Novel: Rabbit, Run

Overview
John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960) follows Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a one-time high-school basketball star whose fleeting athletic triumphs haunt his present. Now a restless salesman trapped in an aimless suburban life, Rabbit impulsively abandons his wife Janice and their young son Nelson in a search for freedom and self-definition. The novel charts a short, turbulent period in Rabbit's life as his desire for escape collides with the obligations and moral pressures of midcentury American society.
Updike renders Rabbit as both unsympathetic and profoundly human: he is selfish and cowardly yet vividly alive in his physical impulses and small desperations. The narrative moves rapidly through episodes of flight, sexual longing, failed commitments, and brief, often comic attempts at redemption, building a portrait of a man who cannot settle into the roles adulthood demands of him.

Plot
The story begins with Rabbit abandoning his family in a fit of frustration and yearning for something more than the narrow comforts of suburbia. He drifts through a few days of impulsive decisions: seeking out old acquaintances, finding temporary refuge with a younger woman, and resisting the adult responsibilities that threaten to define him. His actions set off a chain of responses from the people around him, Janice confronts the marriage's decay, Nelson experiences the confusion of a neglected child, and friends and neighbors react with a mix of bewilderment, anger, and pity.
Attempts at reconciliation and self-reform punctuate Rabbit's flight. He alternately longs for the safety of home and recoils from the commitments that come with it. Encounters with well-meaning but flawed figures, religious counselors, former teammates, and strangers who mirror aspects of his own restlessness, force moments of self-examination but rarely produce lasting change. The novel moves toward an ending that emphasizes the cyclical quality of Rabbit's behavior rather than a neat resolution, leaving him poised between escape and the demands he cannot fully accept.

Characters and Themes
Rabbit is the central force of the novel: his charisma, vanity, and cowardice propel the plot and illuminate the novel's larger concerns. Janice, his wife, embodies the domestic stability and thwarted resentments of middle-class life; their son Nelson represents the next generation inheriting unsettled values. The younger woman with whom Rabbit becomes involved represents both the possibility of renewed vitality and the moral complications of abandoning responsibilities.
Themes of identity, masculinity, and the American Dream recur throughout. Updike explores how past glories can calcify into a haunting nostalgia and how consumerist, suburban prosperity fails to satisfy deeper longings. The novel interrogates the tension between personal freedom and social duty, the spiritual emptiness of postwar affluence, and the small cruelties that sustain ordinary lives. Updike's attention to bodily sensation and the rituals of daily life underscores the ordinary sources of crisis and meaning.

Style and Legacy
Updike's prose is precise, often lyrical, and keenly observant of the interior life. He balances satirical clarity with empathetic detail, making Rabbit both a figure of comedy and tragic sympathy. The novel's brisk structure and episodic scenes create a momentum that mirrors Rabbit's own restless movement.
Rabbit, Run inaugurated a tetralogy that follows Harry Angstrom across decades, and it established Updike as a leading chronicler of American middle-class consciousness. Its unflinching look at personal failure, sexual restlessness, and the costs of self-centeredness secured its place as a seminal work of postwar American fiction, provoking debate and admiration for its moral acuity and formal skill.