Running to Stand Still: Rabbit, Run Review

John Updike is one of our most celebrated and honored living American writers. I recently engaged his writing for the first time by reading the first novel of his series following Harold “Rabbit” Angstrom, Rabbit, Run. Since the 1950’s, Updike has returned to Rabbit at the end of each decade to tell a new story about him and about America too. It is easy to see Updike’s influence on American fiction and prose. According to Wikipedia, Rabbit, Run was one of the first novels written in the present tense. Updike’s language brims with energy and some of today’s best writers, like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Franzen, follow in his footsteps. The reader feels a drive to finish the current sentence as quickly as possible to get to the next one. In fact, it was hard for this 21st century reader to grasp how revolutionary Rabbit, Run was because so many of today’s books read like an Updike book. Only when I compared the narrative style to other novels I’ve read from the 1950’s or 1960’s could I appreciate Updike’s contribution to language. But Rabbit, Run is not just a watershed in prose. Thematically, the novel skewers the 1950’s suburban American dream about as thoroughly as F. Scott Fitzgerald debunked the American dream of the jazz age in The Great Gatsby. We can quickly find the thread running from Rabbit, Run to The Graduate, to American Beauty, to Franzen’s The Corrections.

On the first page we meet Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a 26-year old former high school basketball star. He’s now married to his high school girlfriend Janice. They have a son, Nelson, with another child on the way. Rabbit desperately misses the glory days of his youth as he believes he is in a failed marriage to a stupid woman and is completely dissatisfied with his job selling vegetable peelers. One day, as he goes to pick up his son from his in-laws, Rabbit decides to leave his life altogether. He takes the car and drives south from the Mount Judge suburb of Brewer, Pennsylvania. He quickly aborts his escape and returns to the town, but not to his family. Instead, Rabbit seeks out his former basketball coach Marty Tothero who introduces him to Ruth Leonard, a sometime prostitute, and they begin a three-month affair.

The Joker, the Problem of Evil, and Unanswered Questions

Over on Out of Ur, Skye Jethani has written an interesting reflection on Christopher Nolan’s second Batman film, The Dark Knight. He relates the film’s lack of an origin story for the Joker to the way the Bible discusses evil’s origin. Jethani says:

I wonder if the lack of a back-story for evil in the Bible is related to Nolan and Goyer’s rationale for ignoring the Joker’s back-story? Without an explanation or origin, God is emphasizing the utter meaninglessness and anarchy of evil. It cannot be understood; it cannot be rationalized. To do otherwise would be to legitimize its place in his creation or to create sympathy for an enemy that deserves none….

Answers to all of our questions about the origin of evil are not found in the Scriptures, which means that God, the Writer and Director of this cosmic drama, did not deem them necessary for the story he wanted to tell. Are we satisfied with that, or must we continue to contrive answers for ourselves? My guess is that Christians would find themselves in less trouble theologically, culturally, and politically if we stuck with the questions God has chosen to answer, and immersed ourselves in the story he has chosen to tell.

As a Christian who has listened to, read, and even made several attempts to explain why evil exists and who hasn’t been fully convinced by any of them, I like the direction Jethani takes. The Bible doesn’t seem to occupy itself with answering why evil exists or even asking the question. Instead, the Bible takes evil’s presence as a given and focuses on God dealing with it. This lack of an origin story may not be the most comforting message in my questioning, but it does redirect my focus to look for God’s redemptive work in the world rather than fixating on the evil’s existence.