Rabbit, Run
by John Updike may make you do this http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world
10 out of
10
Some years
back, the under signed has read this wondrous novel and rated it with just
three stars out of five, only to take it up again, about a week ago, and find
it enchanting – this proves that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, which
is paraphrasing Plato, and there is also the truth related by Marcel Proust, in
his chef d’oeuvre, the greatest book that I know, A La Recherche du Temps
Perdu, that we are a different person with the passing of time, and while there
seems that the forty years old me found little to relate with Rabbit aka Harry
Angstrom, now that I have added a couple of years, I find him quite like me.
This master
work does not have a hero, in that he could also be seen as an antihero (after
all, he is in large part responsible for a tragedy, the decline of his wife is
her responsibility, but he did not stop it, arguably contributed to that, and
however likeable he is, there is a sense that he is superficial, selfish, ready
to…well, Run) and we see him Running from the very first chapters, after he
plays basketball with some youngsters (he is twenty-six), he takes the car and
drives through Pennsylvania, heading south.
There is no
definite aim (this in itself could be a shortcoming, he is a father and
husband, but appears to be undecided, confused over the duties he has and
thinks he is free to just take off and disappear into the sunset) in his
driving, but he contemplates a long, long trip to the beach, in the south,
perhaps to Florida, Texas, one of those red states that are associated with the
cult of personality these days, and what a monster that personality is, orange
and idiot, in ignorance of the Happiness Myths exposed in the psychology
classic Stumbling on Happiness by Harvard Professor Daniel Gilbert http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/06/stumbling-on-happiness-by-david-gilbert.html wherefrom we learn that we think we
would be happy if only we were to live in California or a Pacific, maybe Caribbean
island, and once we move over there, we discover that happiness is elusive
because of Hedonic Adaptation…
Nonetheless,
Harry Angstrom does not travel all the way to Mexico or Florida (devastated by
hurricane Ian these days, and more generally, by a governor who acts as a
mini-Trump), he returns from his initial escape trip and looks for his former
basketball coach, Marthy Tothero, the latter speaking of the days when Rabbit
was a star, scoring record points and promising an outstanding future – this
also shows the complexity of our main character, who combines extraordinary
qualities with equally remarkable shortcomings and flaws, at one stage, he
thinks about what he can do, and he does not have many, or any skills, except
for putting the ball through the net, he sales a magic kitchen instrument when
we meet him, and though his standing will improve, for we know that Rabbit Is
Rich is the name of a title in the trilogy, in the first part, we see him as
pretty much a lost soul, doing a rather less than rewarding job, facing
unhappiness at home, where his wife is almost, or already an alcoholic.
In Harry’s defense,
the guilt is not completely his to carry, because if both spouses have clear
responsibility when one is in decline – the tendency is to blame the partner,
as we learn from another magic psychology classic, Games People Play by
Magister Ludi Eric Berne, where one of the most common interactions is called
If It Weren’t For You http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/09/games-people-play-by-eric-berne.html only it appears that we select the
other, better half to blame him/her/they for the things we do not think we can
do anyway, but a scapegoat comes in handy – then Janice Angstrom is an adult
who should not indulge in drink to this point.
Harry finds
some solace in the arms of Ruth Leonard, who used to be a prostitute (or sex
worker in the parlance of our age) and though Rabbit declares himself ready to
marry her (supposedly in a harem) his superficiality, lack of involvement,
seriousness make him hesitate between staying in this affair and returning to
Janice – incidentally, let us quote yet another psychology classic (they help
us understand human interactions) and say that the affair is not the cause of
the breakup in marriages, but the symptom, the marital troubles have reached
the point where an affair is investigated to resolve the solitude felt within a
‘stable relationship’ but ne suffering because of one of the Four Horsemen of
the Apocalypse, as named by John Gottman in his quintessential The Seven Principles
of Making Marriage Work http://realini.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-seven-principles-of-making-marriage.html
When Janice
is giving birth – they have already a son, Nelson, and she is expecting another
child when Rabbit drives south and then settles for some weeks with Ruth – they
call him to go to the hospital, and this is the occasion when the bond between
Harry and Ruth is broken, and the modern day Ulysses returns to his awaiting Penelope,
but it is a rather unstable situation, though some folks try to help, one of
them is the clergy Jack Eccles, who becomes a sort of friend – in spite of
these efforts however, our anti-hero slaps Jack’s wife on her ‘fanny’ and
envisages erotic games with her, imagines that she winks at him (maybe she did,
but with just humor in mind) with the intention to have coitus
Ruth may
give birth to a daughter – I am now already reading Rabbit is Rich, which is the
third part in the trilogy, having finished Rabbit Redux, thus a note will be
coming in the next few days on the latter, an announcement which presumed with
infatuation that somebody might be interested in the notion, and Harry is already
well, rich, as the title puts it clearly and when a young woman enters the
Toyota dealership where he is boss now (a spoiler alert might be missing) he
thinks this might be the daughter he had not met, given that she mentions that
her mother owns a farm, and then Rabbit had met Ruth in Redux and she mentioned
that, just as she made it clear that she does not want Harry to come anywhere
near – but the tragedies in the life of the hero, or perhaps antihero of this
narrative, mix with the happy events
Rabbit Run
and some of the other volumes in the tetralogy have been well received (‘a
masterpiece’ is one comment) and two went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for
Literature…as a personal comment, they make for a very entertaining reading,
and this is the second time that I meet with Harry Angstrom and the characters
that people his saga…
http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html
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