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.

Eventually, Rabbit runs into Jack Eccles, the local Episcopalian minister who has taken it upon himself to reconcile Rabbit and Janice. They strike up a friendship and Eccles takes heat for this from his parishioners and his wife. Eccles wants to cast his friendship as extending grace to Rabbit so as to bring about reconciliation, but we see that part of Eccles admires Rabbit’s ability to change his situation all the while finding Rabbit’s choices repulsive. Eccles is ultimately just as confused as Rabbit is. The name Rabbit Angstrom is no accident as Rabbit is full of sexual energy. Updike describes several sex scenes fairly graphically. Rabbit eventually returns home, only to run again. It is as if he can only feel comfortable when he is in motion.

Updike has done an amazing feat in that just about every character in Rabbit, Run is unlikeable — especially the cad, Rabbit — but they are all empathetic. Rabbit is selfish, horny, and judgmental without a hint of introspection. Janice is lethargic and her parents overbearing. Eccles has wed himself to his profession, but one can see he has just about as little faith in what he espouses as his wife does. Eccles is just afraid to admit that he does not have the answers he wants. He doesn’t even know the questions to ask. Ruth is weak and allows Rabbit to walk all over her, including a scene that can only be described as psychological rape. These unlikable characters making bad decisions initially makes the book difficult to read. But eventually, the reader develops a sense of grace for them. Yes, they are awful to each other and too obtuse to ask for help, but their humanity grows. We may not want to be friends with them, but if we’re honest, we probably are friends with people like them and we have some of them in us.

The novel shows the effects of Rabbit’s selfishness on his family as Janice further deteriorates into alcoholism, which leads to terrible ends. What is amazing, however, is that without much fanfare, the novel asks the questions, what kind of society have we created where the stated goals of life — a family and home in the suburbs — leave us unsatisfied or empty? Rabbit longs for the glory days of high school when he was revered for his effortless play on the basketball court. People still remember Rabbit’s conquests and he momentarily basks in those memories, but what does it say that the town elevated this young man without an ounce of character only because he could put a ball through a hoop with grace and ease?

As the novel builds to its inevitable final picture, Updike does not offer a remedy to the dry rot eating the American dream from the inside out. The novel simply knows that the answers we’ve created and buttressed will not sustain us. As we see with the Eccles’, when religion becomes a means of offering spiritual validation for the narrative of consumerism, there is not much left in ourselves or our society to give us a picture of a better world.