Word: rabbiters
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...RABBIT, RUN, by John Updike. This talented, depressing book contains some of the best and some of the most shocking writing of the year. Its hollow, spineless central character leaves a trail of misery and tragedy in the wake of his weakness, a condition that, the author seems to imply, infects a great many average U.S. young men without the stamina to face the facts of life...
...Rabbit, Run, by John Updike. A powerful and relentlessly depressing story about the crackup of an unspeakable Hollow Man whom the author perhaps mistakes for Everyman...
...Nathan goes to Yale), where he is traumatically snubbed because he lacks good looks or money, the two top things, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it. Lacking popularity, the non-hero decides to be different (Nathan wants to be an artist), but he invariably deserts his goal and runs rabbit-scared for life's lettuce (Nathan becomes a cartoonist and creates a Chaplinesque tramp called "Rollo the Magnificent...
Author Updike tells his depressing and frequently sordid story with a true novelist's power. His too-explicit sexual scenes are often in the worst of taste, but his set pieces describing Rabbit's crackup, his confrontations with wife, family, mistress and imploring minister show some of the surest writing in years. Up to a point Rabbit, Run seems to be saying that this is what much of life in the U.S. is like; certainly Updike's scene and people seem too threateningly typical. Yet the real weakness of the book is Rabbit...
...Ipswich, Mass., where their three children and those of the neighbors maintain an innocent bedlam. To escape it, Updike works in a room "in a sort of slum" in the center of town, is "sufficiently Protestant about trying to work every day." He admits that advance readers see his Rabbit "as a kind of beast, almost a satiric creation," but he denies being a satirist and refuses to take sides for or against his character. Is Rabbit a common American type? In some ways, says Updike, but "I don't really know about the youth of today...