1098 Updike, John
these conditions by running away. Just as he runs
home after the symbolic introductory ball game
(maybe as a means to disguise his weariness from
the boys or his aging from himself ), he runs from
his home whenever his failures are all too apparent.
He runs from Janice when he fails to appease her
drunken mood swing, he runs from her when he
fails to seduce her too soon after the delivery of their
daughter, and he runs when he fails to convince her
that she is not solely to blame for the sudden death
of their daughter.
Interwoven with Harry’s flight from failure is his
flight from success. More than just tiredness compels
him to quit the basketball game; he also flees because
he makes the kids, including the young “ace,” look
bad. He does not just flee from Ruth (the prostitute
with whom he shacks up for two months) to be
with his wife in the delivery room; he ditches Ruth
because he treats her like a prostitute instead of a
woman: Despite his many I love yous, he succeeds in
getting her to give him a blowjob, a trick she dislikes.
Moreover, after resurrecting the Edenic garden of an
old lady, he quits the job because the widow confuses
him with her dead husband. In addition, he distances
himself from the Reverend Eccles, the single voice in
the suburb not condemning him for his inconstancy,
because he realizes that he is coming between the
kind man and his sexy wife.
Harry deserts Janice for ethically complex rea-
sons as well. Failing to appreciate the many fac-
ets of Janice’s postpartum pain, he leaves her.
Directly thereafter, Updike’s narrator enters Janice’s
consciousness for the first time. Alone with the
newborn and their toddler, she attacks her uncom-
passionate husband: “Just plain rude. Here he called
her dumb when he was too dumb to have any idea of
how his going off had changed her and how he must
nurse her back and not just wade in through her skin
without having any idea of what was there.” Yet, irre-
spective of her scorn, Janice covers up Harry’s deser-
tion the next day when her father calls in search of
him; Harry now works for the father-in-law he calls
a “successful jerk.”
Harry continually runs from Janice on account
of success-related guilt. Whenever circumstances
beyond his immediate control bring the couple closer
together—like the baby’s birth and her untimely
funeral—Harry ends up fleeing. It seems that he
cannot accept versions of success that he does not
deserve. His success on the court, his parents remind
us, was not a natural gift. Instead, it was the result of
hard work—“night and day” he was at it, “banging
the ball way past dark.” Presently, he knows that he
is known as “the runner, the fornicator, the monster.”
He knows that he has “gotten off pretty easily.” He
knows that “he was a crumb, a dope, he behaved ter-
ribly, he’s lucky not to be in jail.” He knows that his
father sees him as a lazy “bum” because he refuses
blue-collar labor alongside him at the print shop.
Notwithstanding what he self-consciously senses
as “a gap of guilt between [himself ] and humanity,”
Harry finds himself rewarded by a waiting wife and
white-collar employment. In spite of his ignoble
actions, in other words, he is granted an opportunity
to climb the social ranks. And though he wants to
do this, he knows that he does not really deserve it.
This is why he runs. As a three-dimensional char-
acter, Harry is neither selfish nor selfless, neither
dislikable nor likable. He is not a complete failure—
nor is he by any stretch a success. Rather, like us, he
is human.
Jason S. PolleyvIoLence in Rabbit, Run
Subtle and obvious, bitter and dispassionate, horrific
and handsome, violence takes many forms in John
Updike’s Rabbit, Run. Published in 1960, Rabbit
Run is the first novel of a quartet completed in 1990
with Rabbit at Rest. The protagonist of the series is
the elusive Harry Angstrom, whom only the narra-
tor refers to by his high-school nickname: Rabbit.
Readers first encounter Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom
insinuating himself into a neighborhood basketball
game with some teenagers. Within the play space,
where the rules are set and unambiguous, Harry is
a gentleman—and he dominates. He sinks ball after
ball, many of his shots touching neither backboard
nor rim. As a result of this game play, we are told
that he “feels liberated from long gloom.” At 26,
Harry has fond, and dangerously escapist, memories
of his high-school days, when he was a B-league
basketball star—and, again, a gentleman on the
court. He saves his fouling, his violence, his human-
ness, for the complex world off-court.