Novel
Rabbit, Run
John Updike · 1960
Synopsis
Harry Angstrom, known as Rabbit, a former high-school basketball star, is twenty-six and demonstrates a vegetable peeler in the shops of Brewer, a Pennsylvania town. One evening, he finds his pregnant wife Janice drinking a glass in front of the television. She sends him to fetch the car and their son; he takes the car and drives south without telling anyone. Lost in the night, he turns back and returns to Brewer at daybreak, but not to his home: his old coach, Tothero, introduces him to Ruth, with whom he moves in.
Context
His character returned in three novels written from decade to decade, in 1971, 1981 and 1990, and grew older with America; the last two received the Pulitzer Prize. The author said he had conceived this first volume as a film, and that he found in the present tense, rare at the time, the freedom to pass from one mind to another. Knopf, on the advice of its lawyers, demanded cuts in the sex scenes; the author did not restore the text, with revisions, until 1964, in the Penguin paperback edition published in England.
Who it is for
A novel of medium length, the first of a cycle of four books that follow the same man over thirty years. Translated by Jean Rosenthal in 1962.
Prizes and reception
The novel that established its author, and the one with which, he said, he was most associated; Time included it among the hundred best novels from 1923 to 2005.
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