Rabbit, Run

"The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there."

Rabbit replies, "I don't think so."





Rabbit is Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a star basketball player in his high school, now 26, with a wife pregnant with their second kid. It is 1959, and we meet him as he is returning from his salesman job, as he stops on the way to watch a game of basketball on the street. Soon, he removes his coat, joins the game, trying to relive his glory days. A very different time from where he is at now, with a wife he considers dumb, and a kid he neglects. Everything about his wife irritates him - her continuous drinking, TV watching, and sloppiness around the house. He returns home from his little game, and has another uncomfortable encounter with her. He leaves home to collect his kid from his parents, but as if invigorated from his street basketball play and a feeling that things have to be better somewhere else, runs. Sits in the car, and starts driving off to somewhere. This leads him to a chain of encounters leading to living with Ruth, who becomes his mistress, more or less. The town preacher acts as a link between his family and him, and tries to 'transform' him and get him back to his wife.

"Rabbit, Run" is the first in the acclaimed Rabbit series of books by John Updike, consisting of 4 books, written over 4 decades, capturing Rabbit's life at different points. 2 of the books have won the Pulitzer Prize. Updike writes in the present tense, something Jhumpa Lahiri did in 'The Namesake', which, in my opinion, gives a kind of first hand experience of watching the characters.

Rabbit is a curious character, not 'bad' really, just unable to come to terms with his life and what it has become. Once you have been very good at something, which is basketball in Rabbit's case, everything else that follows can feel a little dull. He becomes aware of his duty sometimes, but just completely disregards it and runs from it when he grows bored of it. He does not seem to realize the hurt he causes the people who are left behind until he returns from his little 'journeys', if at all. He runs from home and from some other places, and never seems to find his way around the world as well as he did on the basketball court in high school.