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"A penis with a thesaurus."
David Foster Wallace, describing John Updike

Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, 26, Mt. Judge, PA, married with a two-year-old son, is a Magipeeler salesman (not what he dreamed in high school basketball glory days). His wife Janice is expecting another child any day, as every night she boozes it up.

After another argument with Janice, Rabbit snaps, hit with an existential crisis, trapped by lifeless monogamy called marriage, choked by a meaningless job. He RUNS, escapes.

This novel follows three months of Rabbit's life in 1959, from the night he runs, to his visit to his high school basketball coach, an affair with Ruth (who feels comfortably "right" as long as she nixes the diaphragm), the birth of his daughter and running, running, running.

Rabbit is an immature, insecure male obsessed with sex, as an animalistic act, looking at potential partners for their sexual fit. He often refers to his being uncircumcised (his "hooded warrior,�� the original "Rumpleforeskin")--uncommon in the U.S.-- insisting Ruth fellate him, as she had other men.

Updike chose Angstrom (meaning "stream of angst"), inspired by his reading Danish philosopher Kierkegaard. In creating the novel (from which flowed three sequels), Updike thought of Kerouac's "On the Road," in imagining what might happen if a small-town, middle-class WASP family man hit the road, and who would be hurt.

He chose a former high school basketball star because he was intrigued by the number of men he saw who had peaked in high school with athletics and were thereafter stuck in a downward spiral.

Updike was groundbreaking in writing graphically about sex in well-regarded literature. Knopf required Updike to delete the sexually explicit passages prior to the 1960 publication, parts that he restored for Penguin's 1963 edition.

Updike said, "About sex in general, by all means let's have it in fiction, as detailed as needs be, but real, real in its social and psychological connections. Let's take coitus out of the closet and off the altar and put it on the continuum of human behavior."

It would be hard to imagine the novel not having sexually explicit passages when it follows three months in the life of a guy whose very identity as a man and human is tied to sex and thoughts of sex and thoughts of things in life as they relate to sex.

This is especially so with Updike's use of the present tense, a brilliant choice. Of employing the present tense, Updike observed:

In Rabbit, Run, I liked writing in the present tense. You can move between minds, between thoughts and objects and events with a curious ease not available to the past tense. I don't know if it is clear to the reader as it is to the person writing, but there are kinds of poetry, kinds of music you can strike off in the present tense.

Until reading this, I didn't realize the many things a writer can do with the present tense. It has a sense of immediacy and a flow that involves one in a story that seems more realistic.