The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
John Updike · a novel in the present tense · Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1960 · scored on Updike’s English in his final revised text, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Realist novel of the small city as a story of flight; domestic tragedy and theological inquiry in one narration
Mythos
The running animal in the name and the title; the American flight from the settlement to the open country, turned back on itself; a soul between two theories of grace
Phase
The spring and early summer of 1959, from a game at a backboard in an alley to a last run
Presentation
Fiction; a full-length novel in the present tense, in close third person held chiefly to Rabbit, leaving him for Eccles, for Janice and for Ruth; an epigraph from Pascal
Register
From the sentence that renders sensation exactly to the speech of Brewer and the two idioms of the ministers, and Janice’s syntax breaking as the bath fills
Scale
One man, two families and a small Pennsylvania city
Governing Proposition
A former high-school basketball star of twenty-six, demonstrating a kitchen gadget in dime stores, walks out on his wife, drives south through a night and comes back, lives for weeks with another woman, returns for the birth of his daughter and runs again; while he is gone his wife, drunk, drowns the baby in the bath. The wager of the novel is that the life of an inarticulate suburban man, told in a present tense that has no past and no future, can carry the old question of grace, and that the cost of his freedom can be shown by giving the sight he lacks to the women who pay it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it.” The first sentence sets a scene and a social world, and the man who walks into it is too old for it. Harry Angstrom, called Rabbit, is twenty-six, once the star of his high-school team, now demonstrating a kitchen gadget, the MagiPeeler, in dime stores. He joins the boys at the backboard in the alley and feels the old perfection come back into his hands. It is the first height in the book, and it is the past: a grace he knew once, in the body, and has found no adult form for.
He goes home to Mt. Judge, a suburb of the Pennsylvania city of Brewer, and to his wife Janice in front of the television. The book is told in the present tense, in close third person, and for most of its length it stays inside Rabbit’s senses. Nothing is recalled at leisure and nothing is foreseen. The ball leaving the fingers, the light on a windshield, the smell of a kitchen are given as they happen, because to Rabbit nothing else is quite real. A tense with no past and no future is the tense of the man.
The time is the spring of 1959 into the early summer, and the world beyond the town arrives as news on the radio. Alfred A. Knopf published the novel in 1960, cut and softened in its sexual passages at the publisher’s request, for fear of prosecution. Updike restored those passages and revised the text again, and the book is read here in the final form he gave it, in the omnibus Rabbit Angstrom of 1995. It was his second novel, after the small and quiet The Poorhouse Fair, and it is read alone, before the three books that would follow Rabbit through thirty years.
Movement II
He leaves. He drives south through the night, through a darkening country of radios and diners, with no destination but away. The drive is a long dread rather than a release: the open country he wants keeps turning out to be more of what he left, and the road gives him nothing to arrive at. At dawn he comes back. The running has shown, at its first attempt, that it has nowhere to go, and the book has set its rhythm: flight, and return.
The flight is the old American one, the man who lights out from the settlement for the open country, and the book turns it back on itself. Kerouac’s On the Road had sent its young men across the continent three years before; Rabbit’s road runs out in a night and turns him round, and the open country is a suburb. The running animal is in his name and in the title, and the book does not let the name become a myth. It stays a nickname, and a description of what he does.
He does not go home. An evening with Tothero, Margaret and Ruth ends with Rabbit in Ruth’s apartment, and he stays there for weeks. Ruth is the life he runs to: a woman with a past, who takes him in, and to whom he brings what he brought home, his appetite and his want of plans. The weeks at her apartment repeat their texture, and the book lets them, longer perhaps than it needs. The man without a past has found a room where no one asks him for a future.
Movement III
The minister Eccles takes up Rabbit’s case, and the cure he proposes is golf. They play again and again, the minister talking while Rabbit’s shots go wrong. Then a shot carries: the ball rises and seems to hang before it falls. It is the purest transport in the book, a grace in the physical world, and it comes to a man who cannot say what it means, in a game played to bring him home. The minister has offered talk; the body has given an answer the talk cannot use.
Kruppenbach, the Lutheran minister, sees it otherwise. In his yard he harangues Eccles on a minister’s proper business, and it is not the pastoral care Eccles has been giving. Eccles’s liberal pastoral care and Kruppenbach’s hard law are two theories of grace, and the book sets Rabbit between them without choosing. Over the whole stands an epigraph from Pascal, on grace, the hardness of the heart and outward circumstance. The theology is argued, mostly in dialogue; what the action carries is the flight.
Rabbit takes work in Mrs Smith’s garden. Her rhododendrons come into flower, and among them she speaks to him of the life in him. It is the book’s benediction, and it is given among flowers that will be over in a season. The garden is visited more than once to say this one thing. It says it each time with the same warmth, and in the light of what follows it is the last unshadowed thing the book allows him.
Movement IV
The birth of his daughter brings him back. Rebecca June is born, Rabbit returns to Janice, and for a time the book seems to have closed its circle: the runner home, the family together. It does not hold. He runs a second time, and the circle opens again. The structure has been saying it since the night drive: he can neither leave nor stay, and each return is the start of the next flight.
While he is gone Janice drinks. The book leaves Rabbit’s senses and goes into hers, and the passage that ends with the baby’s death is told from inside her drunken panic, its syntax breaking as the bath fills. Rabbit cannot see this, and so the book gives the sight to her. It is the book’s terror, sustained without relief, and the most exact writing in it. The price of his freedom is paid in a room he has left, by a woman he has left in it, and the form will not let the reader look away to him.
Then the funeral, and the search in the woods after it. The book does not settle who is to blame. Janice, drunk, let the child drown; Rabbit, gone, left her alone; the town around them saved neither; or no one, an accident in a bath. Each answer has its case, and the novel lets each stand. The child’s death is a sacrifice no one intended, and the theology the ministers argued has nothing to say to it.
Movement V
Near the end the book leaves Rabbit again, for Ruth, and gives her a long passage of her own: her account of what he is. She sees him from outside, as he never sees himself. The two departures that matter most, Janice’s and Ruth’s, are the book’s judgment. It never states a verdict on Rabbit. It gives the women who pay for him the sight he lacks, and lets them see.
What holds the whole is one law. The boys’ game at the backboard and Kruppenbach in his yard obey it alike: the self’s hunger for a grace felt once, in the body, against the claims of others and of the law. Golf, sex, the night drive, the garden, the drowning are all instances of it, and nothing in the book breaks it. No one is rescued by plot. The consequences follow from the characters, and the man who wanted grace is left with what his wanting has done.
He sees Ruth once more, and then he runs. The present tense carries him to the last words without a summing up: “Ah: runs. Runs.” Where he is going the book does not say, and in the tense it has kept from the first sentence there is nowhere he could be going. The novel closes on the motion it opened with, a man and his body and a lift that may be grace or may be flight, and leaves the reader running with him, unable to tell which.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the spine passes it: the rhythm of the action is the book’s argument, flight, return, flight, return, flight. The night drive south must stay, since it shows that the running has no destination; Ruth must stay, as the life he runs to; Eccles and Kruppenbach must both stay, since the moral question is posed between them; the drowning must stay, and must be told from Janice’s side. What the test finds is a surplus of rendering. The golf lessons with Eccles run long, the weeks at Ruth’s apartment repeat their texture, Mrs Smith’s garden is visited more than once to say one thing, and the sensory description, Updike’s gift, at moments goes on past the point where it adds knowledge. Perhaps a tenth to an eighth of the book is permitted rather than compelled, and that holds the axis near the foot of the twelve.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a man formed by one adolescent glory, who has found no adult form for the yearning it left him, mistakes his appetite for a vocation and his flight for faith, and the people who depend on him pay the cost. The book shows the spiritual hunger of the prosperous American 1950s without mocking it and without excusing it: Rabbit’s hunger for something he cannot name is given as real, and its consequences as catastrophic. The hardest disclosure is the price women pay for a man’s freedom, and the form makes it: the drowning is told from inside Janice’s drunken panic, and Ruth is given her own long account of what Rabbit is. Held below the higher figures because Rabbit’s inarticulacy is also the book’s: the religious question is posed in conversation more than found in action, and the social order is seen at the scale of one town.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation comes often, and through the body. The opening, in which a grown man joins boys at a backboard and feels the old perfection in his hands, is the first height. The golf shot that finally carries, the ball rising and seeming to hang before it falls, is the book’s purest transport, a grace in the physical world. The night drive south, through a darkening country of radios and diners, is a long dread. Mrs Smith among her rhododendrons in flower, speaking to Rabbit of the life in him, rises into a benediction. The drowning is the book’s terror, and it is sustained without relief. The search in the woods after the funeral and the last run close on an open, uncertain lift. Held below the higher reaches because the elevation is lyrical and local more than grand, and the long domestic middle is low by design.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Some of the myth is built. The running animal is in the name and the title, and the flight is the American pattern of the man who lights out from the settlement for the open country, turned back on itself: Rabbit runs and returns and runs, and the open country is a suburb. An epigraph from Pascal, on grace, the hardness of the heart and outward circumstance, sets a theological frame that the action bears: Eccles’s pastoral care and Kruppenbach’s hard Lutheran law are two theories of grace, and Rabbit is the soul between them. The child’s death is a sacrifice no one intended. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the archetype is mostly evoked: Rabbit is too particular and too unreflective to bear the seeker’s pattern as structure, the theology is argued in dialogue more than enacted, and the American flight answers Kerouac’s road more than it rebuilds a myth.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The inheritance is the American realist novel of the small city and the ordinary man, Sinclair Lewis, Dreiser and O’Hara, whose Pennsylvania lies close by, with Joyce and Proust behind its attention to the instant. The turn is threefold: a full-length novel sustained in the present tense, rare in American fiction of 1960; a lyric and theological seriousness given to a suburban adultery and a man without ideas; and a frankness about the body at the edge of what an American publisher would then print, as the cuts made to the first edition show. The stake was real: a second novel, after the small and quiet The Poorhouse Fair, risking prosecution and a hero readers would hate. Held below the bar because realist social fiction is a proven path, and the present tense and the frankness are accents on it rather than a new instrument.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The present tense is Rabbit’s condition: a man who lives in sensation, without a usable past or an imagined future, given in a tense that has neither. Told in the past, the book would judge him from a distance it has not earned; in the present, the reader runs with him and is implicated. The close third person, confined to Rabbit’s senses for most of the book, makes his blindness the reader’s, and the departures from it, to Ruth and above all to Janice, break the confinement where his blindness costs most: the drowning cannot be seen by Rabbit, and so it is seen by her. The structure of flights and returns is the knowledge that he can neither leave nor stay. Held off the top because the departures in point of view are few and somewhat abrupt, and long middle stretches use the form as a container for observation.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over sixty-six years. The book has a substantial critical literature, much of it within the study of Updike, and the questions it plants stay open. Is Rabbit’s hunger a real intimation of grace, or the name selfishness gives itself? Who is responsible for Rebecca June’s death: Janice, Rabbit, the town, or no one? Is the book on Rabbit’s side, or does it convict him by giving the women their own passages? Is Kruppenbach the book’s voice? Rereading yields more in the prose than a first reading finds. Held in the low eights because much of the later reading of the book is reading of the four Rabbit novels together, which deepen him in ways this book alone does not, and because the surface is lucid and the questions are posed openly rather than buried.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The field is American fiction around 1960 in English: Bellow, Salinger, Cheever, Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), Roth’s first book, Heller to come. The force: the book showed that the life of an ordinary, inarticulate suburban man could carry lyric and theological weight in a sustained present tense, and it set the frankness of the body inside serious realist fiction. That widened the realist novel more than it reorganised it. Held in the low eights because the reach runs largely through the later Rabbit novels and through Updike’s manner, not through this book’s form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it made Updike’s name and began a chronicle of one American life in four novels across thirty years, a sequence widely taken as a model of the American novel of the ordinary man; and the present-tense novel became common in later American fiction, though that cannot be traced to this book alone.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Survival is weighed over sixty-six years. The text survives whole, in a form its author revised and approved, and has been in print throughout. Presence has been wide: a defining novel of its decade, translated, and kept in print with the later Rabbit novels in collected editions. But presence is charged in part: Updike’s standing has cooled since his death in 2009, the book is taught less than it was, and its treatment of women has become a principal ground of its contested reception. The contest has not removed it from print or from readers; it bears on presence, not on form or fabric. Its surface, the dime stores, the Mouseketeers on television, the radio news of 1959, is the matter of the book and dates as period rather than as dependence. The figure stands above a charged presence and below the step that unbroken presence over this span would show.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on Updike’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the sentence that renders sensation exactly, and of a present tense sustained across a full novel without monotony. The first sentence, “Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it.”, sets a scene and a social world in fourteen words, and the prose follows the ball, the light on a windshield, the texture of Ruth’s skin and the smell of a kitchen with a precision few American writers of the decade matched. The shift into Janice’s drunken consciousness, its syntax breaking as the bath fills, is a technical feat of the first order. The dialogue keeps Brewer’s speech and the ministers’ two idioms apart. Charged: the lyricism at times decorates where it should press; some of Rabbit’s perceptions come in a vocabulary that is Updike’s rather than his; and some sexual passages are rendered with more relish than knowledge.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the boys’ game at the backboard in the opening pages, and Kruppenbach’s harangue to Eccles in his yard on a minister’s proper business. They obey one law: the self’s hunger for a grace felt once, in the body, against the claims of others and of the law, and neither the game nor the sermon can settle which is God’s. Golf, sex, the night drive, the garden, the drowning and the last run are all instances of it, and the book never breaks its own physics: no one is rescued by plot, and the consequences follow from the characters. The range runs from comic domestic squalor to the theological, and from Rabbit’s senses to Janice’s. Charged: the departures in point of view, though lawful, are unevenly prepared, and the world beyond Mt. Judge enters only as radio news.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Many orders, held through one man and a small city. Consciousness, in Rabbit’s senses and, for a time, in Janice’s and Ruth’s. The family: two sets of parents, the Angstroms and the Springers, a sister, a son and a daughter. Work: the MagiPeeler, the gardening, the Springers’ car lot, Ruth’s past, the ministers’ vocation. Sex and the body, at length. Sport, as the lost form of grace. Religion, in two churches and two theologies. Class and the small city, in Brewer and Mt. Judge. The natural order, in the spring and Mrs Smith’s garden. Death. They are integrated, not listed: each is a claim on Rabbit and a place he runs from. Held in the low eights because history and the state are absent or heard only on the radio, and every order is seen at the scale of one town.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.7, then The Imperishable at 8.6 and The Inner Law at 8.5. A sentence that renders sensation exactly and a present tense sustained across a full novel without monotony, with the drowning given in Janice’s breaking syntax; sixty-six years in print in its author’s revised text, its presence narrowed and unbroken; and one law, the self’s hunger for a grace felt once in the body against the claims of others, holding the backboard and the minister’s yard alike.
Limiting Dimension
The Archetypal Deep at 7.9: the running animal and the American flight are evoked more than built, and the frame of grace is argued in dialogue more than enacted. Next above it, The Inevitable and The Swerve at 8.0: a spine whose every part is required, carrying a surplus of rendering in the golf, the weeks at Ruth’s and the garden; and a turn made in the present tense and the frankness of the body, accents on the proven path of realist social fiction.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.5, The Living Form at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of its five: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4, Pressure on Tradition at 8.1, The Swerve at 8.0 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.9 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.9, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.1. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.3, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, first published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, in 1960, his second novel. It is scored alone, not as the first of the four Rabbit novels. The text scored is Updike’s final revision, in the omnibus Rabbit Angstrom (Everyman’s Library, 1995): the Knopf text of 1960 was cut and softened in its sexual passages at the publisher’s request, for fear of prosecution, and Updike restored them and revised the book again. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Updike’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the first sentence and the last words. Facts that could not be verified, among them the edition in which the restored text first appeared, the extent of the later revisions, the book’s length in words and its division into sections, the date on which the action opens, the place of the epigraph in Pascal’s writings, Rabbit’s own words to Eccles, the film made of the novel, the prizes given to the later volumes and the lists on which the book has been placed, are not given. Citations are by episode.