Rabbit Run
It depicts five months in the life of a 26-year-old former high school basketball player named Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, and his attempts to escape the constraints of his life. It spawned several sequels, including Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit At Rest, as well as a related 2001 novella, Rabbit Remembered.
Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.
Plot introduction
Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a hemmed-in 26-year-old, leaves his pregnant wife Janice on the spur of the moment.
Plot summary
Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is 26, has a job selling kitchen gadgets, and is married to Janice, his former high school girlfriend.
They have a two-year-old son named Nelson, and live in Mount Judge, a suburb of Brewer, Pennsylvania. He believes that his marriage is a failure and that something is missing from his life.
Having been a basketball star in high school, Harry finds middle-class family life unsatisfying. On the spur of the moment, he decides to drive south in an attempt to escape.
He soon returns home, however, where he visits his old basketball coach, Marty Tothero.
Tothero introduces Rabbit to Ruth Leonard, who is a part-time prostitute, and they begin a three month affair. Rabbit, jealous of a past fling between Ruth and a local man, gets Ruth to perform fellatio, and on the same night Janice goes into labor.
Rabbit leaves Ruth and rushes to the hospital.
Janice gives birth to a baby girl, whom she and Rabbit name Rebecca June. Rabbit returns to live with his wife, and accepts a job at his father-in-law's car dealership.
Spurned, Rabbit leaves and goes looking for Ruth.
The next morning Janice, while drunk and afraid that Rabbit has left for good, accidentally drowns their infant daughter in the bath. She puts forward an ultimatum: file for divorce or she will get an abortion.
He was a basketball ace in high school and now works as a kitchen gadget salesman then as a car salesman.
Miriam Angstrom, Rabbit's 19-year-old sister, who he is very close to.
Mr. She is an alcoholic couch potato, and rather unintelligent.
Nelson Angstrom, Harry's and Janice's 2-year-old son.
Rebecca June Angstrom, Harry's and Janice's infant daughter.
Janice accidentally drowns her in a bath while in a drunken stupor.
Mr. She is harshly critical of Harry when he leaves Janice.
Jack Eccles, a young Episcopalian minister who tries to mend Harry's and Janice's broken marriage.
Lucy Eccles, Jack Eccles's wife.
She blames the lack of love in her marriage with Jack on his job taking up too much of his time.
Fritz Kruppenbach, a pompous Lutheran minister.
Ruth Leonard, Rabbit's mistress with whom he lives for a while. He has slept with Margaret Kosko and Ruth Leonard.
References to other works
Previously, Updike had written a short story entitled Ace In The Hole, and to a lesser extent a poem, Ex-Basketball Player, with similar themes to Rabbit Run.
Protagonist Rabbit's name was inspired by Beatrix Potter's children story The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
John Updike said that he wrote Rabbit, Run in response to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and tried to depict "what happens when a young American family man goes on the road – the people left behind get hurt."
To a lesser extent, echoes of J.D.
Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye can also be found.
The screenplay for 8 Mile by Scott Silver opens with a quote from Rabbit, Run: "If you have the guts to be yourself...other people'll pay your price," and the main character is nicknamed "Rabbit."
Literary significance
The text of the novel went through several rewrites. Knopf originally required Updike to cut some "sexually explicit passages," but he restored and rewrote the book for the 1963 Penguin edition and again for the 1995 Everyman's omnibus edition.
Though it had been done earlier, as in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Camus's The Fall, Updike's novel is noted as being one of several well regarded, early usages of the present tense.
I don't know if it is clear to the reader as it is to the person writing, but there are kinds of poetry, kinds of music you can strike off in the present tense."
Film adaptation
In 1970, the novel was made into a film directed by Jack Smight. Kreitsek. The poster reads, "3 months ago Rabbit Angstrom ran out to buy his wife cigarettes.