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John Updike sure could write. I have to admit that. Even if it's in a style that's hardly my favourite: the contemporary lyrical literary fiction style, often a little too serious and precious for its subject. There's a slight excess of detail about everything, even this interesting historical artefact, a domestic ice container, from before home freezers: "the cold breath of the ice, a tin-smelling coldness he associates with the metal that makes up the walls of the cave and the ribs of its floo...
bellow's writing blows my mind but rarely touches my heart. a handful of mailer's essays and novels are essential, but it's his guts and brain and balls and heart and the ferocity with which he lived life that's the real inspiration. roth? well, i've made my views on roth very well known in bookface world. and the few updike short stories i've read only convinced me that his elegant & writerly style really bugs the shit out of me. all of 'em (bellow, mailer, roth, updike) found themselves as the...
This was the first and shortest of the Rabbit books from Updike. I think that the last two are better because Updike had 30-40 more years of maturity and writing under his belt but this book grabs you and doesn't let you go and makes you beg the the next one. The original concept behind the series is that Updike describes the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom in 1959 in Rabbit Run, 1969 in Rabbit Redux, 1979 in Rabbit is Rich, and 1989 in Rabbit at Rest. There is even an epilogue Rabbit Remembered...
Rabbit, Run (Rabbit Angstrom #1), John UpdikeRabbit, Run is a 1960 novel by John Updike. The novel depicts three months in the life of a 26-year-old former high school basketball player named Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom who is trapped in a loveless marriage and a boring sales job, and his attempts to escape the constraints of his life. It spawned several sequels, including Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, as well as a related 2001 novella, Rabbit Remembered. In these novels Updike ta...
Have you ever seen something noted because it is a representation of a specific thing? For example, a building might be marked with a plaque as a perfect representation of a type of architecture. Well, this book should be marked with a plaque as a perfect prose example of America in the late 50s/early 60s. The thoughts, ideas, acceptable social standards, treatment of women, etc. are so vivid and strongly represented, but soooooo dated!The book is very interesting, but mainly held my attention t...
Apologies to my friends who are Updike fans. Despite my hopes to love this classic, I didn't. I'll try to be as specific as possible why.Part of the issue is probably my own modern perspective. Rabbit, Run was first published in 1960 and its themes are meant to specifically address a certain type of mentality during that moment in time. Updike said that inspiration came when he observed a "number of scared dodgy men" in the late 1950's, "men who peaked in high school and existed in a downward sp...
If it's hard to love a book when you dislike the hero, it's harder still when the book leaves you cursing the nature of humanity.I hate John Updike right now.I hate him as an idealistic dreamer, for making me remember how ugly we are – all of us humans with our selfish hearts and boring thoughts, our fractious flaws, and our suffocating sense of doom and exceptionalism.I hate him as a woman, for cringe-worthy moments of misogyny, for the distancing male sexual fixation, and for making me wonder
God, do I hate Rabbit Angstrom! How much do I hate him? If I was in a room with Hannibal Lector, the Judge from Blood Meridian, the Joker from Batman, and Rabbit Angstrom, and someone handed me a gun with only 3 bullets, I'd shoot Rabbit three times. This is the first book by Updike I've read, and his reputation as a writer was well-earned. I'd had a vague idea that this story was about a former hot shot basketball player struggling to adjust to a regular life. I was completely unprepared for th...
“I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you’re first-rate something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.”Harry Angstrom, nicknamed Rabbit as a boy, knows what it’s like to be at the top of your game. And once you’ve been at the top, it is very difficult to come back down. Unfortunately, this seems to be exactly what has happened to ‘poor’ Rabbit. He reached his peak far too early but refuses to believe this. He knows th...
I'm sorry I think I might have to pause before the start of this review and scream discretely into a pillow: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!Phew, that's better, very cathartic. This is yet another book from the 1001 books list which has made me question whether or not the people who write the list actually like people who read books or if they are really secretly intent on torturing us all for their own amusement?The review w...
You know what would be nice, is if there was a wikipedia for life, and every time you met someone, you could just give it a glance and see if, you know, you really want to be associated with that person. Sure, it would backfire, it would reveal your prejudices and narrow-mindedness, your circle of friends might become a lot less varied and interesting. On the other hand, you'd never have to fake a conversation about football again, and you could easily avoid the total assholes like Rabbit Angstr...
I’ve read three or four Updike novels and I can’t recall a damn thing about any of them. Never a good sign. I was fifty pages in before I realised I’d already read this one. That in itself – to spend money on a book I’d already read – was irritating! Updike’s novels seem like misplaced objects in my life. He’s one of those writers I feel I’ve underappreciated and yet every time I give him another go I’m left underwhelmed. This isn’t a bad novel by any means. But I was relieved to finish it becau...
This is the best book I've read this year. Period. Maybe last year, too. Maybe. I don't know. But this book is amazing. I just looked up synonyms for "amazing", and all of them are adjectives you can use to describe this book. Man, John Updike just has this way of making the most mundane, ordinary stuff extraordinary. He takes pages and pages to set a scene or describe the inner thoughts of one of his main characters, and all of it is awesome. I mean there were paragraphs that went on for pages
“[Rabbit Angrstrom] drives too fast down Joseph Street, and turns left, ignoring the sign staying STOP. He heads down Jackson to where it runs obliquely into Central, which is also 422 to Philadelphia. STOP. He doesn’t want to go to Philadelphia but the road broadens on the edge of town beyond the electric-power station and the only other choice is to go through Mt. Judge around the mountain into the thick of Brewer and the supper-time traffic. He doesn’t intend ever to see Brewer again, that fl...
Get over it! Pull up your socks and get on with it! Sheez.Book Circle Reads 96Rating: 2.5* of fiveThe Book Description: Penguin's bumf--Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his — or any other — generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual g...
I'm kinda speechless. My mind is spinning from being held hostage by John Updike for the last two hours of reading this book, which is equal parts disturbing, relatable, repellant, tragic AND one of the most amazingly written books I've read.Harry Angstrom (Rabbit) is 23. He was a one-time great basketball player in high school. Now, our tall protagonist is waking up to his real nightmare: he's married to an alcoholic with whom he has little in common (besides their two year old son and the baby...
If The Catcher in the Rye hit the American literary scene with shock and awe in 1951, then I can't even imagine what happened when Rabbit, Run hit the bookstores in 1960. My guess is that it wasn't exactly circulating amongst factory workers and housewives (remember when we used to have those here??), which is ironic, because it's largely about them.This novel is very disturbing. I can't quite recommend it to you unless you can look me in the eye and tell me that you've read either Philip Roth o...
The very precision of words makes this Man-Bad-so-Man-Punished tale oh so jolting. A writer like this composes a cautionary story out of perfect and incredibly complex sentences. He is undoubtedly a poet, especially in his navigating the traditional ('somnambulent') realm of late '50s idyllic Americana gone to the dogs."On The Road" bears a comparison in its obvious Grownass-Young-Man-Seeking-Escape motif. The time-frames are also relatable. But this is closer akin to the intrepid tale of 50's S...
I discovered Rabbit Angstrom and John Updike while sitting in the Intensive Care Waiting Room at a local hospital. My mother languished in a coma for one month before she finally found peace, and I spent most of those days and many of my nights in that waiting room. During much of that time I'd blown through typical waiting room crap like books with plots about overthrowing the government, stories about detectives who were psychoanalysts, stories about psychoanalysts who were detectives, etc. On...
Guys are like that. Why blame Updike?