Recommendations
Books Like Rabbit, Run by John Updike
Updike fiction, American suburban novels, and books about middle-class men trapped by their own choices
If Rabbit, Run stayed with you for the uncomfortable intimacy of Harry Angstrom's consciousness and Updike's unsentimental portrait of American suburban life, these eight works share its present-tense immediacy, its account of what suburban domesticity costs, and its refusal to let its protagonist off the hook.
- 1
Buy on AmazonRabbit Redux
by John Updike
The second Rabbit novel — 1969, the moon landing, Vietnam; Rabbit older, less mobile, watching his world change around him; essential continuation.
- 2
Buy on AmazonRevolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
Yates's 1961 novel of a couple in 1950s Connecticut trapped in their suburban life — the closest contemporary parallel to Rabbit, Run; Frank Wheeler is what Rabbit Angstrom might have been with a college education.
- 3
Buy on AmazonThe Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen's 2001 novel of a Midwestern family's collapse — the most important successor to Updike's project of treating white middle-class American family life with full literary seriousness.
- 4
Buy on AmazonHerzog
by Saul Bellow
Bellow's 1964 novel of a middle-aged Jewish intellectual's breakdown — the Jewish-American counterpart to Rabbit's WASP crisis; Moses Herzog's unsent letters against Rabbit's running.
- 5Buy on Amazon
The Swimmer
by John Cheever
Cheever's 1964 short story of a suburban man swimming home through his neighbors' pools — the American suburban tradition Updike belongs to, at its most concentrated; collect it in The Stories of John Cheever.
- 6
Buy on AmazonOn the Road
by Jack Kerouac
Kerouac's 1957 Beat novel — the book Updike said Rabbit, Run was arguing against; Kerouac celebrates the man who runs, Updike shows the damage he leaves behind.
- 7
Buy on AmazonFreedom
by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen's 2010 novel of a Midwestern couple's marriage and their son's escape — Rabbit's themes (suburban domesticity, male restlessness, American abundance) in a contemporary setting.
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Moviegoer
by Walker Percy
Percy's 1961 novel of a New Orleans stockbroker's existential crisis — published the same year as Rabbit, Run; both protagonists are young men who feel that their ordinary lives are somehow not their real lives.
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