by Ann Hood
RABBIT, RUN WAS published in 1960, over a decade before I read it. John Updike said that when he looked around in 1959, he saw a number of scared, dodgy men who could not make commitments, men who had peaked in high school and existed in a downward spiral. Their idea of happiness, Updike noted, was to be young. Harry Angstrom, Rabbit, Run’s eponymously nicknamed protagonist, is only twenty-six, yet on page two of the novel he refers to himself as old. Updike himself was only twenty-eight when he wrote the book. At the age of fourteen, I was more than willing to accept that Rabbit was indeed old. Twenty-six? Definitely old. In fact, rereading the novel recently I was stunned by how young he actually is in it because he feels so old, so disheartened and beaten.
A former high-school basketball star, Rabbit is married with one young son and a baby on the way, working at a job selling a kitchen gadget called a MagiPeel when the story opens. Julian Barnes described Angstrom in an article about all four Rabbit books in The Guardian: “Harry is site-specific, slobbish, lust-driven, passive, patriotic, hard-hearted, prejudiced, puzzled, anxious. Yet likeable—for his humour, his doggedness, his candor, his curiosity and his wrong-headed judgments—for example preferring Perry Como to Frank Sinatra.” The description is fitting; yet as a young reader I developed a literary crush on Rabbit, as I did on Dr. Zhivago and Jay Gatsby. The allure of Zhivago and Gatsby is obvious. Angstrom—hard-hearted and anxious man that he is—less so. But in his introduction to Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy, Updike himself comes close to capturing what I found so appealing in Rabbit: “The character of Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom was for me a way in—a ticket to the America all around me . . . an Everyman who, like all men, was unique and mortal.”
In my blue-collar mill town, I recognized Rabbit’s own hometown of Brewster, and the people who populated it. “My subject,” Updike said, “is the American-Protestant small-town middle class. I like middles. It is in middles that extremes crash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.” Rabbit and I wanted to escape the very small town, the very middles, that Updike described. That ambiguity fed our restlessness, and therein lies the effect Rabbit had on my teenage self. He is, after all, a middle-class guy who is “overwhelmed by the shifting world around him.” So overwhelmed that Rabbit does exactly what I dreamed of at the top of the stairs—he runs away. “He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same.” He wonders, “Is it just these people I’m outside, or is it all America?” As the New York Times put it in their November 6, 1960, book review of Rabbit, Run it’s “a tender and discerning study of the desperate and the hungering in our midst.” If ever a word was perfect to describe how Rabbit and I felt, that word is hungering.
Isn’t this the magic of books? That a fourteen-year-old girl can exactly identify with the fictional character of a twenty-six-year-old, married, former basketball star from Pennsylvania just as readily as that same girl—Italian American, blue-collar, Catholic in a small town—exactly identifies with Marjorie Morningstar, an upper-middle-class Jewish girl in New York City? When I read Rabbit, Run, I understood that Rabbit, and John Updike, knew me. The me I didn’t think anyone else saw.
JOHN UPDIKE LEFT New York City in 1957 for Ipswich, Massachusetts, because, as he said, “I was full of a Pennsylvania thing I wanted to say,” and he could not write that in the city. The novel, written entirely in present tense and with multiple points of view, has an urgency made even more apparent by all the ways in which Harry runs. After he joins young boys in a basketball game at the start of the book (a scene that Updike imagined cinematically, with the title and credits playing above it), Rabbit runs home: “Running,” the paragraph begins, and then we get a description of the street where he lives as he is “running uphill,” with its “block of big homes, small fortresses of cement and brick,” and then halfway up the block “a development built all at once in the thirties,” until finally, “There are a dozen three-story homes, and each has two doors. The seventh is his.” It is there on the worn wooden steps that Rabbit finally pauses.
“Don’t run off on me,” his wife, Janice, admonishes him. Janice, who “just yesterday, it seems to him, she stopped being pretty.” Janice, who, in one of the most harrowing scenes I have ever read to this day, gets drunk and accidentally drowns their infant daughter Rebecca in the bathtub while Rabbit has, once again, run off on her. And he runs from her again at Rebecca’s funeral: “He hates his wife’s face. She doesn’t see . . . A suffocating sense of injustice blinds him. Again he turns and runs.” Not just runs, but “uphill exultantly. He dodges among gravestones.” Perhaps escaping the death of his soul that he so acutely feels but can’t articulate. “I’ll tell you,” Rabbit says, “when I ran from Janice I made an interesting discovery . . . if you have the guts to be yourself, other people’ll pay your price.”
AFTER I READ Rabbit, Run, I read the other three John Updike books on the library shelf: The Centaur, Couples, and Bech: A Book. Although I remember being equal parts shocked and seduced by Couples, none of these other books had the effect on me that Rabbit, Run did. I took that book out of the library over and over, growing more certain with each reading that Updike had stared unflinchingly straight into my heart.
In 1974, I graduated from West Warwick High School in a ceremony held in the Warwick Musical Theatre, a giant tent on Route 2 that hosted the likes of Engelbert Humperdinck, John Davidson, and Liberace on summer nights. That fall, my parents drove me and my brand-new stereo thirty-one miles south to the University of Rhode Island and my new home in the Barlow dormitory, Room 401. For one day, I was a journalism major. When the teacher told us that in journalism we had to tell the truth—“No making things up!”—I immediately switched my major to English. In 1974, at URI, there were no creative writing classes, only remedial writing classes. My first English class was a general American literature survey. The teacher handed out the syllabus, and to me the reading list was like a gift. Someone had chosen all of these books for me to read. I didn’t have to scour library shelves and haphazardly select books anymore. Here was My Ántonia by Willa Cather, The Falconer by John Cheever, Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow, and—I blinked to be sure I was reading it correctly—Rabbit Redux by John Updike.
As if she’d read my mind, the teacher asked, “How many of you have read John Updike’s Rabbit, Run?”
I alone raised my hand.
She smiled at me, and gave me a little nod.
“The rest of you read Rabbit, Run first, before Rabbit Redux,” she said.
My heart was beating hard against my ribs. For my whole teenage life, I’d read to understand who I was and where I was going and what it was I was yearning for so desperately. And sitting in that warm, stuffy classroom in Independence Hall on that September day in 1974, I realized I’d somehow, through serendipity and curiosity and doggedness and intelligence and just plain luck, done it right. I’d taught myself how to live the life I’d dreamed by reading books.
Soon I had other English classes, and professors who told me to read Shakespeare, Anne Sexton, Flannery O’Connor, and so many more authors that I cannot even begin to name them all. I discovered The New Yorker, and the New York Times Book Review, and I made friends who loved to read, and then friends who wanted to write, and then I was doing it, living this life I’d dreamed about. I stepped into this big, beautiful world with an open, eager heart. I opened my arms to it, all of it.
This is why we all read, isn’t it? To know the world and ourselves better. To find our place in that world. Even if you did have access to readers and guidance on what to read, even if you grew up in a family that loved to read and owned shelves of books, still, still, one day a book falls into your hands—perhaps it’s Beloved or A Wrinkle in Time or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; perhaps it’s Great Expectations or Pride and Prejudice—whatever book it is, it falls into your hands at just the right moment when you need to read it. It transforms you. Perhaps it lifts you up when you are at your lowest; perhaps it shows you what love is, or what it feels l
ike to lose love; perhaps it brings you places far away or shows you how to stay put when you need to.
In a 1966 Paris Review interview, John Updike said, “When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, and having them speak to him.”
I was more than a little east of Kansas, and a daughter of Italian immigrants, but those books on library shelves called out to me too. Thick, beautiful old books. They called out, and I heard them. Gratefully, I heard them.
Acknowledgments
I would like nothing more than to thank every writer who helped me become the person I used to dream of becoming, but the list would be too long and never ending.
Many, many thanks to my brilliant agent, Gail Hochman, who recognized how books had shaped me and urged me to write about that; and to my brilliant editor, Jill Bialosky, who agreed.
As always thanks to all the people at Brandt and Hochman and W. W. Norton who work tirelessly for me. And to Sam and Annabelle, my kids who are passionate readers too and put up with a mom who reads and writes all the time.
And to Michael, ybv.
ALSO BY ANN HOOD
The Book That Matters Most
An Italian Wife
The Obituary Writer
The Red Thread
The Knitting Circle
An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life
Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine
EDITED BY ANN HOOD
Knitting Yarns
Knitting Pearls
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