The First Reviews of John Updike's "Rabbit" Novels / Book Marks. March 18, 2019

On what would have been the eighty-seventh birthday of John Hoyer Updike—the prolific, double Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicler of the (deep breath) post-war middle class suburban American male psyche—we look back at what the critics first wrote about each of his Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom novels.
Over the course of what is probably the most famous tetralogy in contemporary fiction, Updike’s alter ego goes from being a disaffected 26-year-old former high school basketball star turned salesman in a loveless marriage, to a depressed and overweight grandfather with a drug-addicted son and a bad heart. Along the way there are affairs, flights, births and deaths, health scares, alcoholism, embezzlement, and plenty of extramarital sex.
Angstrom is Updike’s restless American everyman, reappearing at the close of each decade to recap his most recent trials and tribulations against the backdrop of America’s woes. Indeed, taken together, these novels give us not just a portrait of a life, but of the nation as Updike saw it.

Rabbit, Run (1960)

You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.

“This is the stuff of shabby domestic tragedy—and Mr. Updike spares the reader none of the spiritual poverty of the milieu. The old people are listless and defeated, the young noisily empty, the young noisily empty. The novel, nevertheless, is a notable triumph of intelligence and compassion; it has none of the glib condescension that spoils so many books of this type. The characters have an imposing complexity.
…
“The author’s style is particularly impressive; artful and supple, its brilliance is belied by its relaxed rhythms. Mr. Updike has a knack of tilting his observations just a little, so that even a commonplace phrase catches the light. The prose is that rarest of achievements—perfectly pitched voice for the subject.
The treatment of sex commands our attention. For Rabbit, its expression is the final measure of the quality of experience. The author is utterly explicit in his portrayal of Rabbit’s divagations—but the description is as seemly as it is candid, for Mr. Updike is primarily interested in the psychic underside of sexuality. Nevertheless, there are some not-easily-ignored footnotes about the erotic sophistication of the post-war generation that will shock the prudish.
Rabbit, Run is a tender and discerning study of the desperate and the hungering in our midst. A modest work, it points to a talent of large dimensions—already prove in the author’s New Yorker stories and his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, John Updike, still only 28 years old, is a man to watch.”

–David Boroff, The New York Times, November 6, 1960 

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