Rabbit Run by John Updike

I am back to books written before I was born, with Rabbit Run by John Updike, but in my defense this turned out to be a series of four books and the last two were written while I was of reading age.

Rabbit Run depicts five months in the life of a 26-year-old former high school basketball player named Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, and his attempts to escape the constraints of his life. He doesn't like the domesticated man he has become and through a series of misadventures and affairs, he tries to find something better only to fall further down the hole of despair. Updike said he wrote the book in response to Kerouac's On the Road to depict, "what happens when a young American family man goes on the road – the people left behind get hurt"

Rabbit Run spawned three sequels, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit At Rest, that take us through Rabbit's middle aged life and up to his death. It is a great joy to be able to read these book consecutively, rather than having to wait 10 years between them.