Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960):
Rabbit, Run is the first in a four part series of novels about Harry Angstrom. Set in small town Pennsylvania, Harry was the star of his high school basketball team - a quick rabbit-like fella - but barely into his 20's, life isn't so great. He's the father of a toddler, his wife Janice is an alcoholic and expecting their second child, and he works demonstrating a vegetable peeler in a local department store. In short, his life sucks, he's miserable, and he really just wants to take off. Sorry honey, this isn't really working for me, gotta go.
So that's the backdrop, but what I find interesting is how this book, this story of average people leading unhappy, unfulfilled lives, people unable to fully love their loved ones, was regarded as so groundbreaking in its day. As though before Updike wrote about people who lived like these characters, this sort of life was not imaginable. It reminds me of that Dave Chapelle joke about white people who didn't believe black claims of police brutality until Newsweek wrote a story about it - ".. honey, did you see this article in Newsweek? Apparently the the police have been beating up Negros like hotcakes ..."
Don't get me wrong, this book is considered a classic for more than it's subject matter. Updike, a Harvard grad and Pulitzer Prize winner (twice) is a powerful writer. Obviously it was his treatment of the subject matter that made the book resonate with so many people.
Rabbit, Run is the first in a four part series of novels about Harry Angstrom. Set in small town Pennsylvania, Harry was the star of his high school basketball team - a quick rabbit-like fella - but barely into his 20's, life isn't so great. He's the father of a toddler, his wife Janice is an alcoholic and expecting their second child, and he works demonstrating a vegetable peeler in a local department store. In short, his life sucks, he's miserable, and he really just wants to take off. Sorry honey, this isn't really working for me, gotta go.
So that's the backdrop, but what I find interesting is how this book, this story of average people leading unhappy, unfulfilled lives, people unable to fully love their loved ones, was regarded as so groundbreaking in its day. As though before Updike wrote about people who lived like these characters, this sort of life was not imaginable. It reminds me of that Dave Chapelle joke about white people who didn't believe black claims of police brutality until Newsweek wrote a story about it - ".. honey, did you see this article in Newsweek? Apparently the the police have been beating up Negros like hotcakes ..."
Don't get me wrong, this book is considered a classic for more than it's subject matter. Updike, a Harvard grad and Pulitzer Prize winner (twice) is a powerful writer. Obviously it was his treatment of the subject matter that made the book resonate with so many people.
"He seems to see Harry as just another in a parade of more or less dutiful husbands whose brainlessly sown seed he spends his life trying to harvest."
"You kept me alive Harry; it's the truth; you did. All winter I was fighting the grave and then in April I looked out of my window and here was this young man burning my old stalks and I knew life hadn't left me. That's what you have Harry; life. It's a strange gift and I don't know how we're supposed to use it but I know it's the only gift we get and it's a good one."
"Though her heart bathes the universe in red, no spark kindles in the space between her arms; for all of her pouring prayers she doesn't feel the faintest tremor of an answer in the darkness against her. Her sense of the third person with them widens enormously, and she knows, knows, while knocks sound at the door, that the worst thing that has ever happened to any woman in the world has happened to her."
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