Harry Angstrom, called Rabbit, was a high school basketball star and now sells kitchen gadgets, and one evening he simply drives away from his pregnant wife and keeps driving. Updike was twenty-eight when he wrote this, and the prose already had that distinctive shimmer, that attention to surfaces that reveals depths. Rabbit runs from responsibility but cannot escape himself. The novel launched a tetralogy that would follow Rabbit through four decades of American life. Updike's sentences notice everything: the light, the textures, the small betrayals. The final word is runs, and it is still running.