{"id":6647,"date":"2025-06-07T11:31:41","date_gmt":"2025-06-07T16:31:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=6647"},"modified":"2025-06-07T11:31:41","modified_gmt":"2025-06-07T16:31:41","slug":"top-five-road-trip-novels-rabbit-runs-among-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2025\/06\/07\/top-five-road-trip-novels-rabbit-runs-among-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Top five road-trip novels? Rabbit runs among them"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo credit: Ben Hasty – Reading Eagle<\/p><\/div>\n

Benjamin Markovits was interviewed about “The Best Road Trip Novels”<\/a> he selected for readers of the Five Books<\/em> website:<\/p>\n

1\u2014On the Road<\/em> by Jack Kerouac
\n2\u2014Independence Day<\/em>, by Richard Ford
\n3\u2014Ladder of Years: A Novel<\/em>, by Anne Tyler
\n4\u2014Rabbit, Run<\/em>, by John Updike
\n5\u2014The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor<\/em>, by Peter Taylor<\/p>\n

Rabbit, Run<\/em>, by John Updike\u2014the first in the series of novels featuring Harry \u2018Rabbit\u2019 Angstrom. I think of this as an archetypal midlife crisis novel. Do you agree?
\n<\/strong>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\u2019s in a dead-end job. And, actually, I looked into the \u2018midlife crisis\u2019 term, and it was coined by a Canadian psychoanalyst who had in mind men in their mid-thirties. So he\u2019s not so far off that.<\/p>\n

Like Delia in\u00a0Ladder of Years,\u00a0<\/em>he also leaves his family on a whim.
\n<\/strong>He\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The road trip represents a common fantasy\u2014that you can just get in your car and drive away, and never stop driving.
\n<\/strong>And we should talk about the car. I\u2019ve done a couple of road trips across the States, and one of the things that happens is that the car becomes your home. It\u2019s the only constant in your life. If you\u2019re stopping in motels or camping or staying at friends\u2019 houses, the car is the one place that you feel is consistent in your life.<\/p>\n

The appeal of that in Rabbit, Run<\/em>\u00a0and all these other books is that in the car you have a home that you can take with you. You\u2019re a turtle with a shell on your back.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Benjamin Markovits was interviewed about “The Best Road Trip Novels” he selected for readers of the Five Books website: 1\u2014On the Road by Jack Kerouac 2\u2014Independence Day, by Richard Ford 3\u2014Ladder of Years: A Novel, by Anne Tyler 4\u2014Rabbit, Run, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":818,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person-singular","category-lists"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6647","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\/818"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6647"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6649,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6647\/revisions\/6649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}