Rabbit, Run (Rabbit Angstrom, #1) in Around the Year in 52 Books

May 26, 2023 Blaine rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: pc-100-essential-read, from-library, 2023

“I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.”
…
“If you have the guts to be yourself … other people'll pay your price.”
…
You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.

Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom could be one of the unnamed sad sacks mocked in Bruce Springsteen’s classic “Glory Days”: sitting back trying to recapture the glory of their youth, boring peopl

“I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.”
…
“If you have the guts to be yourself … other people'll pay your price.”
…
You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.

Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom could be one of the unnamed sad sacks mocked in Bruce Springsteen’s classic “Glory Days”: sitting back trying to recapture the glory of their youth, boring people with stories of when they were a great high school basketball player. Now 26 years old, Rabbit has a boring job selling a kitchen appliance called the MagiPeeler. He is unhappily married to Janice, has a toddler son and another baby on the way. Until one day, when Rabbit gets in his car, drives away for a day, drives back the next day, and moves in with a prostitute named Ruth. Much of the rest of the novel is a lot of navel-gazing while Rabbit talks to a priest named Jack Eccles about whether or not he should return home.

Rabbit, Run regularly appears on lists of the 100 greatest novels. I’m guessing that, back in 1960, its gritty depictions of sex and questioning of religion were considered groundbreaking and controversial, but today it’s neither. I will freely concede that John Updike can write a paragraph with the best of them. The book is full of gritty, earthy, rich descriptions. But that craftsmanship is really the only thing to recommend about this story, and even that is a double-edged sword, because his skill for description is so often used for ill. Endless unsexy descriptions of sex and, somehow more than once, about pubic hair? Ugh.

Rabbit, Run is a painful book to read first, last, and in the middle because it is the story of a truly reprehensible person. Rabbit is living a shitty life because he made shitty choices. But rather than own those consequences, on a whim he abandons his pregnant wife and young son to start living across town with a prostitute. He is somehow both gross and stupid: he objects to using a condom (again, with a literal prostitute) and complains when she insists on using a diaphragm, which he calls a “flying saucer” like some kind of 13-year-old. Seriously? And you’ll have to trust me that his actions become even worse later in the book. I honestly can’t believe that Updike wrote three more books about Rabbit and that two of those books would go on to win Pulitzers. How that happened will have to remain a mystery to me, as I have no intention of reading them. Not recommended. ...more

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Oct 18, 2015 Marie (UK) rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2015-reading-challenge

The author write in a depth of detail that is off putting. Page after page of things that could and maybe should have been said in a paragraph. I find nothing ely positive to say about this book. The characters are unlikeable, either put upon or egotistic. Rabbit Angstrom is an immature man who refuses to take responsibility for his actions. The story line is almost exclusively depressing. As the first in a series you have to wonder why anyone would want to read or publish a second.

This is one ...more

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