Word: rabbiting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...RABBIT, RUN (307 pp.)-John Updike -Knopf...
...center of the crack-up is Harry ("Rabbit") Angstrom. In the small Pennsylvania suburb where he was born and lives, he had been a schoolboy hero, a basketball player of exciting skill. That was the high point of his life. Now, out of the army and in his mid-20s, he has reached a personal nadir. The old hero of the courts works as a demonstrator of a kitchen gadget. His wife is dull, losing her looks, and spends most of her time before the TV set with an oldfashioned. Not knowing what he wants, but hating what...
...hollow center, Rabbit is ineffectual. He cannot even run away cleanly, gets lost on the road and returns-but not to his wife. He turns to his old high school coach and through him meets a girl who has slipped into casual prostitution. The first night, he pays. Then he and Ruth simply begin living together. Big, shrewd, and without illusions, she knows Rabbit is no prize, but neither is she. It is when the local Episcopal minister shows up to make Rabbit see the moral wrong of his desertion that all the weak strands of his character begin...
Author Updike tells his depressing and frequently sordid story with a true novelist's power. His too-explicit sexual scenes are often in the worst of taste, but his set pieces describing Rabbit's crackup, his confrontations with wife, family, mistress and imploring minister show some of the surest writing in years. Up to a point Rabbit, Run seems to be saying that this is what much of life in the U.S. is like; certainly Updike's scene and people seem too threateningly typical. Yet the real weakness of the book is Rabbit...
...Lure. Since doctors who patronize shoddy, low-cost labs clearly run high risk of diagnostic error, what is the big labs' big lure? Though doctors shy away from admitting it, the answer is speedy service at supermarket savings. Small, painstaking laboratories charge about $25 for a single rabbit test for pregnancy; contract labs offer an unlimited number of tests for a monthly fee which can work out to less than a dollar a test...