he listens to, and the fashions he observes were all typical of the late fifties. Greiner points out that Updike has remarked, "My fiction about the daily doings of ordinary people has more history in it than the history books."

The 1950s were often labeled as the age of conformity due to the strong emphasis on adhering to strict, often unquestioned, societal norms. People were encouraged to attend church, show patriotism, work diligently, and start families, without really questioning if these were their true desires.

In the 1950s, family stability was highly esteemed. Divorce rates fell, and birth rates increased. Society taught men and women that marriage and having children were the ultimate symbols of respectability and maturity—a sort of fairy tale ending of domestic happiness. They married younger than couples do today; Rabbit, at twenty-six, comments that he wed relatively late. Men were expected to be the primary breadwinners, ideally through business careers, while their wives stayed home to care for the children. However, for those who found this dream to be a nightmare, there were few constructive ways to escape.

Some individuals, like Rabbit's wife Janice, turned to alcohol and tranquilizers as a form of escape. Kielland-Lund notes these have been described as the "American housewife's answer to what [Betty Friedan] calls 'the problem that has no name.'" Separated from opportunities for meaningful work, these women often struggled with low self-worth, using tranquilizers and alcohol to cope with their daily lives.

In this decade, television emerged as the dominant form of communication and entertainment for the first time. Millions of Americans tuned in to watch sitcoms, family programs, and game shows, similar to the one Rabbit watches in Janice's hospital room:

The idea is all these women have tragedies they tell about and then get money according to how much applause there is, but by the time the M.C. gets done delivering commercials and kidding them about their grandchildren and their girlish hairdos there isn't much room for tragedy left.

Popular television programs like Leave It to Beaver and The Mickey Mouse Club portrayed ideal families and children who faced only minor, humorous issues. These shows reinforced the notion of a typical family consisting of a father, a mother, and children, while suggesting that divorce was rare and stigmatized.

During the 1950s, more Americans began enrolling in college, a trend primarily supported by the GI Bill. This government scholarship initiative provided affordable student loans to military veterans who had served in World War II.

At that period, the feminist movement was still a few decades away, and the prevailing attitudes towards women are evident in the literature of the time. Women were expected to fulfill roles as mothers, wives, or girlfriends, with little recognition of their lives outside of their relationships with men. A girl's wedding day was seen as the pinnacle of her life, and other contributions by women to society were often minimized.

As a realist, Updike highlights the darker aspects of this idealized vision: restrictions inevitably lead to rebellion, and the 1950s were no exception. Although it was an era marked by conformity, as noted by Sanford Pinsker in New Essays on Rabbit, Run, "the 1950s were also anxious, jumpy, and filled with rebelliousness." Rabbit Angstrom embodies this spirit of rebellion as he grapples with the constraints of family, work, and societal expectations.

Updike's Use of Metaphor

As Hermione Lee highlighted in the New Republic, Updike's writing transforms everything into a metaphor: every mundane object and event can symbolize something greater, often revealing a deeper truth. "This is the most metaphorical writing in American fiction, except for Melville's," she stated. Rabbit perceives everything as both significant and peculiar. Lee remarked on Updike's varied comparisons of Rabbit's heart, describing it as "a fist, an amphitheater, a drum, a galley slave, a ballplayer waiting for the whistle." In Updike, she observed, "no object, no creature, is too mundane or too intricate to be imbued with metaphor."

Rich Detail

Updike's work is distinguished by its detailed, precise depiction of everyday life. Lee referenced other critics who praised Updike's "meticulous taxonomy" of "the material nature of the world," and admired his ability to "salute and memorialize American superabundance." Updike devotes as much attention to the details of fleeting scenes as he does to pivotal moments, making each moment in the book, however minor, remarkably vivid. For instance, when Rabbit visits a roadside cafe for a late-night coffee, Updike narrates,

Somehow, though he can't pinpoint the distinction, he feels different from the other patrons. They sense it too and gaze at him with hard eyes, eyes like small metal studs embedded in the pale faces of young men seated three to a booth with a girl, the girls' orange hair resembling wiggly seaweed or loosely held with gold barrettes like pirate treasure. At the counter, middle-aged couples in overcoats lean their faces forward into the straws of gray ice-cream sodas.

In another scene, Updike describes a street corner: "Tall two-petalled street-sign, the cleat-gouged trunk of the telephone pole holding its insulation against the sky, fire hydrants like a golden bush: a grove." This level of detail persists throughout the book, combined with Updike's use of the present tense to make the narrative as vivid and immediate as a film. Moreover, it provides readers with a rich understanding of middle-class American life in the latter half of the twentieth century. Anthony Quinton noted in a Times (London) review that "what [the Rabbit books] amount to is a social and, so to speak, emotional history of the United States over the last twenty years or more."

Utilizing the Present Tense

Rabbit, Run stands out from many other novels by being entirely written in the present tense. Instead of narrating Rabbit's tale as a completed past event, Updike employs the present tense to infuse the story with an immediate, "this-is-happening-now" sensation, making readers feel as though they are directly involved in the action. For instance, when Rabbit is driving south to escape his home, Updike describes, "The road twists more and more wildly in its struggle to gain height and then without warning sheds its skin of asphalt and worms on in dirt. By now Rabbit knows this is not the road but he is afraid to stop the car to turn it around. He has left the last light of a house miles behind."

According to Alice and Kenneth Hamilton in The Elements of John Updike, the author intentionally selected this method to impart a cinematic quality to his prose. They reference author Jane Howard, to whom Updike revealed,

I originally wrote Rabbit, Run in the present tense, in a sort of cinematic way. I thought of it as Rabbit, Run: A Movie. Novels are descended from the chronicles of what has long ago happened, but movies happen to you in the present, as you sit there.

In his book John Updike, Robert Detweiler noted that Updike "composes the whole novel in the historical present to provide a precarious dramatic immediacy—a short-story technique that functions very well in this long narrative."

1950s: In 1959, the typical annual income for an American is $5,016.

Today: By 1999, the average annual income has risen to $53,350.

1950s: In 1959, the United States boasts 3,287 AM radio stations, 578 FM stations, and 509 television stations.

Today: By 1999, the numbers have grown to 4,782 AM radio stations, 5,745 FM radio stations, and 1,599 television stations across the country.

1950s: In 1959, buying a new car costs an average of $2,132.

Today: By 2000, the average price of a new car exceeds $20,000.

1950s: During the 1950s, when fathers like Rabbit abandon their children with Janice and Ruth, the mothers struggle to enforce child support payments or even prove paternity.

Today: Laws have been enacted to assist mothers in securing child support, and DNA tests can definitively establish a man's paternity.

Rabbit, Run was produced by Warner Bros. in 1970, featuring James Caan in the role of Rabbit.

Sources

Aldridge, John W., Time to Murder and Create: The Contemporary Novel in Crisis, McKay, 1966.

Bemrose, John, "Culture of Speed," in Macleans, February 26, 1996, p. 70.

Burchard, Rachael C., Yea Sayings, Southern Illinois University Press, 1971.

Detweiler, Robert, John Updike, Twayne Publishers, 1984.

Doner, Dean, "Rabbit Angstrom's Unseen World," in New World Writing 20, J. B. Lippincott Co., 1962, pp. 63-75.

Fremont-Smith, Eliot, Review, in Village Voice, September 30, 1981.

Greiner, Donald J., John Updike's Novels, Ohio University Press, 1984.

Hamilton, Alice, and Kenneth Hamilton, The Elements of John Updike, Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1970.

Howard, Jane, Interview, in Life, November 4, 1966.

Kielland-Lund, Erik, "The Americanness of Rabbit, Run: A Transatlantic View," in New Essays on "Rabbit Run," edited by Sidney Trachtenburg, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 77-93.

Lee, Hermione, "The Trouble with Harry," in New Republic, December 24, 1990, pp. 34-37.

Pinsker, Sanford, "Restlessness in the 1950s: What Made Rabbit Run?" in New Essays on "Rabbit Run," edited by Sidney Trachtenburg, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 53-75.

Quinton, Anthony, Review, in Times (London), January 14, 1982.

Rogers, Michael, "The Gospel of the Book: 'LJ' Talks to John Updike," Interview, in Library Journal, February 15, 1999, p. 114.

Schopen, Bernard A., "Faith, Morality, and the Novels of John Updike," in Twentieth Century Literature, Winter 1978, pp. 523-35.

Uphauser, Susan Henning, John Updike, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1980.

For Further Study

Plath, James, ed., Conversations with John Updike, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson), 1994.
Plath compiles a series of interviews with Updike.

Thorburn, David, and Howard Eiland, eds., John Updike: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, 1979.
This book offers critical essays that explore John Updike's work from multiple perspectives.