John Updike
Rabbit, Run

This novel by John Updike, the first in a series of four stories dedicated to the same character and which constitute the core of his literary work, is what can rightfully be called an 'important' book.

This is not only because the work has achieved enduring success, gaining more admirers each year, but also and especially due to its content and because the protagonist of these stories, 'Rabbit', has somehow become a true figure in the cultural imagination, not only in America but in the entire Western society. In essence, he is a manifestation of the strong, even violent, contradictions of capitalist society. Similarly, his stories are timeless and still relevant and significant today as they were in the past.

This is an opus I would define as somewhat peculiar on the stylistic level as well. You see, 'Rabbit, Run' (1960), in my opinion, does not have the same narrative power as other great pages in 20th-century American literature. The style adopted by the author is somewhat subdued and lacks that inventiveness-rich spirit bordering on theatrical and artificial improvisation, spectacular and fundamentally action-based, typical, for example, of Beat Generation authors. The descriptive scenes thus practically match those of action, and the events being recounted are never characterized by a certain impetuosity and seem to occur without any particular emotional content. Everything is indeed marked by a certain underlying inevitability, which then constitutes the main theme of the entire story. What could be defined as pathos is completely absent, and this perhaps paradoxically makes it even a difficult book to read. Challenging to fully understand in its deepest reasons (and roots). This is not because the language used by the author is difficult or exclusive (on the contrary), but because even empathizing with the character, which is inevitable after all—that's why we read or in any case are interested, driven by a primitive and innate instinct within mankind to everything that happens in the world—it seems difficult to understand and grasp the dynamics that lead him to perform certain actions. And the fact that is essentially true is that these reasons, Harry Angstrom, known as 'Rabbit', neither knows nor will ever fully understand them himself.

I think the story of Harry Angstrom, known as 'Rabbit', is then as simple as it is simultaneously complicated. As ordinary as it is seemingly unique and special in its exceptionality. But deep down, the truth is that all of us are or have been for a period or at least once in life, exactly like 'Rabbit', and somehow this probably prevents us, given his clear incapacity for analysis and 'growing' (in the proper sense of evolving, expanding his cultural baggage, and literally his 'boundaries', even spatial), from identifying with him. Because Rabbit is a negative character, even if his true nature is fundamentally innocent like that of a child, and all he seeks is a freedom that even he doesn't know what it consists of, and for this same reason then cannot exist, and empathizing with him is something that frightens us and makes us deeply ashamed of what we are, or in any case, it generates in us that typical sense of unease to which we are unable to provide an answer.

Harry Updike, born in Reading, Pennsylvania, chooses to tell Rabbit's story because he considers him a character radically different from himself, yet somehow close, and this choice is dictated by various reasons. Firstly, this surely facilitated him in having that detached approach to narrative material I mentioned earlier. This is fundamental to telling the story in a lucid, careful, attentive manner, and although it may not seem like it, in an analytical and almost scientific way. On the other hand, he decides to set the entire story in Mt Judge, a suburb of Brewer, always in the same state of Pennsylvania, and tells us a story that, even if it's not his, he evidently knows very well for obvious reasons. It's a reality familiar to him due to the same places narrated and the social and geographical context.

However, Rabbit is not a boy different from others of his generation. Nor is he different from all the boys of all generations in the same way, and perhaps this is his great 'fault' in the eyes of the more critical reader: that of being and remaining a boy even if life's events should push and force him to grow and be something he can't or deep down doesn't want to be. That frightening adult man that, in the end, we all deny in our smallness and most intimate selves.

In school, Rabbit is a great basketball promise; before him, every possible door could open: he is not a brilliant student, but he is somehow a 'star' and dreams of a future as big as his achievements on the basketball court. But then school ends, and he marries his girlfriend, Janice, who deep down is a bit like him in her inability to grow (and perhaps this is why he considers her stupid, but Rabbit considers everyone as if they were stupid, and it couldn't be otherwise in the profound solitude he feels characterizes his existence), has a child, and a job that barely allows him to make ends meet.

Like everyone, he would like to escape from his life, which he considers miserable and with no prospect of change, and one day, without even realizing it, he leaves the house and starts to distance himself, until he actually does so. I mean he runs away from his life. Or at least he tries to. Because let's say he disappears, but the truth is deep down he can't really succeed: because the reality is that Rabbit is incapable even of 'disappearing' and truly escaping the inevitability of his existence. But that's because Rabbit feels this inevitability upon himself. They have taught him that it cannot be escaped, and somehow he cannot overcome this thing. In this sense, he is incapable of unlearning. Assuming that this process is somehow possible except in a regressive-type process.

He thinks about leaving the city, but returns, where he will start to live with a woman named Ruth and then practically daily, frequent the reverend Eccles, who, unleashed in search of him by the family, tries to bring him back without ever forcing the matter, trying to build a relationship based on mutual trust and the weaknesses of both, on the 'straight path'.

In this sense, what is striking is the parallel and similarity between Rabbit and Eccles, between Rabbit and Janice, between Rabbit and Ruth, between Rabbit and old Mr. Springer, Janice's father, who when he returns home, will employ him in his business: a sort of recognition that initially seems to Rabbit as an arrival point before realizing that this too is something inconsistent. That it doesn't matter.

All these characters are actually immobile, stuck in their existences, as if Mt Judge were a kind of USA suburban diorama (here in Naples, we would almost define it as a kind of 'presepe', where Rabbit could metaphorically be the baby Jesus, he too condemned from birth to an inevitable destiny that he too knows very well). The only movement they make is rooted in the laws of magnetics because all of them, bound together in an indissoluble and irreparable manner, attract and repel each other. But deep down they never move away and always remain still in their place.

I realize that talking about Ligabue in the review of such an important literary work might seem out of place; I'm well aware that the rock singer-songwriter from Correggio does not enjoy great popularity and particular sympathy, especially during the glory days of Vasco Rossi... who some claim to consider his 'rival', but there is a part in the film 'Radiofreccia' (written and directed by Luciano Ligabue himself, 1998) where, talking about the protagonist (who is, in fact, young 'Freccia', played by Stefano Accorsi), the narrative voice says that wanting to escape from a small town, and in the case of Rabbit we're not talking about a town but still a small community, is a bit like wanting to escape from yourself. 'And you don't escape from yourself even if you are Eddy Merckx.'

Then the title of the novel might seem improper or incorrect because in the end, it seems precisely that Rabbit cannot and does not succeed in escaping from a life that appears inevitable and in which everything and everyone seems to be against him: as if he alone were the chosen victim of a gigantic conspiracy.

But instead, we can also strive to be positive in some way and read the title of the novel (and the whole story of Rabbit from the beginning to the end) as if this were a shout, an exhortation, and then Rabbit, or the reader, who has long legs and ran faster than everyone else on the basketball court, might indeed succeed in moving with the same speed and ease to be a 'champion' even off the playing rectangle. To exit the basketball court and ultimately open himself up to life. That same challenging 'ground' where soon another key character of the made-in-USA counterculture of the last century would have to learn to move quickly and who also had to learn to play even beyond the basketball court and experience extreme and painful life experiences: that great artist who corresponds to the name of Jim Carroll.

Thus, the story of Rabbit, like that of Jim Carroll or Kurt Cobain or James Dean, transcends the simple definition of a novel and in every aspect becomes a great story of our times.