Rabbit, Run

I don’t know how it’s happened that every book I have read so far has painted a fairly dismal picture of marriage. There has never been much thought to what books I would read. When discussing it with my best friend, she brought her hand to her chin and looked to the sky and said, “Hmm, what books show a compelling dynamic between men and women?”

Wait, really? I hadn’t even thought of being that purposeful in my choosing. Honestly, I took the fifty-two books I most wanted to read off of my overburdened bookshelves and stacked them in a corner. Any similarity of theme is purely by chance.

And yet, here we are, about to dive headfirst into a book about a young married couple, about indecision, about responsibility, about growing up, about letting go of the star-like quality of your childhood.

This book (oh, this book!) is so phenomenal. I can’t tell a lie, there were parts that lagged, times when I’d text a friend and say, “This book is such a roller coaster!” because sometimes the text did become dense and seemingly inconsequential. But the page would turn and there would be the most compelling of character interactions, a blatant struggle for power, and Updike would redeem himself entirely. In the introduction, which just happens to be written by the author and the best introduction ever in my humble opinion, Updike discusses the changes made to the first edition years after it had been published. I wonder if some of these changes resulted in the noticeable change of speed on occasion throughout.

But let’s begin, shall we?

Be prepared, like last week’s random outbursts of anger and frustration with Sebold, for my sudden declarations of adoration, because there were pages of this book that I want to write copy in long hand and tuck under my pillow, paragraphs that were so hard to read, hard to hear the truth of the “unresolvable tension intrinsic to being human” (xi). There will be complications in reviewing this book. I want you all to go out and read it immediately, but with that wish, I would hate to spoil the ending and the momentous plot changes that take place within its pages. I can’t tell you what happens forty pages from the end, even though without it, my discussion on sin and punishment is going to be lacking. But, I’ll do my best to stay strong and to not spoil it for you all.

Did I mention you should all go out and buy this book immediately? Because you should.

First off, an explanation: Rabbit, Run is the first book of four. “Each… composed at the end of a decade and published at the beginning of the next one[,] they became a kind of running report on the state of [the hero] and his nation” (vii). The first book was written in 1959, so the differences of that time have to be taken into consideration when discussing themes like gender roles, sex, and religion, all of which I’ll get into. But, in the meantime, Updike does a wonderful job of placing the time in which it takes place, mentioning details such as Janice watching the Mousketeers on television and going into detail about a commercial for Tootsie Rolls. In the introduction, Updike reveals that he would sit in front of the television and take notes on these specific details to add to the book’s solid grounding in its time. I’m eager to see the progression of these details and the lifestyles of the characters as the decades progress through the other three novels.

It’s all a bit Mad Men-ian, in a way. It’s different in that it was written in the time that it takes place, as opposed to Mad Men, which is a look back on the 1960’s, but one sees the same humor in noticing how times have changed: walking in on Janice for the first time, seven months pregnant and soused from too many Old-fashioneds, the way children are often disregarded and left to their own doing instead of nurtured in any concrete way, and the ever-present influence of religion.

Of course, the most predictable difference of note is the gender roles that the characters steadfastly hold to. It’s startling at first to witness the exchanges between Rabbit, or Harry, and his women: how he finds them stupid and fat and ugly. It’s insulting, and for a good two hundred pages I hated him for it. That wording may be a little too strong, but it was hard to stomach what Rabbit was doing to the people in his life on a grand scale, let alone how he debased and disrespected them in his head.

The first description we read of Janice, Rabbit’s wife, is far from flattering. At the ripe age of twenty-three she is described as middle-aged: “Just yesterday, it seems to him, she stopped being pretty. With the addition of two short wrinkles at the corners, her mouth has become greedy; and her hair has thinned, so he keeps thinking of her skull under it. These tiny advances into age have occurred imperceptibly, so it seems just possible that tomorrow they’ll be gone and she’ll be his girl again” (8). Women, for the most part, are described by Rabbit as fairly unattractive creatures. In the moments when he is attracted to them, when he catches a glimpse of their naked bodies, generally when they are submitting to him sexually, the way he describes their beauty is purely possessive. To be pretty again would make Janice “his girl” as she used to be. When he sees Ruth in the pool he watches her bottom float above the water, which “ma[kes] him harden all over with a chill clench of ownership. His, she was his, he knew her as well as the water” (123).

The possession of women turns physically dominating in sexual situations. Rabbit feels an “insanity” once he knows that Ruth will submit to him, “he wants to crush her, a little gauge inside his ribs doubles and redoubles his need for pressure, just pure pressure, there is no love in it… it is her heart he wants to grind into his own” (66). Perhaps the most startling moment of chauvinism happens post-coital with Ruth: “His thigh slides over hers, weight on warmth. Wonderful, women, from such hungry wombs to such amiable fat. Best bedfriend, fucked woman… He reawakens enough to feels his dry breath drag through sagged lips as she rolls from under his leg and arm. ‘Hey get me a glass of water,’ he says” (75). When Rabbit finds out that Ruth has been with a man that he has hated since high school, and who he competitively banters with like two lions fighting over a lioness, he demands that she submit to him sexually: “’Listen. Tonight you turned against me. I need to see you on your knees. I need you to’—he still can’t sat it—‘do it’” (161). And days after his wife gives birth to their daughter, he objectifies her in his admiration of her new body and role as mother: “she… seems to accept herself with casual gratitude as a machine, a white, pliant machine for fucking, hatching, feeding” (201). Women, to Rabbit, are merely objects. Objects to be fucked and used as pillows and give birth and feed babies.

Troublingly, Rabbit seems to use female submission as an outlet for his anger, suggesting in many instances that it is the woman’s submission that is to blame for his outbursts of emotion, his tendency to run, and his, sometimes physical, abuse. “He repeats, ‘Did I?’ and pinches her arm, hard. He hadn’t meant to do it so hard; something angered him at the touch of her skin. The sullen way it yielded” (124). When he rubs his wife’s back he “gathers such a feel of strength from her pliancy” (211). And when, a few minutes later, days after giving birth to his child, she turns down his attempts at sex, he furiously leaves her, blaming her pathetic behavior for his departure: “But she asks for it, lying there in a muddle sobbing” (214).

There is also very little distinction in women in his mind. They are all versions of the ones he knows: his wife, his mistress, etc. Speaking of his minister’s wife, he says that “he is struck; she seems at this moment a fine-grained Ruth. There is a world of women beyond Janice” (102). And let us not fail to notice mere paragraphs later when Rabbit, without thought of consequence, slaps his minister’s wife’s ass. What’s more interesting than Rabbit’s chauvinism is the eager submission of the women who are the victims of it. Working my way through two hundred and sixty pages of pure male domination, by the end I realized there was something more than just infuriating in it. At the risk of enraging every women’s libber in the world, there was something base, something biologically instinctual about all of the animalistic fulfilling of urges. Updike states it more clearly: “He knows only this: underneath everything, under their minds and their situations, he possesses, like an inherited lien on a distant piece of land, a dominance over her, and that in her grain, in the lie of her hair and nerves and fine veins, she is prepared for this dominance. But between that preparedness and him everything reasonable intervenes” (206).

What ties into all of this talk of dominance and power and submission and struggle, is the discussion of sex, and there is no way to have a conversation about sex in this book without also having a conversation about religion. Hand in hand, they permeate Rabbit’s life as we see it. Sex, for the most part, is an extension of his domination of women: it is physical, it is overpowering, and it is mostly about him being a good lover. When Janice, for a brief interlude, takes over the narrative, she comments on this tendency in men. Let it be known: I couldn’t agree more. I’ve tried to express this to men I’ve dated, men who took more pleasure in being good at pleasing me than actually pleasing me, but, of course, the literary giants say it best: “You can feel in men’s fingers if they’re thinking about you and tonight Harry was first and that’s why she let him go on it was like lying there in a bath of yourself his hands going around you but then he began to be rough and determined and it made her mad to feel him thinking about himself what a good job he was doing sucking her along and not at all any more about how she felt, exhausted and aching, poking his thing at her belly like some elbow elbowing her aside. It was so rude” (215).

From the beginning, religion seems to be as much a part of the characters as their central nervous system: “Janice and Rabbit become unnaturally still; both are Christians. God’s name makes them feel guilty” (10). There is a lot of guilt to be had. When Rabbit has sex, he feels despair, and not predictably so for having sex with a whore when he wife is pregnant at home. No, instead his guilt seems to exist hand-in-hand with any form of orgasm, a consequence of Christianity: “He looks in her face and seems to read in its shadows an expression of forgiveness, as if she knows that at the moment of release, the root of love, he betrayed her by feeling despair” (75). Despair at the release, not regret for the betrayal of his wife and child. When Ruth performs oral sex on him, his first feeling after the high of climax is “shame” (165), and when he masturbates in his loneliness, he feels “sorry” (199). The ultimate punishment for these sins come at the end of the novel when “the worst thing that has ever happened to any woman in the world” happens to Janice and, as a direct result, Rabbit (227). It is an obvious consequence of their sin, and Eccles instructs Rabbit to be a “good husband. A good father. Love what you have… Carr[y it] out through a lifetime” in order to be forgiven (241).

The church’s presence is always felt, whether it is across the street from Ruth’s apartment or the constant attendance of Eccles, the minister, in the Springer home. The church’s struggle in this period of spiritual flux in history is evidenced by the relationship between Eccles, a devout Episcopalian, and his wife, a devout follower of Freud. Even Eccles battles with the changing role of religion in the world when he confronts an older minister about helping his parishioners in their time of struggle. The older berates the younger: “’Do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now: this psychology and that. But I don’t agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up the holes and make everything smooth. I don’t think that. I don’t think that’s your job’” (146). Eccles symbolizes the changing role of the church in the middle of the century, even revealing his own struggles with sin and dedication to God. Even though he aims to help people, it seems that his “help” is often just an opportunity for him to hear about the sins of others in order to experience the sin through them: “When he does come in, at quarter of eleven, it turns out he’s been sitting in a drugstore gossiping with some of his teenagers; the idiotic kids tell him everything, all smoking like chimneys, so he comes home titillated silly with ‘how far’ you can ‘go’ on dates and still love Jesus” (162). He almost appears to be aroused by the confessions of his young parishioners, giddy in his attempts at connecting with them, having experienced their sin without committing his own.

The most fascinating element of the novel, more so than the sexy sex and the startling adherence to gender roles, is the question of responsibility. Updike admits to resenting the work of Kerouac and its apparent instruction to be free of obligation. He meant for Rabbit, Run “to be a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road—the people left behind get hurt” (x). This, then, is the sun around which the novel revolves. In Rabbit, Updike strives to show what happens when a high school hero grows into a man, what obstacles he faces in maturing and taking on the responsibilities of adulthood when baser, more selfish needs, call him to temptation. Rabbit sets out on a journey of pure instinct. He doesn’t decide to leave Janice until he actually does, and he stays away because it feels “second rate” to the “first rate” life he had as a basketball star (94). Rabbit is undeniably self-centered and immature, but he is also young. Rabbit is twenty-three, younger than I, mostly likely younger than you, and while we can cast judgment on his decisions from our lofty position as readers (something Updike makes a point of not doing, by the way), after two hundred and sixty pages there is something identifiable in his selfishness and envious in the way he fulfills it them without regard for consequences.

Eccles says it best during a round of golf: “’The truth is… you’re monstrously selfish. You’re a coward. You don’t care about right or wrong; you worship nothing except your own worst instincts’” (115). Rabbit is repeatedly described as being a man of pure instinct. He lives in the moment and doesn’t give thought to the consequences of his behavior. He even concedes the level of his selfishness in a startling admission: “’When I ran from Janice I made an interesting discovery…If you have the guts to be yourself,’ he says, ‘ other people’ll pay your price’” (129). Not only does he not take ownerships of the consequences of his actions, he is perfectly content to let other people take them as their own. When Janice asks him to be sympathetic to her pain and exhaustion from childbirth when he persists in using her sore and stitched body to reach orgasm, he responds, “’I can but I don’t want to, it’s not the thing, the thing is how I feel’” (213). Towards the end he admits what drove him away from his life with Janice: “What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots” (232). In that moment of realization, we watch Rabbit grow into a man, or at least attempt to. He tries, in that moment, to kill that desire to seek out something better. But in that same moment, a clear moment in which Updike graciously allows us to view Rabbit objectively without any judgment, we see a piece of ourselves in Harry. We see our selfish desires, our questioning our long-term relationships, our picky dating habits. Harry’s self-driven and purely indulgent behavior seems to be a clear message of warning from Updike. It ties back to the religious crisis apparent throughout the novel. It is highlighted when Janice’s mother marvels at his behavior and directs a foreboding question to Eccles: “’if the world is going to be full of Harry Angstroms how much longer do you think they’ll need your church?’” (132). I know Harry Angstrom. Sometimes I am Harry Angstrom. We all are Harry Angstroms, but it is the acknowledgement of right and wrong and the understanding of consequences that prevents us from living as he does. Harry Angstrom then is the selfish, self-centered, indulgent, irresponsible, base, animalistic version of all of us.

I’m so far over my word and time limit. I have twelve minutes until this coffee shop closes its doors on me. I’d love to talk more of the use of light, how it allows insight into truth to be revealed, the precise description of Janice’s alcohol abuse, the way Rabbit physically and emotionally mimics a rabbit’s behavior in his unrest and his tendency to, literally and figuratively, run, but I won’t. I’ll end here for the sake of not being locked in a coffee shop for the rest of the evening and for the sake of your tired eyes.

I give this book five stars. Five selfish, tired-from-running stars.