Top five road-trip novels? Rabbit runs among them

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Photo credit: Ben Hasty – Reading Eagle

Benjamin Markovits was interviewed about “The Best Road Trip Novels” he selected for readers of the Five Books website:

1—On the Road by Jack Kerouac
2—Independence Day, by Richard Ford
3—Ladder of Years: A Novel, by Anne Tyler
4—Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
5—The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor, by Peter Taylor

Rabbit, Run, by John Updike—the first in the series of novels featuring Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom. I think of this as an archetypal midlife crisis novel. Do you agree?
Yeah. I mean, eventually. Although at the beginning he is only 26, although he is married with a kid, with another kid on the way. Midlife maybe began earlier then. He’s in a dead-end job. And, actually, I looked into the ‘midlife crisis’ term, and it was coined by a Canadian psychoanalyst who had in mind men in their mid-thirties. So he’s not so far off that.

Like Delia in Ladder of Years, he also leaves his family on a whim.
He’s determined to get the hell out of Dodge, and wants to drive to the coast although he never quite makes it because the tangle of American highways somehow obstructs him. He ends up moving one township away and shacking up with a woman that his old basketball coach introduced him to, and being no happier than he was before. He reproduces the same kind of domestic mess he was trying to escape from in the first place.

The road trip represents a common fantasy—that you can just get in your car and drive away, and never stop driving.
And we should talk about the car. I’ve done a couple of road trips across the States, and one of the things that happens is that the car becomes your home. It’s the only constant in your life. If you’re stopping in motels or camping or staying at friends’ houses, the car is the one place that you feel is consistent in your life.

The appeal of that in Rabbit, Run and all these other books is that in the car you have a home that you can take with you. You’re a turtle with a shell on your back.

About John John Updike’s Writing Routine

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There’s a website for everything these days, including one on Famous Writing Routines. What works for one writer might not work for another, but when that one writer is John Updike, who wrote more than 60 books during his professional lifetime, there has to be something, even in a single tip—which is what these posts seem to entail—to help writers aspiring to complete ONE book. Hao Nguyen shared this writing advice from Updike:

“Even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.”

On reading Updike’s stories in Japan

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Writer Daniel Clausen posted a review of Updike’s 40 Stories on Goodreads that was more a personal story of reading and engaging with a text than it was a standard review . . . and, like Updike’s stories, the introspective meandering made it more interesting. Clausen confesses to having a hard time concentrating back in 2021 when he read the stories. “I remembered the story ‘The A&P’ from long ago and thought I might try 39 more stories by John Updike. I would read them in various locales of Nagasaki. The book itself was in my university library. Its pages were brown and yellowing. I was busy that semester, which is why I had trouble concentrating.

“I’m sorry. I’m lying. Let me start over. I had started a new job at the university, and I was gripped with anxiety. Would I be good at my new job? Would the coronavirus ever end? What would I do now that I was almost forty? Would I be able to finish my novel?”

Clausen is the author of a collection of short stories and essays, Something to Stem the Diminishing (2015).

‘New Yorker’ celebrates Ted Williams (and John Updike)

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As part of a grand centennial year celebration, an episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour featured “Louisa Thomas on a Ballplayer’s Epic Final Game,” a remembrance that “naturally gravitated to a story about baseball with a title only comprehensible to baseball aficionados: “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.” The essay was by no less a writer than the author John Updike, and the “Kid” of the title was Ted Williams, the Hall of Fame hitter who spent nineteen years on the Boston Red Sox. By happenstance, Updike joined the crowd at Fenway Park for Williams’s last game before his retirement, in 1960. Thomas, looking at subtle word changes that Updike made as he was working on the piece, reflects on the writer’s craft and the ballplayer’s. ‘Marginal differences really matter,’ she says. ‘And it’s those marginal differences that are the difference between a pop-up, a long fly, and a home run. Updike really understood that, and so did Williams.’

Excerpts from ‘Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,’ by John Updike, were read by Brian Morabito.”

Updike’s former Boston condo lists for sale

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For a short time, Updike left suburbia for Boston’s Back Bay, living in one of the units at 151 Beacon Street—#4. Now that unit can be yours for $2.85 million. From BostonRealEstate.com:

“Welcome to a distinguished residence where historic charm meets modern comfort. Spanning 2 grand Back Bay townhouses, this home offers city living at its finest. Originally built for the Lowell family & later home to John Updike, 151 Beacon features 3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, & over 2,000 sq. ft. of sophisticated living space. Enjoy direct elevator access, a formal living room w/ gas fireplace, custom built-ins, & oversized windows framing picturesque Beacon Street views. The open-concept kitchen, enhanced by bay windows w/ striking John Hancock Tower views, boasts a central island & a second gas fireplace. The primary suite offers a luxurious retreat w/ an oversized walk-in closet & spacious ensuite bath. 2 additional bedrooms, a powder room, in-unit laundry, & two separate AC/heat units complete the layout. Set in a professionally managed, boutique building of just 6 residences, this home includes 1 tandem parking space & is around the corner from some of Bostons Historic landmarks.”

‘Rabbit, Run’ and 20 other books that start with the ending

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Writing for Festivaltopia, Fritz von Burkersroda recommends “20 Books That Start at the End—and Still Surprise You”: One Hundred Years of Solitude and Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Márquez), The Secret History (Tartt), Fight Club (Palahniuk), The Book Thief (Zuzak), American Beauty (Ball), Before I Fall (Oliver), The Lovely Bones (Sebold), We Need to Talk About Kevin (Shriver), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Díaz), An American Marriage (Jones), The Arsonist’s City (Alyan), Everything I Never Told You (Ng), Atonement (McEwan), Dark Places (Flynn), The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (North), They Both Die at the End (Silvera), The Sense of an Ending (Barnes), Revolutionary Road (Yates), and John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. “Rabbit, Run opens with Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom running out on his family—not the lead-up, but the aftermath. The rest of the novel digs deep into the why, exploring freedom, failure, and the pressures of adulthood. Updike’s portrayal of postwar American life is as vivid as it is critical, painting Rabbit’s choices as both selfish and painfully human. The story’s realism and attention to detail have made it a staple in discussions of American literature. Critics highlight how Updike’s exploration of existential angst still feels modern, with the consequences of Rabbit’s actions rippling out in unexpected ways. The book’s unflinching honesty ensures that even if you know where it all starts, you’re never sure where it will end.”

‘Perfection Wasted’: John Updike’s poetic self-assessment

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On the Best American Poetry blog, the April 10, 2025 entry was John Updike’s “Perfection Wasted,” a poem written when the author was dying of lung cancer.

Perfection Wasted
And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market —
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That’s it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren’t the same.

(included in Endpoint and Other Poems)

Christopher Lydon considers John Updike’s ‘Terrorist’

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Boston radio’s Christopher Lydon has interviewed Updike on numerous occasions, and now he’s turned his admiration for Updike into “Open Source” conversations. In “John Updike and his Terrorist,” Lydon shares an interview he did with Updike about the post-9/11 novel and adds his own comments:

“Terrorist is cinematic and political—wonderfully so, as I read it. It may be as close to the movie Syriana as we’ll ever get from Updike.

“It’s not for me to vouch that he nailed every answer here. But I can report the huge pleasure for one reader—picking up a piece of our conversation recently on The Great American Novel—in ‘public’ fiction, masterfully made, encompassing the depressive high-school guidance counsellor Jack Levy, and the hateful Secretary of Homeland Security, whose name sounds like Haffenreffer; and at the center of it all, Ahmad Ashmawy Mullow at the brink of manhood, flickering between earnestness and extremism, trying to solidify a Muslim consciousness in what feels like a wasteland of selfishness and materialism.'”

On January 28, 2009, one day after Updike died, Lydon had paid tribute to the legendary writer who chose the Boston area for his home for his adult life, in “John Updike: Ted Williams of Our Prose”: “John Updike had every kind of grace about him, including for me an aura of divine blessing. I liked his religious inquiries better than the Rabbit books—novels like A Month of Sundays, Roger’s Version, and In the Beauty of the Lilies, and of course stories like ‘Pigeon Feathers’ about a boy’s crisis of faith, which ends in his famous meditation on the pigeons he’s shot, on orders, in his mother’s barn, and the irresistible beauty of the blue and gray patterns in their dull coloring.”

Updike mentioned in review of Diana Evans essay collection

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British writer Diana Evans has written four acclaimed novels and, more recently, a collection of essays titled I Want to Talk to You and Other Conversations. In Alex Clark’s review of the book, John Updike surfaces as an influence:

“Thinking about Rhys and her peripatetic, rackety life leads Evans to interrogate the ways in which writers of fiction might reach their own particular method of ‘psychological enunciation.’ It’s a delicious counterpoint to Evans’s fondness for John Updike; crediting his novel Couples with influencing Ordinary People, she describes what might legitimately be called a guilty pleasure, weighing the erasing masculinity of his work against the sentences ‘like hot-air balloons drifting through a dazzling harlequin sky.’ It was also being alive to the domestic ease of the married protagonists of Couples that sparked Evans to ask: ‘How often do middle-class black people in books get to just live in their damn houses and open and close their wardrobes and be aware of each other’s fingertips?'”

New Yorker at 100 also celebrates editorial battles

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The New Yorker is taking the entire year to celebrate its centennial, and deservedly so. John Updike, whose first major publications were in those New Yorker pages, turns up quite a bit in the article by Jill Lepore on “The Editorial Battles that Made The New Yorker.” John Updike Society’s Dave Lull culled the sections that deal with Updike:

1—”Early in Adam Gopnik’s stint as a New Yorker editor, he got a draft of a piece from John Updike. It was perfect, so he set it aside. Soon, he got a typewritten postcard from Updike:
Dear Adam,
The piece recently submitted was
a) deemed unacceptable,
b) in need of significant rewriting,
c) lost behind a radiator.
John
Updike—even Updike!—had been feverishly awaiting a reply, Gopnik realized. ‘Was anything wrong with the Auden review?’ Updike once queried Shawn, scratching at the editorial door like a cat left outside for the night. ‘There has been an ominous gap since I turned it in.’ He wrote constantly, and brilliantly, submitting fiction, poetry, and criticism to the magazine over six decades. He got plenty of rejections, and sometimes, like every other self-loathing writer, he all but asked for them. ‘I enclose a disk,’ Updike once wrote to Finder, ‘but if you and Remnick are too let down, I will certainly understand.’”
2—”White later wrote to Updike, ‘Nabokov’s the best writer in English but sometimes he’s maddening and I do not like what his ego has done to make him so very complex.’ Updike once expressed the same kind of exasperation about a Nabokov novel: ‘There seem to be a lot of hostile parentheses.’”
3—”There’s a reason that Updike fretted so much. Other magazines print most of what their established contributors submit; from the start, The New Yorker refused to do that, rejecting submissions even from its star writers—sometimes for years—leaving many of them, especially fiction writers, in precarious financial straits.”
4—”In 1973, it was Updike who recommended that the magazine solicit a story from Chinua Achebe. Still, if you’re a piece of well-worn planking, you are keenly aware that your days as part of the ship are numbered. A good editor can put that fear to use, as Angell did with Updike. McGrath puts it this way: ‘Roger had a trick, when John hadn’t submitted anything in a while, of dropping a line to Updike mentioning that the magazine had just discovered a promising young writer, and as often as not, an Updike story would turn up in the mail a week or two later.’”
5—”Updike never saw that pasture. ‘I wanted to get this down to you before anything more befuddling befell me,’ he wrote to Finder from his sickbed, sending in what would be his last piece. ‘They must begin, surely, with chemo soon.’ He died the next month. He never lost so much as his fastball.”