John Updike

John Updike (1932–2009) grew up in Philadelphia and attended Harvard University on a full scholarship, graduating summa cum laude and serving as president of the Harvard Lampoon. He is known for his careful craftsmanship and for writing about the world of the Protestant middle class. The first novel in Updike’s Rabbit series, Rabbit, Run (1960), tells the story of the early years of former high-school basketball star Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom’s marriage to Janice Stringer. In this excerpt, Harry has taken off, looking, as always, for something more—a longing he can never quite fulfill.

The rich earth seems to cast its darkness upward into the air. The farm country is somber at night. He is grateful when the lights of Lancaster merge with his dim beams. He stops at a diner whose clock says 8:04. He hadn’t intended to eat until he got out of the state. He takes a map from the rack by the door and while eating two hamburgers at the counter studies his position. He is in Lancaster, surrounded by funny names, Bird in Hand, Paradise, Intercourse, Mt. Airy, Mascot. They probably didn’t seem funny if you lived in them. Like Mt. Judge. You get used. A town has to be called something.

Bird in Hand, Paradise: his eyes keep going back to this dainty lettering on the map. He has an impulse, amid the oil-filmed shimmer of this synthetic and desultory diner, to drive there. Little plump women, toy dogs in the street, candy houses in lemon sunshine.

But no, his goal is the white sun of the south like a great big pillow in the sky. And from the map he’s been travelling more west than south; if the dirtdigger back there had had a map he could have gone due south on 10. Now the only thing to do is go into the heart of Lancaster and take 222 out and take it all the way down into Maryland and then catch 1. He remembers reading in the Saturday Evening Post how 1 goes from Florida to Maine through the most beautiful scenery in the world. He asks for a glass of milk and to go with it a piece of apple pie; the crust is crisp and bubbled and they’ve had the sense to use cinnamon. His mother’s pies always had cinnamon. He pays by cracking a ten and goes out into the parking lot feeling pleased. The hamburgers had been fatter and warmer than the ones you get in Brewer, and the buns had seemed steamed. Things are better already.

It takes him a half-hour to pick his way through Lancaster. On 222 he drives south through Refton, Hessdale, New Providence, and Quarryville, through Mechanics Grove and Unicorn and then a long stretch so dull and unmarked he doesn’t know he’s entered Maryland until he hits Oakwood. On the radio he hears “No Other Arms, No Other Lips,” “Stagger Lee,” a commercial for Rayco Clear Plastic Seat Covers, “If I Didn’t Care” by Connie Francis, a commercial for Radio-Controlled Garage Door Operators, “I Ran All the Way Home Just to Say I’m Sorry,” “That Old Feeling” by Mel Torme, a commercial for Big Screen Westinghouse TV Set with One-finger Automatic Tuning, “needle-sharp pictures a nose away from the screen,” “The Italian Cowboy Song,” “Yep” by Duane Eddy, a commercial for Papermate Pens, “Almost Grown,” a commercial for Tame Cream Rinse, “Let’s Stroll,” news (President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan begin a series of talks in Gettysburg, Tibetans battle Chinese Communists in Lhasa, the whereabouts of the Dalai Lama, spiritual ruler of this remote and backward land, are unknown, a $250,000 trust fund has been left to a Park Avenue maid, Spring scheduled to arrive tomorrow), sports news (Yanks over Braves in Miami, somebody tied with somebody in St. Petersburg Open, scores in a local basketball tournament), weather (fair and seasonably warm), “The Happy Organ,” “Turn Me Loose,” a commercial for Schuylkill Life Insurance, “Rocksville, P-A” (Rabbit loves it), “A Picture No Artist Could Paint,” a commercial for New Formula Barbasol Presto-Lather, whose daily cleansing action tends to prevent skin blemishes and emulsifies something, “Pink Shoe Laces” by Dody Stevens, a word about a little boy called Billy Tessman who was hit by a car and would appreciate cards or letters, “Petit Fleur,” “Fungo” (great), a commercial for Wool-Tex All-Wool Suits, “Fall Out” by Henry Mancini, “Everybody Likes to Do the Cha Cha Cha,” a commercial for Lord’s Grace Table Napkins and the gorgeous Last Supper Tablecloth, “The Beat of My Heart,” a commercial for Speed-Shine Wax and Lanolin Clay, “Venus,” and then the same news again. Where is the Dalai Lama?

5

Shortly after Oakwood he comes to Route 1, which with its hot-dog stands and Calso signs and roadside taverns aping log cabins is unexpectedly discouraging. The farther he drives the more he feels some great confused system, Baltimore now instead of Philadelphia, reaching for him. He stops at a gas station for two dollars’ worth of regular. What he really wants is another map. He unfolds it standing by a Coke machine and reads it in the light coming through a window stained green by stacked cans of liquid wax.

His problem is to get west and free of Baltimore-Washington, which like a two-headed dog guards the coastal route to the south. He doesn’t want to go down along the water anyway; his image is of himself going right down the middle, right into the broad soft belly of the land, surprising the dawn cottonfields with his northern plates.

Now he is somewhere here. Further on, then, a road numbered 23 will go off to his left—no, his right. That goes up and over and back into Pennsylvania but at this place, Shawsville, he can take a little narrow blue road without a number. Then go down a little and over again on 137. There is a ragged curve then that this road makes with 482 and then 31. Rabbit can feel himself swinging up and through that curve into the red line numbered 26 and down that into another numbered 340. Red, too; he is really gliding and suddenly sees where he wants to go. Over on the left three red roads stream parallel northeast to southwest; Rabbit can just feel them sliding down through the valleys of the Appalachians. Get on one of them it would be a chute dumping you into sweet low cottonland in the morning. Yes. Once he gets on that he can shake all thoughts of the mess behind him.

(1960)