Rabbit, run

SUMMARY: It's 1959 and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, one time high school sports superstar, is going nowhere. At twenty-six he is trapped in a second-rate existence - stuck with a fragile, alcoholic wife, a house full of overflowing ashtrays and discarded glasses, a young son and a futile job. With no way to fix things, he resolves to flee from his family and his home in Pennsylvania, beginning a thousand-mile journey that he hopes will free him from his mediocre life. Because, as he knows only too well, 'after you've been first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate'. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty—even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path, an invisible line toward his own salvation as straight as a ruler’s edge It's 1959 and Harry Rabbit Angstrom, high school sports star turned MagiPeel Kitchen demonstrator, is going nowhere. His only escape is into the arms of his mistress or on a 1,000 mile drive, yet this only makes things worse. Originally published: New York: Knopf, 1960; London: Deutsch, 1961 John Updike ; With An Afterword By The Author. Published In Penguin Classics 2006--t.p. Verso.