Get over it! Pull up your socks and get on with it! Sheez.

Book Circle Reads 96

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Book Description: Penguin's bumf--Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his — or any other — generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual g More...

bellow's writing blows my mind but rarely touches my heart. a handful of mailer's essays and novels are essential, but it's his guts and brain and balls and heart and the ferocity with which he lived life that's the real inspiration. roth? well, i've made my views on roth very well known in bookface world. and the few updike short stories i've read only convinced me that his elegant & writerly style really bugs the shit out of me.

all of 'em (bellow, mailer, roth, updike) found themselves as More...

On the surface, Rabbit, Run is about a guy who runs around on his son and pregnant wife, and ends up living with a prostitute. Real interesting, right? Actually, yes. Because the characters come to life and they’re struggling with their own moral weaknesses and existential problems -- their problems and interactions are truly believable. So this is an interesting story, because Updike can write, and he pulls it off.

But first, I must explain why my rating is only 3 stars (or, 3 and a half, really More...

I'm sorry I think I might have to pause before the start of this review and scream discretely into a pillow:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Phew, that's better, very cathartic. This is yet another book from the 1001 books list which has made me question whether or not the people who write the list actually like people who read books or if they are really secretly intent on torturing us all for their own amusement?

The review w More...

I discovered Rabbit Angstrom and John Updike while sitting in the Intensive Care Waiting Room at a local hospital. My mother languished in a coma for one month before she finally found peace, and I spent most of those days and many of my nights in that waiting room. During much of that time I'd blown through typical waiting room crap like books with plots about overthrowing the government, stories about detectives who were psychoanalysts, stories about psychoanalysts who were detectives, etc. O More...

John Updike has a very non-traditional interpretation of redemption, and you find that in his main character, Harry Angstrom, also known as Rabbit. In this first Rabbit novel, he is 26, and he finds himself in crisis about where his life is headed. I found myself loving Rabbit and sympathizing with him (mostly), but also hating him and hating his choices. As a friend once put it to me, "He is Holden Caulfield grown up." It is a painful and powerful book. The writing is delicious, and I have neve More...

God, do I hate Rabbit Angstrom! How much do I hate him? If I was in a room with Hannibal Lector, the Judge from Blood Meridian, the Joker from Batman, and Rabbit Angstrom, and someone handed me a gun with only 3 bullets, I'd shoot Rabbit three times.

This is the first book by Updike I've read, and his reputation as a writer was well-earned. I'd had a vague idea that this story was about a former hot shot basketball player struggling to adjust to a regular life. I was completely unprepared for th More...

Damn Updike, I wanted to find an immediate reason to dislike this, but he's so smooth in his text, I have no excuse to not continue reading it: it's very frustrating for us curmudgeons.

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Okay, that didn't last long. I refuse to finish this book. I find the prose self-indulgent, the understanding of human nature self-serving, and the protagonist impossible to empathize with. Would reading this book help me understand individuals I find narci More...

oh boy, i have issues with john updike. he has all the goody-goody provincialism that drives me crazy about john irving, without the (debatable) benefit of the quirky plots. check out his motivation for writing Rabbit, Run: "Jack Kerouac’s On the Road came out in 1957 and, without reading it, I resented its apparent instruction to cut loose; Rabbit, Run was meant to be a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road – the people left behind get hurt." More...

You know what would be nice, is if there was a wikipedia for life, and every time you met someone, you could just give it a glance and see if, you know, you really want to be associated with that person.

Sure, it would backfire, it would reveal your prejudices and narrow-mindedness, your circle of friends might become a lot less varied and interesting. On the other hand, you'd never have to fake a conversation about football again, and you could easily avoid the total assholes like Rabbit Angstr More...

"Everybody who tells you how to act has whisky on their breath."

"He wonders, is it just these people I'm outside or is it all America?"

"He wonders why there are so many signs coming back and so few going down."

Rabbit, Run has now taken a very special space on my pretty short list of Greatest American Novels. Pretty high up there. Perhaps if I wasn't raised in Salinas, John Updike may even eclipse John Steinbeck on my favorite author's list.

I have a feeling if I would have read this book at any o More...

I don't think I've ever read a book from which I've gained so much while loathing the main character. Usually books like this depress me; this one offers some sort of weird relief.

Instead of having the wherewithal to actually make the complete break with his former life and head down to the sun and the sand, Harry instead turns back to travel the edges of his home turf and trashes the lives of everyone close to him, without remorse; indeed, without a thought he should even FEEL remorse.

I don't More...

Why I read it: Well I joined my parents little book club and it was my dad’s choice. He selected three books and told me to pick one of the three and that would be the one that my mom, dad, and I read. I chose this one merely based on the synopsis and hearing good things about Updike being a classic author.

Synopsis: Set in 1959, Rabbit Angstrom, 26 years old and a former basketball star, lives with his pregnant wife and young son. Yet his life and marriage is a melancholy one, one in which he is More...

Updike certainly turns out the anti-hero in Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, a misogynistic 26-year old ex-basketball player who hasn't grown up. Love, for Harry, ebbs away with every ejaculation and is restored only when his reservoir’s fill up. Yet women fall for him, forgive him, hate him and hate themselves for their vulnerability, while Ha foil, the Rev Jack Eccles, who is truly on a mission to save souls, is despised by his wife Lucy. And yet it was the Eccles's of this world, the organizational m More...

For the three days since I've finished this book I've been going back and forth about whether this is 5 stars, or 4, or 3. Part of the problem is John Updike himself. Liking him as a writer somehow feels politically incorrect. Even mentioning him in mixed company gets glances, "you're reading HIM?" The Rabbit books have always had an aura of ho hum who cares to me. I'd hear Rabbit blah blah and tune it out like it's hockey. I knew Updike was competent, certainly anyone picking up a random issue More...

I really did not like this book. I really disliked all the characters in this book (except maybe Nelson) and especially hated Rabbit. He started out as a loser and did not learn anything through the story- I hate books with no character growth or depth. The story was just not engaging in the least and felt it was a chore just to finish it (and I only finished it because it was for my book club). I will never read another book by Updike. The only positive thing I can think of is that there were a More...

I wasn't quite sure what to expect with this, an early and famous Updike. I found it mostly quite powerful. The protagonist Rabbit Angstrom is a bit of a (mostly) lovable loser, bumbling his way into young adulthood. Many scenes are perfectly setup and described with fresh (even decades after its writing) turns of phrase that captured my attention without pulling me out of the book.

Having said that, there were a few disjunctions, for me at least. One is [MINOR SPOILER:] that Rabbit's initial fle More...

I've always hated the sort of "adult literary fiction" which deals with, mainly, unhappy marriages and adultery and gives a picture of a sort of two-dimensional world of unrelenting bleakness where no one is ever just decent to each other. This is the country where Rabbit, Run takes place, and it's always been an unrecognizable country to me, this place where "adult literary authors" live. Perhaps it's just my naturally cheerful and upbeat nature that makes such so-called darkness seem just sort More...

This novel begins the great American story of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. It was the first Updike novel I ever read. I read this after reading his classic short story called "A&P" for a college lit course. I recall that the subject matter here was a little beyond my life experience but I was immediately drawn to his beautiful use of the English language. Nobody wrote like Updike. I would read and re-read his descriptions of say a widow's parlor or maybe the eighteenth hole of a local public gol More...

I didn't like this book when I first started reading it. If it hadn't been for the book club that chose this as its next read, I probably would not have gone past 100 pages, which is what I give a book before giving up on it. The language is glorious. "The cuticle moons on this fingernails are big." "His downstairs neighbor's door across the hall is shut like a hurt face." "Brewer spread(s) out below like a carpet, a red city, where they paint wood, tin, even red bricks red, an orange rose flowe More...

I didn't like this book. I can honestly say I don't "get" Updike. There were lots of tersely poetic little sentences and very unique metaphors - I mean it's obvious the guy can write and has style, but his protagonist (Harry Angstrom) is just boring. If you want to read an interesting first-person account of a life then read The "Great Gatsby" or even Irving's epic "The World According to Garp" (Which by the way sports a fairly good does of sardonic humor for those of you who are so inclined).

Do More...

Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom was a star basketball player in high school, now he's married to his high school sweetheart who he thinks is boring, they have one child and another on the way. His life is lackluster, he's a salesman for a kitchen gadget, certainly not what he expected when he was a star. One day after a particularly unsatisfying exchange with his wife, he decides to run away. After a brief meeting with his old coach, he ends up moving in with a good-time girl named Ruth. There he lives More...

Missed this when it and its sequels first were published. Updike is a remarkable writer. His characters stay with you for better or worse. I'll get to the remaining books eventually. I want to find out what becomes of Rabbit and his friends and family.

Since the first time I read this book years ago, I bet I haven't gone 24 hours without thinking about it in some way. It's not my favorite book in the series, but it's the emotionally rawest thing I've ever read. A recurring image in the book is that of things spilling over, appropriate for a novel in which the title character's frustration with his life can no longer be contained. Updike chronicles the caustic results caused by Rabbit's inner restlessness that surfaces, then boils over, when he More...

It's the year 1959 and Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is only 26 years old but already finds himself in a dead-end life defined by sippy cups, bills, responsibility and is “immersed with hate”. He is married with a 2-year-old son and although they are hardly able to financially take care themselves as it is, they have another child due in a couple months. Rabbit finds the most joy out of going to the local basketball court and being included in the game by the local neighborhood boys. Eight years earli More...

Updike is one of the few highly acclaimed post war writers I'd never read. Considering this was written when he was only 28, I can see why he has the reputation he does. Great prose. For me, the book is weakened however by the rather unsympathetic central character, who is a young man who - rejecting the stifling social mores of suburban America in the 1950s - sort of drifts in and out of others' lives based on what "feels right" to him at a particular moment, wreaking havoc on his family and ot More...

Rabbit, Run, by John Updike, is the first of four books about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Updike was eventually to win the Pulitzer for the last two Rabbit books. I read this book as a high-school senior, and the only memories that I brought with me to this re-reading were that Rabbit lived an almost unbearably seedy and depressing life.

Part of the danger in reviewing books on this site is that while I am reading a book, I am actually actively engaged in mentally composing my review. While reading More...

Rabbit had a wife and kids in Pennsylvania, Jack
/:He went out for a ride, and then he went back
Then he went out for a ride, and then he went back:/ (da capo al fine)

Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom really is a spoiled little asshole, isn't he? Like a literary Al Bundy, still hung up on his brief turn as a high school star athlete, stuck in a dead-end sales job, watching his life go by as his wife expects her second child and is already slipping into permanent housewifeitis, afternoon TV and alcohol and a More...

STEWING IN HIS OWN JUICES

I’ve been meaning to read the “Rabbit” books for years and have finally made a start. I wasn’t disappointed, although I was a little surprised. I had an idea of the matters covered in these books but was expecting a wider canvas than the small domestic drama that is the story of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Perhaps I had this preconception because one tends to expect a grandiose sweep from such lauded literature. But Updike deals with the American dream in a microcosmic way. More...