Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run has astonishing sentence-by-sentence writing, with Updike’s brilliant insights expressed in the most consistently poetic, precise, and surprising phrasing and imagery. I frequently read individual sentences aloud to my wife. I listened to the audiobook when I was in the gym or the car and read the novel in bed and found myself listening to sections I’d already read because the audiobook made me slow down and pay attention to every word.

What’s striking is that none of the characters in Rabbit Run are particularly likable, or at least, no one behaves in a way that is remotely admirable,… show more.

The four Updike Rabbit novels are written in the present tense, which is uncommon for fiction but done to help bring more immediacy to the action. This causes the novels to read more like screenplays than when written in the past tense. I chose to write my own book in the present tense as a new challenge after reading all four Rabbit novels in succession. Updike was a master at getting into the interior lives of his characters, revealing their longings, typically not to be obtained. The character Rabbit is a wayward former high school basketball star who marries a… show more.