Just Finished Reading John Updike's Rabbit, Run

John Updike, who passed away in 2009, was a writer of both short stories and novels, as well as serving as a regular critic for New Yorker magazine.  He was also someone whose works I never got around to read, and only did so this time because Stephen King's most recent novel Finders Keepers led me to him.  Although Updike wrote a lot, his most famous work seems to be the Rabbit series, the first book of which he published in 1960 and spaced subsequent installments in approximately ten-year intervals as he examined the unfolding life of its main character, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom...

Set in 1959, Rabbit, Run, as the first book is titled, sees Harry, our "hero", at age 26 in his home town of Mount Judge, Pennsylvania (a mythical suburb of Updike's mythical city of Brewer).  He is a former high school star basketball player and can't seem to let go in his mind of his old "glory days".  He lives near both his parents and those of his wife Janice, whom he had married after discovering that she was pregnant with his first child.  Janice is now pregnant again, and Harry is a door-to-door salesman for kitchen gadgets.  Being something of a dissatisfied "seeker" in life, but never really knowing exactly what he wants or in which direction to look, he starts up his car one night and spontaneously takes off in it, going several hundred miles south and west before returning to Brewer.  But he has left his wife, and the story takes off from this disturbing beginning.  How it develops and ends I'll leave you to read for yourself...

Self-discovery and personal fulfillment in the face of social obligations and responsibilities is a theme I found in Rabbit, Run.  The problem with the character of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is that, while he is continually upsetting the latter, he is clueless about the former...ultimately projecting the impression of himself as being something of a selfish, manipulative jerk.  I never could get into this character's mind or find a basic for empathy/sympathy.  Sure, we all have that struggle going on in our lives between what we want for ourselves and how we respond to others' expectations of us.  But Harry never seems to learn anything from his experiences: he is so focused on whatever situation he is currently in that he cannot see beyond it...and the ramifications of his often destructive behavior...

Not only did I find Harry a disagreeable character, but I didn't get how Updike portrayed his thinking. Although he is 26 and fully engaged in what people would call "adult" behavior, in dialogue Harry speaks like a little kid...reminding me of Dennis the Menace's way of talking ("Jeepers, Mister Wilson!")  Yet, when he is alone and the author wants to express his thoughts through the general narrative, Harry comes across as a very serious, contemplative man.  Was this discrepancy intentional on the part of Updike?  Who knows...but I had difficulty with his protagonist as someone who I could imagine as being real, and that was a huge problem for me with this book...

As far as I know, the Rabbit series is comprised of four books.  The next one is titled Rabbit Redux.  Seeing how it is set in time several years later than Rabbit, Run, it might be intriguing to see how Updike developed Harry Angstrom's character, if at all...