{"id":3646,"date":"2017-01-05T09:33:43","date_gmt":"2017-01-05T15:33:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=3646"},"modified":"2017-01-05T09:33:43","modified_gmt":"2017-01-05T15:33:43","slug":"is-updikes-rabbit-rare-or-common","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2017\/01\/05\/is-updikes-rabbit-rare-or-common\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Updike’s Rabbit rare, or common?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a January 5, 2017 post on\u00a0The Guardian<\/em>, writer Matt Lewis notes that “Rabbit, Run is about a rebel we all know; John Updike’s disappointed young man dreams of escaping a workaday existence in a way that’s still familiar nearly 60 years on.”<\/a><\/p>\n

Updike famously intended Rabbit, Run<\/em> as a “riposte to Jack Kerouac’s 1957 beatnik classic\u00a0On the Road,<\/em>” Lewis writes.\u00a0“Rather than beating morality into his readers, Rabbit gives Updike a means to explore the urges that exist in everyone\u2014however secretly.”<\/p>\n

That’s the common part. But as Lewis observes, “Like James Joyce and DH Lawrence before him, Updike treats sex and sexuality with a frankness that was uncommon among his contemporaries. The descriptions of sex have retained their raw freshness. In an essay<\/a>, David Foster Wallace named Updike one of three Great Male Narcissists in U.S. postwar fiction and said that friends had criticized Updike for being ‘just a penis with a thesaurus.’ But that feels grossly unfair when considering his early novels like this one.<\/p>\n

“For all of the prose’s curlicues and self-conscious prettiness, there is undoubtedly meat on the bone. Through Rabbit, Updike confronts major topics in a minor way: unravelling the tapestry of the suburban American male psyche and reweaving it into beautiful images. On reading, we become like his protagonist: restless strivers yearning for something different and altogether bigger than ourselves.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a January 5, 2017 post on\u00a0The Guardian, writer Matt Lewis notes that “Rabbit, Run is about a rebel we all know; John Updike’s disappointed young man dreams of escaping a workaday existence in a way that’s still familiar nearly … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person-singular","category-scholarship-analysis"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3646"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3647,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3646\/revisions\/3647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}