Rabbit, Run - John Updike [0]
“IF THE POWER TO SHOCK MAY
BE TAKEN AS A YARDSTICK OF
FICTION, JOHN UPDIKE HAS
WRITTEN ONE OF THE YEAR’S
MOST IMPORTANT NOVELS …
THE SUREST WRITING IN YEARS.”
—Time Magazine
RABBIT, RUN is a shocking novel—not only because of its sexual candor, but because it challenges an image of life still cherished in America.
Original, graphic, and merciless, RABBIT, RUN will be admired and hated with equal intensity. That it cannot be ignored or read with indifference is a tribute to the author’s insight and great gift as a novelist.
“UPDIKE’S PUNCH IS POWERFUL”
—Newsweek
The Crest imprint on outstanding books is your
guarantee of informative and entertaining reading
John Updike
RABBIT, RUN
A Crest Reprint
Fawcett Publications, Inc., Greenwich, Conn.
Member of American Book Publishers Council, Inc.
A Crest Book published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Copyright © 1960 by John Updike. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without
permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer
who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a
magazine or newspaper.
PRINTING HISTORY
Alfred A. Knopf edition published November 1960
Second printing, November 1960
Third printing, November 1960
Fourth printing, March 1961
First Crest printing, July 1962
Second Crest printing, August 1962
This book was written with the help of a grant generously given
by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
All characters in this book are fictional and any resemblance
to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Crest Books are published by Fawcett World Library, 67 West 44th
Street, New York 36, New York. Printed in the United States of America.
The motions of Grace,
the hardness of the heart;.
external circumstances.
—PASCAL, Pensée 507
1
BOYS are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though he’s twenty-six and six three. So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname, which was given to him when he too was a boy. He stands there thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up.
His standing there makes the real boys feel strange. Eyeballs slide. They’re doing this for their own pleasure, not as a demonstration for some adult walking around town in a double-breasted cocoa suit. It seems funny to them, an adult walking up the alley at all. Where’s his car? The cigarette makes it more sinister still. Is this one of those going to offer them cigarettes or money to go out in back of the ice plant with him? They’ve heard of such things but are not too frightened; there are six of them and one of him.
The ball, rocketing off the crotch of the rim, leaps over the heads of the six and lands at the feet of the one. He catches it on the short bounce with a quickness that startles them. As they stare hushed he sights squinting through blue clouds of weed smoke, a suddenly dark silhouette like a smokestack in the afternoon spring sky, setting his feet with care, wiggling the ball with nervousness in front of his chest, one widespread pale hand on top of the ball and the other underneath, jiggling it patiently to get some adjustment in air itself. The moons on his fingernails are big. Then the ball seems to ride up the right lapel of his coat and comes off his shoulder as his knees dip down, and it appears the ball is not going toward the backboard. It was not aimed there. It drops into the circle of the rim, whipping the net with a ladylike whisper. “Hey!” he shouts in pride.
“Luck,” one of the kids says.
“Skill,” he answers, and asks, “Hey. O.K. if I play?”
There is no response,