Desperate Weakling

RABBIT, RUN (307 pp.)--John Updike --Knopf ($4).

If the power to shock may be taken as a yardstick of fiction, John Updike, 28, has written one of the year's most important novels. Like last year's Poorhouse Fair, his new book is bitterly anchored in Thoreau's belief that most men lead lives of quiet desperation, but in this story, the restraining dam breaks to let loose such relentless despair as is seldom found in U.S. writing.

At the center of the crack-up is Harry ("Rabbit") Angstrom. In the small Pennsylvania suburb where he was born and lives, he had been a schoolboy hero, a basketball player of exciting skill. That was the high point of his life. Now, out of the army and in his mid-20s, he has reached a personal nadir. The old hero of the courts works as a demonstrator of a kitchen gadget. His wife is dull, losing her looks, and spends most of her time before the TV set with an oldfashioned. Not knowing what he wants, but hating what he has, Rabbit walks out on his wife and child, gets into his car and simply runs away.

At his hollow center, Rabbit is ineffectual. He cannot even run away cleanly, gets lost on the road and returns--but not to his wife. He turns to his old high school coach and through him meets a girl who has slipped into casual prostitution. The first night, he pays. Then he and Ruth simply begin living together. Big, shrewd, and without illusions, she knows Rabbit is no prize, but neither is she. It is when the local Episcopal minister shows up to make Rabbit see the moral wrong of his desertion that all the weak strands of his character begin to tangle up. The minister is a weakling himself, but he is persistent. What follows is the revolting zigzag course of a weak, sensual, selfish and confused moral bankrupt. He returns to his wife; he walks out again; a tragic incident sends him back to her once more-and again he runs out. Can he go back to Ruth, pregnant and contemptuous of his weakness? When he goes out on a simple errand, all his failings converge on him at once, and again he runs, runs, runs.

Author Updike tells his depressing and frequently sordid story with a true novelist's power. His too-explicit sexual scenes are often in the worst of taste, but his set pieces describing Rabbit's crackup, his confrontations with wife, family, mistress and imploring minister show some of the surest writing in years. Up to a point Rabbit, Run seems to be saying that this is what much of life in the U.S. is like; certainly Updike's scene and people seem too threateningly typical. Yet the real weakness of the book is Rabbit's own. Not many men, no matter how desperate, are as devoid of inner resources. For all its excellences, it would have been a bigger book if Rabbit had been a bigger man.

Nothing in John Updike's life seems like adequate preparation for the private terrors of his characters. Dry and courteous, only child of a high school mathematics teacher in Shillington, Pa., he brings to mind Picasso's picture Boy Leading a Horse and bears a pleasant resemblance to the lad. As a boy. Updike wanted to be a cartoonist for Disney or The New Yorker, and after Harvard he studied drawing at Oxford. He no longer draws or paints but is acute enough to know that his writing "is excessively pictorial." He began sending work to The New Yorker at 15, but it was not. until seven years later that the editors took both a poem and a story and offered him a job besides. For two years, he worked as a "Talk of the Town" writer, left in 1957 because he had his fill of its carefully constructed casualness, and also because his wife was having a second baby and, like most Manhattanites, they could not find a suitable apartment.

Now the Updikes live in a 17th century house in Ipswich, Mass., where their three children and those of the neighbors maintain an innocent bedlam. To escape it, Updike works in a room "in a sort of slum" in the center of town, is "sufficiently Protestant about trying to work every day." He admits that advance readers see his Rabbit "as a kind of beast, almost a satiric creation," but he denies being a satirist and refuses to take sides for or against his character. Is Rabbit a common American type? In some ways, says Updike, but "I don't really know about the youth of today or any other day. If the book has any sociological value, that's fine, but it was not the purpose of writing it. There is a certain necessary ambiguity. I don't wish my fiction to be any clearer than life."

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