Rabbit Run, published in 1960, established its author, John Updike, as a major American novelist. The novel tells the story of Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, a former high-school basketball star, who finds himself in his mid-twenties, marooned in a mundane marriage and a boring sales job. We follow him for three months as he struggles to transcend the limits of his life in Brewer, Pennsylvania – which in practical terms means leaving his pregnant wife, getting his girlfriend pregnant, going back to his wife after she has a baby, and facing eventual domestic tragedy, caused in part by his flaky carry on.

The book, while consisting of the most intimate and closely observed details of human behaviour, has a detached tone. We float above events, seeing them from the perspective of different characters, sometimes switching viewpoint over the space of a paragraph. Although this could be confusing, I did see it as fitting to the story. Harry tries to rise above ordinary life that drags on him. The narrative style reflects Harry’s aspiration. Maybe he would like to be an omniscient author, up above events, describing them in the present tense, like John Updike.

So is Harry’s quest valid, given all the hurt it causes? About half way through Rabbit Run, we get an example of a man who has actually succeeded in leaving the mundane aspects of life behind. Jack Eccles is a young priest who is trying to help Harry repair his marriage. Unsure of what to do, Eccles goes to his boss, Fritz Kruppenbach, for advice. The ‘advice’ Eccles receives is to leave tedious, worldly complications to work out for themselves. The job of Church ministers is not to involve themselves in the ridiculous business of parishioner’s lives, but to demonstrate faith, as it exists above humanity’s petty affairs. Kruppenbach is smug and aloof, only serving to demonstrate that standing above life is not attractive, not something that anyone would reasonably seek to achieve. Eccles storms out of the meeting and continues his best efforts to help Harry. And good for him, you think. Now, mundane details look different. This is where true meaning and compassion can be found. Incidentally, the name Eccles serves as a reference to Ecclesiastes, a story in the Old Testament, where the narrator famously declares that ‘all is vanity’ in human affairs, and people should enjoy the simple pleasures of daily life, which are a gift from God.

I think the book continues to be relevant today as a commentary on efforts, both ancient and modern, to rise above everyday concerns. Traditional methods are represented by the book’s various religious characters. In a more modern vein, I’ve read that Updike wrote Rabbit Run partly as a reaction to Kerouac’s On The Road, where self-involved young people drive around America, searching for themselves, with no thought for those they leave behind. Rabbit himself tries an ‘on the road’ escape early in the book, after walking out on his wife. He drives all night, gets lost, buys some fuel and ends up right back where he started the following morning.

Rabbit Run expresses a desire to transcend ordinary life, while also suggesting – in the manner of Ecclesiastes – that the only meaningful escape available to us lies in ordinary things. In the end Rabbit Run does not promise any kind of silly nirvana, but it does suggest a more liberating and interesting way of looking at the non-nirvana in which we spend our days.

The Guest is a 2023 novel by Emma Cline. It tells the story of a young woman called Alex, a hustler trading on her looks. As the story opens, she’s about as close as she’s going to get to settling down, playing the role of dutiful girlfriend to Simon, a wealthy older man. They live at his house in a smart, Long Island beach resort, until a moment of unguarded exuberance at a party has Simon asking Alex to leave.

I soon abandoned my initial assumption that The Guest would be something like Pretty Woman. Do you remember that scene in Pretty Woman, where Edward mistakes Vivienne’s innocent flossing for drug taking? In The Guest there is no innocent flossing. And while Pretty Woman ends with Vivienne winning her rich man, The Guest starts with the rich man dumping the girl. Ejected from his house, she wanders around the local area, surviving on her wits, hoping for a reconciliation at Simon’s traditional Labor Day party five days hence.

I really enjoyed this book but found it hard to review – as in to describe what I liked about it. I was engrossed, as if reading a thriller, every page a cliffhanger. And yet this tension could arise from Alex milling about at boring, pretentious parties, causing very minor damage to valuable paintings, sitting in restaurants telling various men what they want to hear, pretending to be different women depending on the context in which she finds herself.

Maybe I found this book hard to write about, because a review seeks to tie a book down, while Alex, as a character, seeks to escape such a fate.

In her wandering on Long Island she adopts all kinds of roles as part of her little scams. Student girl, rich girl, respectable young lady, child minder, femme fatale. She wants the security of any of these roles but instinctively does not want to become marooned in them, as she was whilst living her seemingly perfect life with Simon. In reality that idyll involved lonely days on the beach while her middle-aged boyfriend pursued an obsessive exercise regime and worked long hours in his home office.

Just before Simon tells her to leave, Alex goes for a swim. Caught in a current, exhausted by futile, splashy efforts, she saves herself by giving up and drifting. This happens to deliver her into safer waters. Alex staggers out of the sea, onto a beach populated by people having a vaguely summery time, unaware that a life and death crisis had just occurred.

This sums up the book really, the combination of peace and danger in one scene. Life at Simon’s house was a lost Eden, and a hazardous quicksand of boredom and loneliness. Any of the other roles into which Alex dips her toe during the book might offer security, or become a trap to be escaped. In the end the security she seeks and the danger she flees are combined. There is a kind of peace in The Guest, like the misleading tranquility of a billionaire’s mansion:

‘So much effort and noise required to create this landscape, a landscape meant to evoke peace and quiet. The appearance of calm demanded an endless campaign of violent intervention.’

The Guest is beautifully written mediation on the nature of security in a dangerous world. Bravo.

The Corrections is a Jonathan Franzen novel from 2001, winner of awards and much critical praise. It tells the story of the Midwestern Lambert family – Alfred Lambert, a railway engineer, his wife Enid, and their children. The narrative moves between each main character, and between the family’s past, and turn of the millennium present. The sprawling story focuses on Enid’s efforts to persuade her adult children to return home for ‘one last Christmas’.

Correction is the process of righting things that are wrong. So, did The Corrections win awards for suggesting solutions to problems? That would be a no. Do I recommend you read this book because it will help you with shortcomings in your life? Once again, the answer is no. Like good fiction in general it won’t really correct anything. So why would I recommend you read it? Here’s why.

About half way through the book, during a section describing the Lambert siblings’ childhood, there is a long account of a terrible family meal. Alfred has just returned from a trip inspecting a decrepit railway network that his own efficient railway network is looking to buy. He gets back home and all the things that make him a brilliant railway engineer – practical competence, analytical lack of emotion, self discipline, decisiveness – metamorphose into the rather scary characteristics of an overbearing, stubborn figure trying, and failing, to be a good husband and father. Life has so many different scenarios and sets of circumstances. Whales are wonderful at swimming in the ocean, not so good if they ever had to live on land. Does that mean a whale is a good or bad creature? Does life allow for such judgements when it poses such varied challenges, requiring different attributes?

Anyhow, the family meal – Alfred, Enid, and their two young boys Chip and Gary sit down to a meal of liver and bacon, with a root vegetable called rutabaga. Gary eats with relish, proclaiming the food delicious. Meanwhile poor Chip, who seems to have some kind of food issue, can barely even look at the mess on his plate.

The book is like that meal, presenting people and their lives not as disgusting on one hand, or delicious on the other, but somehow both at the same time. It’s not even as simple as saying the characters are a mixture of good and bad. They are both of those things, to the exclusion of the other, depending on circumstances, or from the angle you look at them. That’s the irony of The Corrections. Deficiencies to correct, and qualities to celebrate, are never clearly defined.

This contradiction is explored in a long, painful and funny book, as Enid Lambert tries to persuade her grown up children to come back home and enjoy that one last Christmas. There is an end-of-an-era feeling, as we follow Albert and Enid into old age. But we also feel there are no straight forward answers and neat endings to problems. There is no last Christmas in this vague situation. There will always be another.

The Corrections is non judgemental in a judgemental age. Whether you consider this neutral quality good or bad is up to you. But I would ask this question – would you prefer a book that provided a final correction, or another Christmas?