Rabbit, Run

Harry Rabbit Angstrom, a twenty six year old former high school basketball star now selling kitchen gadgets, walks out on his pregnant wife Janice one ordinary evening and drives south with no real destination before turning back and settling instead into an affair with Ruth Leonard, a woman he meets through his old coach Marty Tothero. When Janice gives birth to their daughter Rebecca June, Harry returns home, and the marriage totters into an uneasy reconciliation; a night when he pressures Janice for sex ends instead with Janice, drunk and unsteady, accidentally drowning the infant in the bathtub. At the funeral Harry insists on his own innocence in front of the assembled family and bolts rather than stay for what follows. Learning that Ruth is now pregnant too, he visits her only long enough to learn she wants nothing more from him, and the novel ends with Harry running again, mid stride, toward no destination the book will name.

Updike wrote the whole novel in present tense, an unusual choice for 1960 that gives every scene an unfinished, still happening quality matched to Harry's own inability to settle into any life he is offered. It reads fast and close, moving scene to scene with almost cinematic immediacy, and it asks a reader to spend the entire book inside a man whose charm and cruelty arrive in the same instant; Harry never becomes likeable exactly, but the prose keeps a reader uncomfortably tethered to him anyway. Updike said later he wrote the book partly in response to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, wanting to show what happens to the people left behind by a man chasing his own freedom.

Alfred A. Knopf published the novel on November 2, 1960, having first required Updike to cut its more explicit sexual passages; those cuts were restored only in the 1963 Penguin edition and, more fully, in the 1995 Everyman's Library omnibus.