Fawcett Books (Random House/Ballantine), 264 pages, 1960
When I was about 16 and trying desperately to seem intellectual, I pulled this off the shelf at the Folsom Library, read the summary on the back, and put it back because I thought it was about basketball. I'm kind of glad I did because I don't think I was ready to read it then. It took me a while to get into it this time, despite the beautiful prose. What finally gave me an "in" was reading on Wikipedia that Updike wrote it as a response to Kerouac's On the Road (which was the first and only book read by the ill-fated Joetsu book club last year). I have no idea whether that's true, but having spent so much time dissecting On the Road, thinking about the two books together helped me realize what exactly the story was that Updike was trying to tell.
The stories are actually very similar--dumb, misogynist everyman decides that the tedium of American family life is beneath him and that he's meant for something greater, takes off on road trip, eventually is smacked in the face by divine retribution (Dean Moriarty goes crazy; Rabbit's wife accidentally drowns their daughter). But the writers take completely different approaches. Kerouac really believes in the lifestyle he sets forth in his books, and describes it with breathless joy; Updike is more cautious, and makes it clear that what he's describing is an attempt to escape from something that has no escape. There are so many late '50s/early '60s American novels on this theme--if you were a thinking person in America at that time, it seems, you were looking for a way out.
There is one more novel I've read recently that fits this formula: Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. I read Rabbit, Run the way you take medicine (it's good for you), and On the Road was like a trainwreck (can't look away), but I genuinely enjoyed Revolutionary Road, and I finished it in about 3 days. The difference, I think, is that it tells the story of a married couple instead of a single male protagonist, and so includes a female perspective. In fact, the wife, April Wheeler, is the one pushing for the family's escape to Europe--she's the smart one, the one who acts, causing her husband to react. Rabbit Angstrom and Dean Moriarty can go to hell, but I actually felt for the Wheelers as I watched their lives get torn apart.
Next up: Montana 1948 by Larry Watson
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