. Spinning .

Well, Rabbit did what was expected of him–secretly in everyone’s mind of course, as what was expected of him was that he behave responsibly, putting his family above his own passions and perplexities.   This is perhaps the theme of Updike’s Rabbit, Run, rather than to consider it a moral: Decisions made must be carried through, regardless of the the fact that they may have been made in the ignorance of youth or the simple twists and turns life takes changes things, changes people.

While I might not feel that the characters were an allegory of family life of that period of time in America because they were too finely drawn, most readers can relate to Rabbit’s questioning of his life, his dissatisfaction with how things turned out.  His wife is an alcoholic, yet Updike’s method of putting us into her head show us what led her there.  Rabbit’s run to Ruth and his behavior with her was a need for ego-strokes that he felt he wasn’t getting any more, especially missed since his high school days when he was a hot-shot ballplayer. 

There is a thread of generations, both Rabbit’s parents and his wife Janice’s play fairly important roles as figures of authority, symbols of "doing the right thing."  There is a contrast in what they do and what they say; there is dishonesty for sake of appearances and sacrifices made for happiness and maybe that’s one of the reasons why they’re not so hard on Rabbit.  They’ve all felt the urge, the realization that for what their lives have become, that’s all there is.  Secretly they may have cheered him on yet felt guilty for doing so.

But is Rabbit deserving of their understanding, or even ours?  I’m in no way a women’s libber and yet I couldn’t accept (though of course, even in fiction as in reality, accept I must) Rabbit’s lack of comprehension of anyone else’s feelings, of how his actions would affect their lives.  It seemed more than a lack of caring and not on an emotional level since when something serious happened, such as the baby’s death or in facing people after deserting his wife, he seemed to know how he was supposed to act, was overly grateful for their help and forgiveness.  But wasn’t it just so that he could feel good about himself?  Isn’t this often what people do to fit back in among society?

Updike’s narrator has a voice that is totally inobtrusive to the story;  in fact, in thinking about it now, it is so dispassionate that it makes me wonder how so much was told in such detail. Perhaps because this is a character-driven story the telling was perceived to be coming from within the characters themselves, making the narrator truly a relator of story.

There are symbols that Updike offers us to make of them what we will.  The rose window of the church across from Ruth’s apartment; is it a source of comfort or a beacon as in the end of the story, Rabbit seeks it out for light.  There are many references to his heart, and yet it’s hard for me to see it as a warm and living thing that means a love for fellowman; Rabbit is self-centered and even as he holds his son it is often for his own comfort rather than for the child’s.

The story here is simple: a young man, fed up with lost opportunity and feeling maneuvered by routine and responsibility makes his escape.  He doesn’t go far, comes nearly back, hooking up with a hooker for a couple months.  He lies to her of his love–or maybe he just doesn’t really understand what love should be–and leaves her in the middle of a night when he’s called out to witness the birth of his second child.  Strange, he’s never called his wife to let her know where he’d gone, never needed to see his son.  He easily accepts help from others: his former coach, Ruth, and his wife’s clergyman, Eccles. Eccles sees Rabbit as a personal challenge, trying hard to guide him yet we see his own sense of disillusionment in people and relationships. 

There is no doubt that Rabbit can be understood; there is doubt that at least for now, he’s anything more that a real prick.  Updike may have set us up for this, to make a moral judgement of a man who represents a realization and last grab for change, to make his own life better even at the expense to others.  I’m not sure that Updike hasn’t made Rabbit a bit unlikeable just so we don’t relate too closely, so that we can still say, yeah, I understand but I’d never do that without at least…

An excellent read, excellent writing style and way of bringing the reader deeply into the brief time span of conflicts within a small group of people.  I’m not sure, however, that I like Rabbit enough to find out how his life unrolls by reading the three subsequent novels in the series.  Likely I will, but I’m reluctant right now to forgive Rabbit as easily as everyone else has done.  Do I care?  We’ll see.

There is one risk the author runs in omniscient point of view and that is that the reader, knowing what the characters think can respond more accurately than merely providing their own justification or guesswork as to motivation.

By what Updike gives the reader as to Rabbit’s movements, his decisions, his reactions, one can choose to understand and either self-righteously blame Rabbit, denouncing him as a first class jackass or one can understand his frustration and sympathize, denouncing his actions rather than Rabbit’s character. But once we’re allowed inside Rabbit’s head–or any of the other characters, in particular, Janice or Ruth–those thoughts will enhance our vision and clarify motive. 

In other words, Rabbit is a real jerk.  He’s self-centered, immature, and while I can sympathize with his growing unrest and his weakness in seeking escape, I still think he needs a good slap on the side of the head.  He himself seems to recognize that everyone is bending over backward to help him out and overlook his myopic introspection.  Rabbit doesn’t learn.  His confrontation with Ruth and his treatment of her is forgotten immediately when he, that same night, runs off to be with his wife.  He’s "doing the right thing," even while making excuses that Janice is dumb and can’t have the baby without him there.  Within hours he’s proclaiming his love for Janice, and it’s not the sight of baby Rebecca that does it.

When the baby drowns, he’s more concerned with how others will treat him than about his wife, son, or dead child.  This is where, if Updike had shown Rabbit’s actions alone, we may have supported him in answering his responsibilities, regardless of his unsteady emotions. But as we follow his thought pattern, we see he does what’s best for him, even while blaming society for making him do what he needs to do.

This is character depiction at its best–and I suppose, its worst. We can understand Rabbit’s disgust with Janice’s drinking; but we get to see as well her reasons, her feelings and the insecurities and unhappiness that drives it.  We might have been okay with Rabbit’s treatment of Ruth had we seen only her tough, flippant exterior and the knowledge that she’s a whore.  Once we see her point of view, her fears and needs, her secrets, there is certainly more concern for her than what we might otherwise have had based on Harry’s or the narrator’s opinions only.

(Note:  I’m supposed to be outside gardening while Jim is at the range but I made the mistake of taking a cup of coffee and this book out there with me and well, it’s not really a mistake because I just get tired and sore so I take a short break–like I never used to have to do before but when my Dad turned ninety we talked him into doing so–and rather than waste time I do some reading though it would likely be wiser to take the laptop out there [instead of coming inside like I just did now] and work on the Scratch project to get that damn thing done so I could move on to Alice beyond the tutorials which I’ve already started because they looked so damned cool, but in reading just a few paragraphs more of Rabbit, Run I came across a very interesting notion that I wanted to write about so that’s what’s below this Note and in fact, is relevant enough because it does deal with both literary analysis of character and the analyzing of folk–ourselves, truly–in reality.)

While his wife is still in the hospital with the new baby, Rabbit visits his mother-in-law:

Now Rabbit knows from school that Peggy Fosnacht, then Peggy Gring, wears sunglasses because she is freakishly, humiliatingly walleyed.  And Eccles has told him that her company was a great comfort to Janice during the trying period now past.  But he does not make either of these objections; he listens contentedly, pleased to be united with Mrs. Springer, the two of them against the world.  The cubes in the iced tea melt, making the beverage doubly bland; his mother-in-law’s talk laves his ears like the swirling mutter of a brook.  Lulled, he lets his lids lower and a smile creeps into his face; he sleeps badly at nights, alone, and drowses now on the grassy breadth of day, idly blissful, smug on the right side at last.  (p. 209)

Compromise for peace, for a place in society that is comfortable, unchallenged.  Freedom not worth the price.  Note the inclusion of the detail of the iced tea made bland by the melting ice cubes; the woman’s talk simile-ed to the mutter of a brook. Certainly the contrast of peace to adventure. 

There is a period in our lives when, after the rebelliousness of youth subsides, we learn to get along by going with the flow.  We keep our mouths shut unless the nature of an event is either far enough from our inner self to be undamaging such as political stands or world situations, or close enough to necessitate the risk.

And then we reach another point where, as Rabbit made his un-thought-out escape, we make a conscious decision to voice our own opinions and buck the tide.  The complacency that Rabbit here exhibits is being done in the name of peace for the immediate and long term future.  His mother-in-law, Mrs. Springer, is doing the same, but more for her daughter’s sake and the still with the idea of society’s tendency in gossip to judge her family just by Rabbit’s own behavior.  She must forgive, for appearance’s sake. 

Strange, how the very nature of fiction which is dishonesty can be so very honest.

Just as Updike helps us to understand Rabbit, accept his leaving his pregnant wife and child, he throws in the inevitable twist: his wife is having the baby.

It didn’t sit well with the reader that Rabbit just drove off that day and yet we came to understand his motivation–he’s not a bad person, he just felt hemmed in and hopeless and seeing an opportunity, broke out.  Like most of the characters in the books I’ve read recently, he receives help from friends–his former coach, and then Ruth.  (Hum: I get by with a little help from my friends) The problem I see here is that it weakens the character; the perk, I suppose, is that it makes them more real. Such a huge difference between these protagonists (Updike’s Rabbit, Ruiz’s Daniel, Murakami’s Kafka) and those of the fantasy genre in which they are kings, princes, (or queens, princesses) and lead armies.  These characters face no wars, just the daily battles that wear us down.  The outcomes don’t lead to treasure and acquired lands, but more towards a realization, an understanding, often resigned acceptance.

He feels the truth; the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it.  No flight would reach it.  It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him.  The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her.  Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk.  Flower stalks.  (p. 208)

Rabbit, having decided his path once again on the spur of the moment when visiting his wife at the hospital having their baby, is still thinking not of her, not of Ruth–whom he has also left without notice, laying in bed in the middle of the night when he rushes off to the hospital–not even of his three year-old son, Nelson, but of himself. 

We’ve come to expect parents to give up themselves for their children; Rabbit, who hasn’t, may have just seen what is expected of him.

In the meantime, the reader, who has come to reverse his own thought pattern of expectations and truly sympathize with Rabbit’s choices if not in agreement with them, is left to wonder how futile it is to fight against expectations.  Self versus society.  Society versus Self.

"Even so.  I saw you that way tonight and I felt a wall between us and this is the one way through it."
"That’s pretty cute.  You just want it, really." She yearns to hit out at him, to tell him to go.  But that time is past.
He repeats, "Is it so awful for you?"
"Well it is because you think it is."
"Maybe I don’t."
"Look, I’ve loved you."
"Well I’ve loved you."
"And now?"
"I don’t know.  I want to still."
Now those damn tears again.  She tries to hurry the words out before her voice crumbles.  "That’s good of you.  That’s heroic."
"Don’t be smart.  Listen.  Tonight you turned against me.  I need to see you on your knees." (p. 174)

Harry and Ruth, out for the evening, meet up with someone out of Harry’s past school days, a rival of sorts.  Ruth knows the man too; from her life as a hooker.

So the stage is set here for Harry to fight one of his battles, his own sense of helplessness and hopelessness.  But he will use Ruth, demean her by asking her for a blowjob because he knows she’s given that to the other man, because he needs to see himself at least at that level of the other man in her eyes. 

And Ruth cannot deny him.  For Ruth, as well as the reader, knows something that Harry does not.  That ties her to him in a subservient manner that has taken away her own sense of freedom.  Strangely enough, the freedom that Harry found in her she must give up herself.

Men  do see a reinforcing of power, control, self confidence in the sexual act.  Harry, at least here, is being honest about it.  And the sex must be of a different manner, leaving us to assume that in the relationship with Ruth, as in his marriage to Janice, plain old sex had lost its worth as a tool. (No pun intended.)

Post-reading of Murakami, Marquez, O’Brien with the forced suspension of disbelief required brings to mind Updike’s near insistence on the realities of existence.

The setting, the interaction of characters, the getting inside to see the motivations, all beat home the notion of the indecision of our lives on a day-to-day basis.  The recognition of reality with its options, its possibilities, its hope and its hopelessness. The emotional swings that follow a major decision finally made is the core of this book, and our job as readers is the same as that of the characters: to make some sense of it all if there is sense to be made.

Updike’s concentration on description, I believe, is to involve the reader in that reality–in Rabbit’s reality.  To make the reader care enough for him and those he affects as if he were a friend that’s taken a path we’re not sure is for the best.  The way Updike fits everything together in a manner that leaves us a world that we can believe exists–forgetting that all fiction is just that, an appearance of reality that doesn’t exist–keeps us tied to the tale, anxious for the story.  It tickles somewhere in the back of the mind where we aren’t required to act, and yet can’t ignore the situation.

Is that Updike’s intention?  Does an author always know, much less plan, who will get our attention?

Updike gives us characters that he understands–if not agreeing with their choices–and allows us that same insight.  As I’ve shown in a previous example, we follow Rabbit’s motivations by knowing his thought processes, his dreams, his desires.  He becomes a full rounded character by our understanding of how he thinks–or sometimes ignores events and people–in his situation. 

What we’re being treated to now is another point of view, that of Rabbit’s inlaws’ minister, Eccles, as he interacts with Rabbit and others affected by Rabbit’s decision to leave his family. Here he is visiting Rabbit’s mother, and by their conversation as well as getting inside Eccles’ head, we become more involved with the story:

Eccles smiles, wondering if the Lutheran church gives everyone such ideas.  Luther himself was a little like this, perhaps–overstating half-truths in a kind of comic wrath.  The whole black Protestant paradox-thumping maybe begins there.  Deep fundamental hopelessness in such a mind.  Hubris is shoving the particular aside.  Maybe: he’s forgotten most of the theology they made him absorb.  It occurs to him that he should see Angstrom’s pastor.  (p. 150)

What this gives us in another point of view, a character trying to understand another character. At the same time, we begin to understand that character as well.  These are all very different people and their reactions to what Rabbit has done is going to give us all the different angles.

That is, besides our own reader response.

The timing of the reading of this section, where Rabbit goes to work part-time as a gardener, couldn’t have been better for me.  It echos the gardener’s love of the earth and growing things, the whole idea of rethinking life as spring rebuilds itself:

Funny, for these two months he never has to cut his fingernails,  He lops, lifts, digs.  He plants annuals, packets the old lady gives him–nasturtiums, poppies, sweet peas, petunias.  He loves folding the hoed ridge of crumbs of soil over the seeds.  Sealed, they cease to be his.  The simplicity.  Getting rid of something by giving it to itself.  God Himself folded into the tiny adamant structure, Sef-destined to a succession of explosions, the great slow gathering out of water and air and silicon: this is felt without words in the turn of the round hoe-handle in his palms.  (p. 127)

There seems to be a change in Rabbit, a mellow acceptance, a seeing of life as a continual renewal of itself.  Oddly, he didn’t seem to see this in the birth of his son, the imminent birth of his second child. 

Updike has made this first break in the narrative; there are no chapters, no other sequencing of note.  Is this then a turning point?  Does Rabbit feel as I do when my fingers are stained with the good earth?

Along the lines of psychological realism, Updike has some more character insight that comes closer to stream of consciousness:

Holding a three wood, absorbed in its heavy reddish head and grass-stained face and white stripe prettily along the edge, he thinks O.K., if you’re so smart and clenches and swirls.  Ahg: when she tumbled so easily, to balk this!  The mouth of torn grass and the ball runs, hops and hops, hides in a bush; white tail.  And when he walks there, the bush is damn somebody, his mother; he lifts the huffy branches like skirts, in a fury of shame but with care not to break any, and these branches bother his legs while he tries to pour his will down into the hard irreducible pellet that is not really himself yet in a way is; just the way it sits there in the center of everything.  (p. 123)

I’m not concerned here with what this means, what his thought process is but more with the fact that it is a throught process.  The only italicized phrase is "O.K. if you’re so smart" and yet the third person narrative here is of the stream of consciousness form, as if taken from Rabbit’s head and explained in a more psychological manner. As if to form the random thoughts into a more cohesive, more telling statement of Rabbit’s thinking.  Not to explain, but to show that Rabbit is at last allowing himself to admit his feelings to himself and to try to understand them.   

I’m not sure that I quite understand the definition of psychological realism–in many places it appears to have more to do with the interaction of the reader rather than characterization–yet it’s the first thing I thought of in Updike’s depth of portrayal of Rabbit.

His day had been bothered by God: Ruth mocking, Eccles blinking–why did they teach you such things if no one believed them?  It seems plain, standing here, that if there is this floor there is a ceiling, that the true space in which we live is upward space.  Someone is dying.  In this great stretch of brick someone is dying.  The thought comes from nowhere: simple percentages.  Someone in some house along these streets, if not this minute then the next, dies; and in that suddenly stone chest the heart of this flat prostrate rose seems to him to be.  He moves his eyes to find the spot; perhaps he can see the cancer-blackened soul of an old man mount through the blue like a monkey on a string.  He strains his ears to hear the pang of release as this ruddy illusion at his feet gives up this reality.  Silence blasts him.  Chains of cars creep without noise; a dot comes out of a door.  What is he doing here, standing on air?  Why isn’t he home?  He becomes frightened and begs Ruth, "Put your arm around me."  (p. 108)

Rabbit is obviously going through some mental gymnastics.  His decision to leave his pregnant wife and two year-old son was spur-of-the moment; the scene the original "I’m going out for a pack of cigarettes" that indicates not the immediate, but the built-upon.

Yet as with Kerouac’s hero in On The Road, he comes back to the area, depends on friends, hovers near, looking at his life positioned just around the corner from it, or peeking in through a kitchen window.

At the side of her neck where it shades into her shoulder there is a shallow white hollow where his attention curls and rests.  (p. 69)

Alliteration: shades into her shoulder and shallow white hollow. Beautiful, soft, smooth.

Personification: where his attention curls and rests.  As if it were a tired toddler settling comfortably into his bed.

Some wonderful stuff here from Updike; a writer’s writer.  He sneaks these in among metaphors and similes that appear so naturally and yet I’m sure have been if not thought out and planned, a language that has become a part of the way Updike thinks.

Backtracking here for a moment because this stuck in my mind.  Updike sets us up with a wonderful metaphor as Rabbit looks into his past, but the setting is wonderfully done; Rabbit goes to his mother’s house to pick up his young son:

He walks back as far as the lit kichen window and steps onto the cement without the sole of his shoe scraping and on tiptoe looks in one bright corner.  He sees himself sitting in a high chair, and a quick odd jealousy comes and passes.  It is his son.  (p. 25)

While it may seem cliche to look into the window of his childhood home and momentarily see himself, the window frame acts as a module within the story as well as one within the image of the house and the neighborhood.  I could well imagine seeing this on a computer screen, clicking on the window to zoom in on the film clip of life that’s going on separately from the house exterior, and the man who stands there looking in.

Updike appears to depend heavily on imagery to set both tone of setting and character:

Growing sleepy, Rabbit stops before midnight at a roadside cafe for coffee.  Somehow, though he can’t put his finger on the difference, he is unlike the other customers.  They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men sitting in zippered jackets in booths three to a girl, the girls with orange hair hanging like seaweed or loosely bound with gold barrettes like pirate treasure.  At the counter, middle-aged couples in overcoats bunch their faces forward into straws of gray ice-cream sodas. p. 36)

While some readers may find this an overdose, I love the color and movement the words evoke.  The place, the people, all telling of who and what they are and what makes them foreign to Rabbit.

Updike uses an omniscient third person point of view which naturally gives us good insight into a character.  As a matter of fact, everything seems to be about character here, and I like that.  It appears that this will be what drives the story and there’s already enough to see that troubles and conflicts will arise to produce a story just out of the information we have so far:

He goes to the closet and takes out the coat he hung up so neatly.  The clutter behind him in the room–the Old-fashioned glass with its corrupt dregs, the choked ashtray balanced on the easy-chair arm, the rumpled rug, the floppy stacks of slippery newspapers, the kid’s toys here and there broken and stuck and jammed, a leg off a doll and a piece of bent cardboard that went with some breakfast-box cutout, the rolls of fuzz under the radiators, the continual crisscrossing mess–clings to his back like a tightening net.  (p. 19)

So we’re not only given what Rabbit’s wife, Janice, is like, but how he looks at his world.  How he sees her, his "kid", his home, all becoming a "tightening net."  We can feel that Rabbit has thoughts of running.

And Janice:

She moves into the kitchen, angry but not angry enough.  She should be really sore, or not sore at all, since all he had said was what he had done a couple hundred times.  Maybe a thousand times.  Say, on the average once every three days since 1956.  What’s that? Three hundred.  That often?  Then why is it always an effort?  She used to make it easier before they got married.  She could be sudden then.  Just a girl.  (p. 17)

How typical of a relationship; the different point of views, the difference in priorities, the hostility held in and argued within oneself instead of with each other.  Janice obviously has an image of herself that doesn’t jive with Rabbit’s version.  She knows that she’s changed and yet the journey as she sees it is a path marked with street names unknown to Rabbit, as his are to her.

Um.  Don’t think I’ve ever read Updike before and I’m finding him quite likeable in his language use and style.

The frame houses climb the hill like a single staircase.  The space of six feet or so that each double house rises above its neighbor contains two wan windows, wide-spaced like the eyes of an animal, and is covered with composition shingling varying in color from bruise to dung.  The fronts are scabby clapboards, once white.  There are a dozen three-story homes, and each has two doors.  The seventh door is his.  The wood steps up to it are worn; under them there is a cubbyhole of dirt where a lost toy molders.  A plastic clown.  He’s seen it there all winter but he always thought some kid would be coming back for it.  (p. 12)

The similes used are amazingly precise: the houses like a staircase, the windows like the eyes of an animal.  The description of color, "from bruise to dung," goes along with the shabbiness Updike paints the neighborhood.  Worn steps, a cubbyhole of dirt, a lost toy–the incongruity of a plastic clown.  This scene has been decaying for years prior to Rabbit living here, yet he continues the neglect by noticing but not touching the toy.  He’s also one of many; the seventh door amid twenty-four.  No one, it would seem, has it better or worse than their neighbors.  All are ensconced here in a life of gradual decay.

Tells us an awful lot about Rabbit, and the way his story may unfold if we leave him to live it.