Martin Amis said of writing that it is not ever something you can choose to do or become, it is a compulsion, a need to make sense of the world – novels are vessels through which the world is furnished with meaning. Far more subtle and various than the everyday, they offer us a purpose – something innate in the human spirit, the need to make sense of our lives, to populate them with some notion of meaning or eloquence. Having a capacity for something so vital is part of a formation of an identity – in a rather high faluting kind of way many of the best writers feel that they were put here to write, and, as Dante’s Inferno tells us, one of the hottest sections of hell is reserved for those who have talent and do not use it. Updike as a young writer in his early twenty’s was trying to understand the changes that were happening in American culture – the post-war America of apple pie and Momma was being challenged by a new idea of what it meant to be young and American, something to do with being individual and choosing your own path rather then accepting the same choices and responsibilities as your parents. Updike wrote a short story in 1957 about a young grocery clerk in a sleepy suburb who is shocked out of the monotony of his work by a group of beautiful young women entering his shop in bathing suits, all buds and curves they peruse the shelves, and, all the other cashiers being busy come to his check out to buy their stuff. Breathless and stricken he serves them – they leave in a flurry of giggles, numb for a few minutes he tells his boss he quits and runs out of the shop in search of the girls. Of course they are gone and he is left with the desperate taste of something he could not quite touch. Updike was trying to get at the disparity between what this free liberated America promised and the reality of most young peoples lives – the same menial jobs as their parents but with the added resentment of having just missed out on something, something that was really first rate.
Updike, in early 1959 started writing Rabbit Run, in, as he called it, a “haze of cigarette smoke and dizziness”. His first full novel, started life as a novella; a small comment on sport as a type of hyperreality that elevates people to some sort of pinnacle before dropping them back into their second rate lives; grocery clerks, gas attendants, factory workers. It quickly became apparent that Updike had found his man, through the character of Harry Angestrom he could survey America in a big way – ventriloquising his own experience as a young man born into this new generation as well as looking beyond his own patch – he was married at the time of the novel’s creation, bound as we all are by decisions and restraints, he needed a narrator who would be there for him, another story to say what he needed to say. We meet Rabbit as a 26 year husband and father, demonstrating kitchen appliances in a store – in his school days he was a basketball star, by contrast his domestic life is full of demands and regrets. His small apartment is dotted with drained whiskeys glasses, bland food prepared without care or thought. There is a private moment of repulsion as he notices new lines in the corner of his wife’s eyes, rendering her plain rather then perky, as he knew her when he had courted her in the dime store they had both worked in. Updike’s gift is in saving this passage of prose from being gratuitous; he does not appeal toward anything base or misogynistic even though his protagonist is judging his wife in such a mean way. He is showing us a life drained of meaning; the idyllic picture of the American family is for Harry a prison where even the conciliations of lust and sex are being eroded by childbirth, familiarity, and the passage of years. These new lines are felt keenly because they are emblematic of living a second rate life, of having become irrevocably settled at twenty-six.
The novel’s title Rabbit Run can be seen then as an instruction to its hero, to get out and break away – the poverty of everyday life surrounds Harry, his parents live in a small dark house, his dad has given his life to the print factory in which he works and his mother gossips and resents Harry’s choice of wife; the small, spiritless Janice. His wife’s family run a car-lot, small minded people who never offered their daughter much love – her father pouring out his heart into his sales pitches, a cultivated artificial kindness. Even the towns reverend lives a beleaguered small existence, escapes to the golf course, his only respite from the web of his wife’s resentments and failed ambitions; at a time when Christianity and community were pillars in the functionalist family dogma, Updike shows it as failing, coming apart at the seems. Why not then should Harry want to break away, like the young cashier quitting his job and running out into the sunshine in search of girls. It may be a futile rebellion but it is a small attack on a American life that no longer works and maybe never did.
Another early novel then, about youth and freedom, tuning into the zeitgeist in anticipation of the 1960’s. No in fact Updike, even as a young man of 27 felt a distance from the reformists and freewheelers that were beginning to emerge out of the legacy of post-war consensus America ( this distance was not just imaginative but political, Updike was always patriotic- in contrast with the new wave of writers critical of American life, such as Norman Mailer, Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal). He remembers a particular resentment toward Kerouac’s “On The Road” published in 1957, because although Updike was aware of the limitations in American family life he saw Kerouac’s celebration of individual freedom as dangerous because it did not stress enough what was left behind. Where we can understand Harry’s motivation for running, we also feel as readers that he’s mean and selfish, leaving a young girl only just out of her teens to look after his kid, as well as facing the twin humiliations of her parents intrusions and the towns gossiping cruelty. Updike does not think that this unbridled search for sensation is something writers should laud around – he looks at the disintegrating weave of late 1950’s America and sees it, at least in part as a loss.
By James Maclaren
