Prose Roundup: Rabbit, Run (1960) by John Updike
JAN 14, 2026
Prose roundups are posts where I run through the noteworthy snippets of books and short stories not yet in the public domain (that therefore can't be made into visual novels yet). The snippets are listed chronologically, grouped by chapters, and may contain spoilers up to their respective locations in their works.
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.
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.
Yet in his time Rabbit was famous through the county; in basketball in his junior year he set a B-league scoring record that in his senior year he broke with a record that was not broken until four years later, that is, four years ago.
I apologize to the reader of this roundup. Since I realize now, three pages into this book, that my copy clearly has some sort of printing error that's scrambled all the sentences and randomly removed punctuation.
His upper lip nibbles back from his teeth in self-pleasure.
His lip nibbles?
Then the commercial shows the seven segments of a Tootsie Roll coming out of the wrapper and turning into the seven letters of “Tootsie.” They, too, sing and dance. Still singing, they climb back into the wrapper. It echoes like an echo chamber. Son of a bitch: cute.
This is the first quote that's made any sense in the book. (America #1!)
Vitaconomy, the modern housewife’s password, the one-word expression for economizing vitamins by the MagiPeel Method.
Wait a minute — I get it! He's just ripping off David Foster Wallace!
(What's crazy is that Updike actually outlived DFW. It's not fair.)
There seems no escaping it: she is dumb.
Dumb.
The torturous, overbearing prose of most of the book does heighten the comedic value of the occasional short, blunt sentence.
It's sort of like someone holding your head underwater until you just about drown. When you do get to come up for a breath, you appreciate it all the more.
He is being drawn into Philadelphia. He hates Philadelphia. Dirtiest city in the world they live on poisoned water.
If Updike can't help himself from bastardizing punctuation and flow, I'm glad he's at least taking it out on a city that deserves it.
(Tow our rental car, will you, Philadelphia? Well guess who's getting made fun of now!)
But he is going east, the worst direction, into unhealth, soot, and stink, a smothering hole where you can’t move without killing somebody.
Based.
A barefoot Du Pont. Brown legs probably, bitty birdy breasts. Beside a swimming pool in France. Something like money in a naked woman, deep, millions. You think of millions as being white. Sink all the way in softly still lots left. Rich girls frigid? Nymphomaniacs? Must vary.
I suppose you have to be at least a little self-indulgent to be a great writer. In Updike's case, he's chosen to make the prose as hard to parse as possible, so that you don't have time to read any other book.
Still a better approach than Irving's.
He remembers reading in the Saturday Evening Post how 1 goes from Florida to Maine through the most beautiful scenery in the world.
I know it's meant to be ironic here, but can we all just take a second to point-and-laugh at the idea an East Coast road trip might have the most beautiful anything?
The hamburgers had been fatter and warmer than the ones you get in Brewer, and the buns had seemed steamed.
Mmmm, steamed buns.
The Mason-Dixon Line.
Ah! Pynchon!
Hunger.
Ah! Knut! (Wait, he's an actual readable author.)
So perfect, so consistent is the freedom into which the clutter of the world has been vaporized by the simple trigger of his decision, that all ways seem equally good, all movements will put the same caressing pressure on his skin, and not an atom of his happiness would be altered if Tothero told him they were not going to meet two girls but two goats, and they were going not to Brewer but to Tibet.
All I wanted to do was quote the funny part about the goats. But I didn't want to split up the sentence either, so now you have to wade through all that other crap to get there.
It's like a microcosm of the book.
Their alert colorless eyes, little dark smears like their mouths, feed on the strange sight of him and send acid impressions down to be digested in their disgusting big beer-tough stomachs.
Mouths feeling kind of left out here. Every other noun gets an overwrought adjective or three.
Distaste, like an involuntary glandular secretion, has stained his throat.
I hate when that happens.
Tothero is moving back and forth like a crab sideways and bumps into a middle-aged couple strolling along.
Now how literally are we to take these similes, Updike?
And on a tide of alcohol and stirred semen he steps forward, in a kind of swoon.
Mine are "shaken", myself.
The edges of the doorway they pass through seem very vivid and sharp. They will always be here.
"Ozymandias" doorway? The f─── does that second sentence mean.
He sees blue when with one deliberate hand she pries open his jaw and bows his head to her burdened chest.
Pries open his jaw?
Galled, he shoves up through her and in addition sets his hand under her jaw and shoves her face so his fingers slip into her mouth and her slippery throat strains.
Shoves her face?
His sea of seed buckles, and sobs into a still channel.
Sobs his seed? (Eh that checks out actually.)
Wonderful, women, from such hungry wombs to such amiable fat; he wants the heat his groin gave given back in gentle ebb. Best bedfriend, done woman. Bit of bowl about their bellies always. Oh, how! when she got up on him like the bell of a big blue lily slipped down on his slow head.
Still better poetry than when authors quote them verbatim.
A girl at the table reaches with a very long arm weighted with a bracelet and turns a handle of the wood icebox and cold air sweeps over Rabbit. She has opened the door of the square cave where the cake of ice sits; and there it is, inches from Harry’s eyes, lopsided from melting but still big, holding within its metal-black bulk the white partition that the cakes have when they come bumping down the chute at the ice plant. He leans closer into the cold breath of the ice, a tin-smelling coldness he associates with the metal that makes up the walls of the cave and the ribs of its floor, delicate rhinoceros gray, mottled with the same disease the linoleum has.
Dream sequences are already annoying in your average book because of their being disjointed and pointless. But that's already the baseline for this book. Why do we need to up the ante!
Again, then, they make love, in morning light with cloudy mouths, her tits silky sacs of milk floating shallow on her ridged rib cage.
Thus begins the million uses of the word "milk" in this book.
Steinbeck, I apologize. In comparison, your milk wasn't so bad after all.
Because of the baby, they will not go far, just a few blocks maybe to the old gravel quarry, where the ice pond of winter, melted into a lake a few inches deep, doubles the height of the quarry cliff by throwing its rocks upside down into a pit of reflection.
This prose actively confuses what it's trying to describe.
“Oh that’s right. You think you’re a rabbit.” Her tone in saying this is faintly jeering and irritable, he doesn’t know why.
Maybe she's doing her Jojo Rabbit Hitler impression.
His car is waiting for him on Cherry Street in the cool spring noon mysteriously; it is as if a room of a house he owned had been detached and scuttled by this curb and now that the tide of night was out stood up glistening in the sand, slightly tilting but unharmed, ready to sail at the turn of a key.
My thoughts exactly every time I see my car in the morning.
As a shark nudges silent creases of water ahead of it the green fender makes ripples of air that break against the back of Rabbit’s knees. The faster he walks the harder these ripples break.
Ripples of… air?
Now Updike, I see why you want to compare the car to a shark, but was this the way.
He goes over and tries to tug the mystery from her hand. The title is The Deaths at Oxford. Now what should she care about deaths at Oxford? When she has him here.
"Now what should she care about tales of Canterbury?"
The motion forces a little guttural noise, “cukk,” out of her throat.
Heh heh… cukk.
What! Your sweet ass!
Your sweet can!
She stubs stubs fat she stubs the dirt torn open in a rough brown mouth dirt stubs fat: with the woods the “she” is Ruth. Holding a three wood, absorbed in its heavy reddish head and grass-stained face and white stripe prettily along the edge, he thinks O.K. if you’re so smart and clenches and swirls. Ahg: when she tumbled so easily, to balk this!
Read the above. Read it in full. Then remember: this is just one snippet of one part of one of the dream sequences in the book.
His putt slides past on the down side and goes two or three fucking feet too far. Four feet.
In a book that otherwise sticks with "frigging", and one that also has its darkest pages ahead (like, really dark pages), I do appreciate the comedy of spending the one f-bomb here, on golf.
When the first blooms came they were like the single big flower Oriental prostitutes wear on the sides of their heads, on the covers of the paperback spy stories Ruth reads.
That's a good trick actually: end any sentence with "on the covers of the paperback spy stories Ruth reads" for plausible deniability.
Stupid man. A Greek.
The kitten’s instinct to kill the spool with its cotton paws.
The book absolutely should have included a kitten image here to break up its prose:
Now was that so hard, Updike?
“About as shy as a snake,” she says, “that girl. These little women are poison.
The snake women return — now it's a real book.
Du du do do da da dee. Dee dee da da do do du.
Yep.
“When on Sunday morning then, when we go before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ, hot”—he clenches his hairy fists—“with Christ, on fire: burn them with the force of our belief. That is why they come; why else would they pay us? Anything else we can do or say anyone can do and say.”
You do need to channel your effectiveness into your job — the kraut has a point here.
Unctuous old thundering Hun had no conception of the ministry as a legacy of light and probably himself scrambled into it out of a butcher’s shop.
It's weird: the Buchan novel didn't use the word "Hun" once, and yet it appears here in a book that doesn't need it. (But read this book if you also want to know what Updike thinks about the Italians.)
“…and the other guy says, ‘Stripper, hell. I’ve been in here three weeks looking for my motorcycle!’ ”
Sic. The joke was swallowed by the ellipsis. I feel cheated.
“What do you think we’re talking about?” He’s too fastidious to mouth the words. She says. “Right,” he says.
We're talking about an oral fixation here. Odd that I guess that still couldn't be put to print in 1960, despite all the other… prose.
“In cold blood.”
Capote! (Why are there so many standalone book-title sentences?)
Her other hand rests, beside the typewriter, on a string of black beads the size of the necklace of beads carved in Java he once got Janice for Christmas.
The most awkward comparison in a book full of them. The beads are like another set of beads.
He is certain that as a consequence of his sin Janice or the baby will die.
It would've been cliche. But it also would have made for a shorter book.
On the extreme edge of his tree of fear Eccles perches, black bird, flipping the pages of magazines and making frowning faces to himself.
♫Black bird singing in the dead of night,♫
♫Take those broken wings and flip through pages of magazines.♫
(Kind of lost the metaphor halfway through is what I'm saying.)
He feels underwater, caught in chains of transparent slime, ghosts of the urgent ejaculations he has spat into the mild bodies of women.
The rare literal use of ejaculation in literature.
Rabbit laughs, and Lucy, having delivered the Cheerios—too much milk; he is used to living with Ruth, who let him pour his own milk; he likes just enough to take away the dryness, so that the milk and cereal come out even—chats on gaily.
Milk, milk, milk — too much milk.
Rabbit keeps thinking that the M.C., who has that way of a Jew of pronouncing very distinctly, no matter how fast the words, is going to start plugging the MagiPeel Peeler but the product doesn’t seem to have hit the big time yet.
Heh heh… every book gets one.
Funny wise freckled piece he ought to have nailed her that steady high hum bothering him ever since she wanted him to really nail her the shadow of her bra tipped bumps, in a room full of light slips down the shorts over the childish thighs fat butt two globes hanging of white in the light Freud in the white-painted parlor hung with watercolors of canals; come here you primitive father canals on the sofa she sits spreads like two white gates parted—what a nice chest you have and here and here and here.
This delightful sample is only one-tenth the length of the full paragraph it's in.
And it seems right here that he made the mistaken turning, that he should have followed, and it seems to him in his disintegrating state that he did follow, that he is following, like a musical note that all the while it is being held seems to travel though it stays in the same place. On this note he carries into sleep.
You could have ended the book right here, Updike. But no. You wanted to grind the reader to dust.
He, too, leaks, thick sweet love burdens his chest, and he wants her—just a touch, he knows she’s a bleeding wound, but just a touch, just enough to get rid of his milk, give it to her.
"His milk".
(I suppose I made the same joke about Steinbeck earlier. You win this round, Updike.)
It has lost the grainy milkiness of morning sun.
Okay but now you're just shoving milk into everything.
“What’s happened to your milk? Why can’t you give the kid enough milk?”
END THE BOOK ALREADY.
Her sense of the third person with them widens enormously, and she knows, knows, while knocks sound at the door, that the worst thing that has ever happened to any woman in the world has happened to her.
Not even this is the ending! He just can't stop himself from breaking these characters.
(And there's somehow four more sequels after this one!)
“Don’t look at me,” he says. “I didn’t kill her.”
So awful it wraps around to being funny. (In context, mind you.)
Final Thoughts
What an absolutely depressing read. In a good way.
At the same time: what an absolute slog of a read. In a bad way.
Of the John books on the site so far — Buchan, Irving, Steinbeck, and the other Steinbeck — this is by far the best. No contest. At the same time, it still manages to annoy in new ways from all those other books. The writing style makes the actual reading an absolute pain-in-the-ass. However, the difficulty is mostly a rewarding one (stupid dream sequences aside).
Read the book and heed its cautionary tale about writing in present tense.