GANC: Rabbit, Run

I am one day late on posting my GANC book, but that is because yesterday I was spending 10+ hours in a car with Aaron driving through Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina in our attempt to arrive in Raleigh after visiting him and his mom in Indiana. West Virginia is very curvy, or the roads are at least. On to the book...

This month I read Rabbit, Run by John Updike. The book follows Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom as he struggles with his desire to escape the routine monotony of his life as a salesman with a wife and a son and his felt responsibility to said wife and son. The writing style and flow of the story were simple enough to follow; it was the wanderings of Rabbit that were the difficult part for me. Not giving too much away, after another day selling kitchen gadgets, Rabbit returns home to find his very pregnant wife watching a kid's show and well on her way to being drunk. After realizing how all the minutiae of home life are not paying off as he thought, he decides to leave his town and drive to the Gulf of Mexico. In a roundabout fashion, he lands on the doorstep of his high school basketball coach, who takes him in and introduces him to Ruth, who is a prostitute. Rabbit begins to live with Ruth in somewhat tenuous circumstances, all the while wondering if he made the right decision to leave his wife and child. After all, nothing seems to have changed.

The story weaves in and out of Rabbit almost going home, going home but not seeing any family, and going to his house and staying there, only to leave again. The book is best described as tragic. At times, I wanted to say out loud, "Rabbit, what are you doing?!" Here is a man who found adulthood not as the still-famous basketball star of the town, but as another face in a crowd, nothing special. He believes that if he could start over it would all be different. He would be something better, greater, though he knows not what nor where to begin. So, instead Rabbit circles the same issues again and again - leave the familiar, wallow in the not quite familiar, return to the familiar and run away again. Even at the end, after true and painful tragedy has struck, Rabbit runs.

I am unsure the impact this book has had on American culture, but it clearly speaks to many young professionals who find middle class life to be a shadow of the dream they had for it in high school or college. A person who may not be able to see all the good about his life and instead focuses on how the closet door cannot open all the way because it will hit the television. In other words, the small little annoyances get the attention and are the call to action instead of the people around you who care and are calling you to action.

Rabbit's escape is a sentiment most people, I imagine, have felt at one time or another. And, in some ways, the reader can live out that escape through him and see just how far or near it can take a person. I do not think desiring an escape is a bad thing, it is why vacation time exists in jobs, but it must be done responsibly, unlike how Rabbit went about it. He wished to escape from his whole existence, his day to day everything, or at least so he thought.

I believe this is a great American novel. Certainly not of the type I thought I would be saying. It is not grand or redemptive, there is no hero, no person to cheer for. But it is honest and true to more of America than we may want to suppose.

Great American Novel Challenge Booklist:

July 2009: Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner, publ. 1936

August 2009: Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry, publ. 1985

September 2009: Moby Dick - Herman Melville, publ. 1851

October 2009: For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway, publ. 1940

November 2009: Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston, publ. 1937

December 2009: The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath, publ. 1963