Rabbit, Run - John Updike

Run Rabbit, run. If I were to meet Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom in the street I would give him a black eye but the way things are, well, I can't stop reading about him. Of all the protagonists I have loved to hate I haven't hated anyone more than Harry Angstrom and therein lies John Updike's genius. He has created such a fantastic world of self-indulgence and you find yourself recognizing bits and pieces of your own world in the book.

At twenty six, Rabbit is caught in the throes of "mid-life" crisis with a meager job selling kitchen gadgets, an alcoholic wife and a second-rate existence. And Rabbit, the high school basketball star, who knows what being first-rate is like, cannot do second-rate. One evening his claustrophobic life finally propels him to abandon his pregnant wife and just flee with his car. What follows are the next five months of Harry's life and the events that unfold as a result of his extremely bad choices. Rabbit's life seems to be on some sort of constant overload and from the beginning, one wonders if Rabbit himself knows who or what he is running from. Rabbit's relationship with his wife, his sometimes loving, sometimes aloof relationship with his son, his affair with Ruth, a part-time hooker whom he meets through his old basketball coach when he leaves his wife and eventually abandons, his friendship with the Reverend Eccles, his parents, his in-laws all suggest that he shows a degree of selfishness that shock the senses.

Rabbit perhaps lives the so-called "ordinary" life of a straying man who abandons his family only to come crawling back and then leave again, but it is the getting inside his head that makes Rabbit Angstrom so fascinating and John Updike has presented the inside of Rabbit's head with crystal clear clarity. Rabbit, Run or any of its sequels for that matter do not seem to guarantee a happy ending, in fact they don't seem to guarantee a happy anything, but if you give this book a shot and stick with it till the end, you will come away having made reluctant friends with a man intensely dislikeable and you will want to go on reading about his life. So Rabbit runs, run with him.