On the Run

Early in Rabbit, Run, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is watching the Mickey Mouse Club with his wife when Jimmie, the adult on the show, sings “Proverbs, proverbs, they’re so true . . . proverbs tell us what to do.”  The proverb he addresses is Know Thyself.  “God gives to each one of us a special talent,” he says. “God wants some of us to be scientists, some of us to become artists, some of us to become firemen and doctors and trapeze artists.  And he gives to each of us the special talents to become these things, provided we work to develop them.  We must work, boys and girls. So: Know Thyself.  Learn to understand your talents, and then work to develop them.  That’s the way to be happy.”  Harry claims that his interest in watching the segment is primarily for professional reasons, since Jimmie models excellent salesmanship, but the fact is Harry is desperately looking for some way to be happy.  At a mere 26 years, he calls himself an old man.  He can’t stand his apartment, his pregnant wife, his sales job, or anything else that fills his day.  It is shortly after listening to Jimmie that Harry, without premeditation, hops into the family car and starts the titular running, but whether he is running toward anything or just running away from everything is never made clear.

At first glance, Rabbit, Run seems to be about the failings of middle class family life in America, a topic that has had traction since at least the 1930s (I am thinking of O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra in particular), but which the ‘50s seems to have brought to a foreground.  But Rabbit is such a particular character, that I think that Updike’s novel speaks less to a general concern about American life and more to a specific sensibility.  To clarify, the novel is most certainly concerned with America and what it is to be American.  Rabbit likes Jimmie’s wink at the end of his speech because it “admit[s] it’s all a fraud but, what the hell, mak[es] it likable. . . . Fraud makes the world go round.  The base of our economy.”  When Rabbit first drives off, he feels alien from the people at a rest stop, which gets him to thinking: “He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same.  He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?”  In talking to Ruth, the woman who is to become his lover, he says, “You’re an American,” to which she responds, “How? I could just as easy be Mexican.”  Rabbit is struggling with what is America and what it means to be American, and in some respects, the book itself is asking these questions, but the character of Rabbit looms so large that these general questions about national identity are eclipsed by him.

Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is kind of an ass.  He’s certainly not the kind of guy I’d like to hang out with for any length of time.  I enjoyed his place as protagonist for the first fifth of the novel, until he hooked up with Ruth in Brewer.  Until that point, I was only disappointed by the portrayal of Rabbit’s wife, Janice, as a sluggish, uninteresting lush.  She seems to be the main reason Rabbit runs, and I thought her character was given short shrift.  It wasn’t clear to me if that choice was made by Updike because he was staying in Rabbit’s head or because he wanted to give Rabbit an easy excuse to beat feet.  After he takes Ruth back to her apartment, Rabbit seems downright creepy.  I kept wondering why Ruth didn’t call it off completely, why she tolerated his behavior at all.  From there, the sexism in the book becomes increasingly uncomfortable for me.  Ruth is described as having a “one-eyed woman’s mind.”  Eccles, the Episcopalian minister who tries to get Rabbit to return to Janice, is said to have “womanish excitement.”  Rabbit feels aroused by Lucy, Eccles wife, because he feels safely “dominant” with her.   He likes being around her because he feels in charge, and notes that there is “something sexed in her stillness in the church, in her obedience to its man-centered, rigid procedure.”   The worst is of course the sexual encounter that follow upon a bad date that Rabbit has with Ruth.  Jealous of her past relationship and recent flirting with Ronnie Harrison, Rabbit demands a blow job to make things right.  Oral sex is presented as a whore’s activity, and since Ruth has lived to some extent on the exchange of money for sex, Rabbit is fascinated with her past as a “hooer.”  Ruth is resistant to do it only because it is clear that Rabbit wants it in order to punish Ruth because “I didn’t like the way you acted tonight.”  He tells her, “Don’t be smart.  Listen. Tonight you turned against me. I need to see you on your knees.  I need you to – do it.”  By this point I found the guy pretty intolerable, but I didn’t know how to react, because I didn’t know the spirit in which Updike presented his protagonist. 

An author’s intent is a funny thing.  We know that art exists outside of the artist and that a thing created is not bound by the intentions of its creator.  An author intending to make one point could very well end up making its opposite.  Nevertheless, the relationship between an author and his or her reader is a sacred thing.  We imagine that having lunch with our favorite authors would be not only a pleasure for us but an utter delight for them as well.  So I can read about any number of wretched people doing wretched things and holding wretched positions as long as I know the author shares my feelings of wretchedness.  But here I was, mid-book, without any clue as to how to interpret Rabbit and his behavior.  On the one hand, I didn’t see how any author could root for this guy, but there was a persistent theme of sexism, and some great authors have held some pretty reprehensible notions.  I knew that Updike had written not one, but three other novels with Rabbit.  Clearly not only did Updike like spending time with this guy but plenty of readers did too.  I wanted to run to the internet and see what was known about the author’s intent, but I didn’t want any of the plot spoiled, so I held off.  I held out hope that it would be made clear to me as the novel unfolded. 

Harry didn’t get better.  While characters like Ruth, Eccles, Lucy, and Janice’s mother responded to Harry favorably, responding to his energy, his life, and his desire to keep on fighting, it became clear that nothing about Harry was heroic.  Only in his actions as a father to his son Nelson was Harry ever likable.  As the novel drew to a close, I had great respect for Updike’s writing, and I enjoyed the novel, even though I was not smitten with it.  Something was scratching at my mind about the character and his relentless desire to move on, his selfish behavior and unwillingness to deal with the facts of his life.  It wasn’t until I was reading about the novel online afterwards that I read the thing that made it fall into place for me:  Updike had written the novel, in some ways, as a response to Kerouac’s On the Road, to show the real-life fallout of the family man who takes off without warning to travel the country, the broken hearts and the inevitable slinking back of the traveler. 

That’s who Harry reminded me of: Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty.  The main song in On the Road is movement, the desire to keep running.  Harry shares this affliction without the philosophical (such as it is) foundation.  Here is a man who wanders instead of stopping to Know Himself.  He wants the world to bend to him, to work to understand him, without offering to do the same in return.  He is an aging sports hero who’s god-given talent on the basketball court is no longer applicable.  With no ball in his hand, all he can do is run the court of life, and running is all he enjoys doing.  He “doesn’t like people who manage things.  He likes things to happen of themselves.”  But of course the advice he was given long ago by his mentor Jimmie is that he must “work to develop” things.  Harry childishly mistakes Living for Himself for Knowing Himself, mistakes moving for searching.  And as the novel ends with another turn of the screw in the relationships surrounding him, Rabbit ends doing what he always does: running.  Updike presents the situation with awareness, however, whereas Kerouac, as I pointed out in my earlier post, does not. 

I can’t say this is one of my favorite books on the list, but I do have a respect and appreciation for it, and I am very glad to have read it.