Out of Balance: A review of Rabbit, Run by John Updike

It is hard not to hate Harry Angstrom. It is hard to hate Harry Angstrom.

Harry Angstrom is the American man who refuses to be the American man. He is the Kerouac who pays, whose leavings take a toll. He is Rabbit, John Updike's most notorious protagonist, and it's hard to read his story without feeling ambivalent.

I should say first that I don't like Updike very much, despite the fact that he is undoubtedly a master stylist and an engineer of perfect sentences. David Foster Wallace called him one of the "Great Male Narcissists," a label that fits, and which could offer a hint as to whether or not you like his work.

I must also say that without Updike's popularization of the present tense narrative, my fiction writing would probably be very different.

But to the story at hand: Rabbit, Run concerns former star athlete Harry Angstrom, nicknamed Rabbit, who refuses to settle into his adult life. He sees its horror and flees, but finds it inescapable, so he runs, returns, runs, and returns.

He is simultaneously rich, full, blunt, obtuse, lustful, loving, and detestable. He's basically everything at once, which makes him pretty much nothing in any given situation. He flees his family to mate with a whore, turns his whore into a mother, then, well, in case you haven't read it, I won't say, but it's a cyclical thing, and Updike doesn't leave the cycle, merely points eloquently to its existence.

The thing that makes RR almost unbearable to me is Updike's obsession with sex. While it does indeed define the main character, I think it neuters many of the other themes of the story. Where my other favorite authors, Keillor, Doyle, Pynchon, and Joyce are able to fit sex in as part of the psychological landscape, Updike seems to place it on an altar at the expense of other truths swimming through his tales.

My complaint here is hard to state carefully, but I think there's some merit to it. Reading Updike is like listening to music where the guitars are turned up so loud you can't hear the singer. Or like watching a movie where the reds are so saturated that they drown out the other colors. In Rabbit, Run, the sex is so prominent and definitive that Harry Angstrom becomes a part of its landscape instead of it being part of his. The same was true of Terrorist, the only other Updike novel I have read, an otherwise perfectly plotted book where the sex seemed grotesquely unnecessary and overplayed.

So I agree with those who assess Updike as a master of the English language, a prose architect, and an incisive examiner of the middle class. But his stories come off as phallic odes instead of well-rounded stories. And, as a result, they end up feeling grotesque and a bit cold to me.

In short stories with sex as the subject, Updike shines, but the theme gets stretched a little thin in longer form, as it did in Terrorist and Rabbit, Run. However, I still intend to read all the Rabbit novels. So my opinion, as always, remains open to influence.