That is essentially the first section of Updike’s novel, 116 pages. Instead, he finds a bed in Brewer at the apartment of his old basketball coach Marty Tothero, and then a bed with Ruth Leonard, a young woman he finds attractively overweight and more comfortable with sex than his wife. Instead, he starts driving south, headed vaguely to the beaches of Florida, but only getting as far as West Virginia deep in the night before turning back. The clutter behind him in the room - the Old-fashioned glass, with its corrupt dregs, the chock-full ashtray balanced on the easy-chair arm, the rumpled rug, the floppy stacks of slippery newspapers, the kid’s toys here and there broken and stuck and jammed, a leg off a doll and a piece of bent cardboard that went with some breakfast-box cutout, the rolls of fuzz under the radiators, the continual crisscrossing mess - clings to his back like a tightening net. It seems to him he’s the only person around here who cares about neatness. As he leaves to get Nelson and the car, an irritated Harry is oppressed by the chaos of the apartment: The couple’s two-and-a-half-year-old son Nelson is with Rabbit’s parents. She is six-months pregnant and irritable. Just yesterday, it seems to him, she stopped being pretty. She is a small woman whose skin tends toward olive and looks tight, as if something swelling inside is straining against her littleness. There, he finds his wife Janice sitting in an armchair with an Old-fashioned, watching television turned down low. When he finishes his game, he heads home to his apartment in Mount Judge, a suburb of the much larger 100,000-resident city of Brewer. In fact, at the very, very beginning of John Updike’s 1960 novel Rabbit, Run, the 26-year-old, 6’ 3” Harry is playing pickup basketball with some kids, young enough to know nothing of his fame a decade earlier. Rabbit was a high school athlete, a star basketball player, known for scoring and never getting called for a foul. His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. At the end, he is running willy-nilly, without direction, into the unknown. Later, he is running to - to the hospital. At the start, Harry Angstrom, nicknamed Rabbit, is running away.
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