Rabbit, Run by John Updike

This book and this author have received so much praise (and a Pulitzer!) that I had to check it out.  Very disappointing.  This is another of those books which were considered "revolutionary" when they came out (1961), but look decidedly unimpressive from the point of view of 2022.  Thomas Pynchon is another of those authors whose books were "revolutionary" in the 1960s, but are the most boring drag to slag through nowadays.  So what is exceptional about this book, "Rabbit, Run" which apparently took its title from a WW2 popular song, as if anyone today in 2022 would have even heard it?  

Well, the language is interesting, pretty much like a "stream of consciousness" but limited only to paragraphs and pages.  There are some paragraphs which are two-pages long, and only consist of Updike's random memories, loosely and barely tangentially related to the story and plot, while using obscure, made-up words and terms, which probably sounded cool in 1960, but today are just a bore.  You can pretty much skip all the paragraphs that don't have a dialogue, and still get the full story, without the ancillary garbage.  

The story is boring, already seen a million times before, and nothing to write home about.  Harry Angstrom, whose nickname "Rabbit" seems to serve absolutely no other purpose in the entire book but to add "flavor" and "spice" and "recognition" - is just yet another mid-western man with little to no education, dead-end shitty job, shitty marriage to a woman he only occasionally feels like fucking (and who drinks barrels of alcohol while pregnant? what kind of child brain development will that result in?), until one day he just doesn't feel like he'd ever want to fuck her again.  So, he does what every average, under-educated, under-achiever would do, and leaves her and his son, and goes to live with a part-time hooker, whom he also manages to get pregnant (praise under-educated sperm!).

Then it gets into melodramatic bullshyte, like his drunk wife drowns the new baby in the bathtub and then goes crazy, and this extremely annoying protestant preacher just yaps his gobbler the entire book with all this sanctimonious bullshyte, which really means nothing in the end.  Pretty much describes every sticks and boonies backwater town in America.  Thanks, but I have better things to do with my time.