Listening to Rabbit for the first time

JR: I don’t have a very good reason for not reading Rabbit, Run. I wish I did. It’s a gap in my reading history, everyone has an author who they’ve missed, for me there are many. I have a two hour commute each day, and not enough time to read and write but I’ve taken to listening to audio books on CD. So far, Rabbit, Run has been an amazing experience, it’s like a trip to another time, when openly sexist husbands could leave their wives, and families, while they pursued the nearest piece of ass. In this case Harry Angstrom has left home, for no reason, and driven south. Updike delivers bucolic Pennsylvania, and points south, with a detailed light touch, that has Rabbit reading the map to himself, finding his own way. He eventually turns around, and comes back to town, and shacks up with a woman he meets the same night he hangs out with his old basketball coach (both the coach and Harry burnish their collective sports memories). I’ve read the first five pages of this book so many times, the basketball scene, which has become my point of reference for the book that I never got past it as a reader, but now that I’m almost done with the audio book as a listener, I’ve realized, that like Cheever, Updike is cutting the throat of “modern” marriage, that sex isn’t free, and women want more from a man than a half-assed screw, they want a companion, and they never confuse lust with love. Harry’s voice is irreverent and bitter, funny and obtuse. Upikes love for golf is personified in Rabbit, and the sections on the golf course, are really quite vivid, almost otherworldly in their overall underlying obsessive compulsive behavior that Harry tries to stamp down. He’s a clothes hound, and Updike whittles away chunks of the narrative about shoes, and ties, suits, and men’s haircuts, smiles, looks, and how these men never seem to understand women; they are openly confused.

Updike isn’t kind to the old folks, the early generations that precede Harry in this book, the preacher, and his in-laws, who he can’t escape, since he’s essentially married to them too, even though he tries. His second child, a girl, (the poor thing) will be punished by Harry for reasons that aren’t quite clear to me. Is it because I think Harry is a dog? And that he won’t even treat his daughter well? That he might even hit on her? Is that taboo to even mention? I’m seventy-five percent of the way through the story, and Harry has returned from months of infidelity, in an apartment across town with a fat woman. I know they made a movie out of this book, James Caan plays Rabbit, but I can’t imagine translating the book to screen. There are miles of narrative that simply render the environment, a pool room (the sound of balls clicking together, such a throw away line, but Harry is walking across town, listening to things as he goes), a hospital, the description of a girl’s upper lip, and that’s just scratching the surface. Updike writes this story like he is doing a surveillance of the suburban landscape and all its inhabitants. The main thing I’m getting from Updike is how he stays in one place and tells me everything about it, from the houses, to the light industry, and the people who work there. The old people I mentioned before speak in a kind of pre-divorce era vernacular (openly they are enemies, but the hatred keeps them alive), and Harry senses the older couples aren’t happy, but don’t know from divorce. I suspect if Updike were alive today and writing these books now, it would be an absolute explosion on the social scene. -JR