We Still Chase Rabbits

On reading John Updike's Rabbit, Run

This is a blurry photo of my copy of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run.

One of the earliest posts I wrote for this newsletter, over two years ago, was a brief and unelaborated list called “10 books I do not want to write.” The second entry on the list (after “Climate Change Ruins the City”) was this:

“A Young Alienated Woman with an Indifferent Non-Boyfriend and a Mind-Numbing Job Drinks Too Much.”

Back then, I was thinking about the trends in “millennial” fiction, all those excavations of the souls of young educated women in deadening jobs and demeaning relationships. For a while, it felt (and sometimes still feels) like every new novel was some variant of this — the job typically in publishing or some other “creative” industry, the boyfriend either married or noncommital, the sex kinky but somehow unappealing. The absurdities of social media supplied a layer of ready irony. The outlook was pessimistic. And the young heroines, who once dreamed of greater things, moved the plot forward by behaving badly, flinging themselves into inappropriate relationships or drugs or crime. What else could they do, given the emptiness of modern life?

While I was in New York (where a lot of these novels are set), I read John Updike’s breakout hit, Rabbit, Run, featuring the exploits of Harry Angstrom. I’ve heard that he is coming back into fashion again, although I’m not cool enough to know. I do remember that, for a while, there was broad permission to ignore him: he was slammed as a Great Male Narcissist — or, more colorfully, “a penis with a thesaurus” — by David Foster Wallace in a 1997 review of Updike’s novel Toward the End of Time. But then, a wonderful piece by Patricia Lockwood a few years ago in the London Review of Books attempted something of a rehabilitation. She acknowledges his misogyny right off the bat:

One woman, informed of my project, visibly retched over her quail. ‘No, listen,’ I told her, ‘there is something there. People write well about him,’ and I saw the red line of her estimation plunge like the Dow Jones. ‘Didn’t he write that thing,’ someone else said, ‘about how women don’t know how to piss, because their insides are too complicated?’ (Yes, in multiple books. It is at best puzzling, and at worst an indictment of both Pennsylvania public schools and Harvard.)

But then she admits she’s not interested in writing a condemnation: “My antagonism toward the Great Male Narcissists, as Wallace called them, is far milder than might be expected,” she continues.

I confess to feeling the same way. Even though Rabbit, Run is definitely misogynistic, unpleasantly and sometimes shockingly so, I confess to some sympathy with its whole deal. Amidst a lot of contemporary fiction that’s self-consciously restrained and precise, making each step as carefully as if a perilous cliff-edge of unseemliness or cringe is nearby, it’s a relief to read paragraphs with some verve, some muscle, some masculine bravado.

Rabbit, Run is about a young man named Harry Angstrom (nicknamed Rabbit), who was once the star of his high school basketball team but now has a job demonstrating MagiPeelers at a shopping center, infomercial-style. He doesn’t like his wife, Janice, who is an alcoholic and, by his estimation, not very bright. One day he goes out for the proverbial pack of cigarettes (actually to pick up his son). He indulges the escapist’s fantasy: what would happen if I just kept driving and never came back?

What happens is, he gets lost somewhere in Maryland and has to turn back, but instead of returning to his family he moves in with a loose woman named Ruth, after bullying her into having sex with him. After that there’s the rest of the novel: what comes after running?

Rabbit, Run can be a frustrating read, mostly because Rabbit is an asshole to nearly everyone he encounters. He is rude and needlessly combative with men. He likes women as long as he believes he has them in sexual thrall; otherwise, he detests them. His soul is diffuse and cloudlike, a haze of desire and sensation. He wants to feel good, he hates to feel bad, and he views the idea of any blame or responsibility accruing to him as a puzzlement, as though he were being asked to account for the placement of rocks and trees.

Despite all this, he believes in God intuitively, and consequently a priest named Eccles takes an interest in him. Eccles, by contrast, has an overdeveloped sense of responsibility; he thinks he can save Rabbit’s marriage and his soul and sets himself to the task. I enjoyed the Eccles scenes, which are nervy and philosophical. And there are moments when Rabbit’s cloudiness is moving:

Eccles’ volunteering all this melts Rabbit’s caution. He wants to bring something of himself into the space between them. The excitement of friendship, a competitive excitement that makes him lift his hands and juggle them as if thoughts were basketballs, presses him to say, “Well I don’t know all this about theology, but I’ll tell you, I do feel, I guess, that somewhere behind all this” — he gestures outward at the scenery; they are passing the housing development this side of the golf course, half-wood half-brick one-and-a-half-stories in little flat bulldozed yards holding tricycles and spindly three-year-old trees, the un-grandest landscape in the world — “there’s something that wants me to find it.”

Eccles tamps out his cigarette carefully in the tiny cross-notched cup in the car ashtray. “Of course, all vagrants think they’re on a quest. At least at first.”

Rabbit doesn’t see, after trying to give the man something, that he deserved this slap.

Men can’t really get away with writing books like this anymore, at least not without heavy criticism. Abandoning wife and children in search of hotter sex and freedom from responsibility, and possibly also God? These days, few readers find such characters sympathetic.

Still, the themes persist, including in the novels I described above, about the young women working underpaid publishing jobs and having unpleasant sex with indifferent men. The bones of these novels are much the same: faced with unsatisfying jobs and disappointing partners, the protagonist — out of rage or boredom or the feeling that there must be something better — blows up her life. There’s even an analog to all the references to Instagram and twitter: the stream of talk, advertisements, songs, and other vulgarities that intrude into Rabbit’s consciousness in the form of radio and television, which Updike mines for irony.

The structures ostensibly being reacted to and rebelled against are different; back then it was suburban conformity and sexual repression, now it’s late capitalism. What remains is the conviction that the values of the middle class are a sham, that they stifle something important in human life. In my newsletter, I’ve found these themes in book after book: in Revolutionary Road, The Sportswriter (perhaps the subtlest of these), and in English, August.

Having finished Rabbit, I’m now reading The Man Without Qualities. We find the same again in this paragraph, describing those who reach middle age with a different life from what they imagined for themselves:

Something has done to them what flypaper does to a fly, catching it now by a tiny hair, now hampering a movement, gradually enveloping it until it is covered by a thick coating that only remotely suggests its original shape. They then have only vague recollections of their youth, when there was still an opposing power in them. This opposing power tugs and spins, will not settle anywhere and blows up a storm of aimless struggles to escape; the mockery of the young, their revolt against institutions, their readiness for everything that is heroic, for martyrdom or crime, their fiery earnestness, their instability—all this means nothing more than their struggles to escape. Basically, those struggles merely indicate that nothing a young person does is done from an unequivocal inner necessity, even though they behave as if whatever they are intent upon at the moment must be done, and without delay.

A young, once-promising person, disappointed to have grown up into unfulfilling middle-class adulthood, starts behaving badly. I’m certain that it will be many decades before people stop writing this novel.