Rabbit, Run

Rabbit Angstrom peaked at eighteen, a high school basketball star whose one unambiguous experience of being first-rate at something recasts his entire adult present — a mediocre sales job demonstrating a kitchen gadget, a marriage to a woman he finds dull, a house he finds airless — as permanent anticlimax. His repeated flights aren't rebellion so much as a search for that same feeling under a name he's borrowed from church: grace. Updike stages the word's secularization explicitly through two competing clergymen — Reverend Eccles, golf-playing, therapeutic, more interested in managing Rabbit's feelings than in doctrine, and the dour, old-school Reverend Kruppenbach, who still believes in sin and tells Eccles so. Between them the novel suggests that mid-century suburban Christianity has nothing left to offer someone chasing transcendence, so Rabbit goes looking for it in his own body instead — in sex, in driving south with no destination, in the pure improvisational instinct he once had on a basketball court and can't locate anywhere else.

The women in Rabbit's orbit exist largely as terrain he crosses on the way to himself: Janice, pregnant and drinking, trapped in a domestic claustrophobia the novel renders with real cruelty toward her interior life; Ruth, an ex-prostitute whose body and apartment become a refuge Rabbit treats as owed to him. Updike's prose lavishes gorgeous, specific attention on Rabbit's every sensation while rarely extending the same interiority to the women whose lives absorb the damage of his leaving — a structure later critics, and eventually Updike himself across the three Rabbit novels that followed, acknowledged as morally troubling even as it's rendered with total conviction.

Updike's choice to write the novel in present tense was unusual for serious literary fiction in 1960, and it's doing real thematic work: it keeps the reader locked in Rabbit's immediate sensory now exactly as he's locked in it himself, unable to draw a lesson from what just happened or plan more than a few pages ahead. The prose moves the way Rabbit's old basketball game moved — pure reflex and improvisation, gorgeous in the instant, accountable to nothing beyond it — which makes the style itself an argument: Rabbit isn't a philosopher failing to reason his way to a better life, he's an athlete's nervous system trying to run a domestic life on instinct, and the present tense won't let the reader forget it.