Rabbit, Run

"Yeah. I mean, eventually. Although at the beginning he is only 26, although he is married with a kid, with another kid on the way. Midlife maybe began earlier then. He’s in a dead-end job. And, actually, I looked into the ‘midlife crisis’ term, and it was coined by a Canadian psychoanalyst who had in mind men in their mid-thirties. So he’s not so far off that. He’s determined to get the hell out of Dodge, and wants to drive to the coast although he never quite makes it because the tangle of American highways somehow obstructs him. He ends up moving one township away and shacking up with a woman that his old basketball coach introduced him to, and being no happier than he was before. He reproduces the same kind of domestic mess he was trying to escape from in the first place. And we should talk about the car. I’ve done a couple of road trips across the States, and one of the things that happens is that the car becomes your home. It’s the only constant in your life. If you’re stopping in motels or camping or staying at friends’ houses, the car is the one place that you feel is consistent in your life. The appeal of that in Rabbit, Run and all these other books is that in the car you have a home that you can take with you. You’re a turtle with a shell on your back. There’s a line about writing novels I once heard: that writing a novel is like driving on a mountain road late at night. You should know where you’re trying to get to, but all you need to see, moment by moment, is as far as your headlights. Something like that. Anyway, The road trip novel makes that literal, you want to have some sense of a destination, but all you ever have to worry about is the next thirty yards. In the case of my book, he wants to drive to see his son at grad school in California. That’s the target. Also, his dad is buried there, so he has complex family reasons for wanting to make it to the coast. He knows he’s going to get there, and the question is, how. Somebody once asked me if there was an English equivalent to the road trip novel. And there is, it’s just not in a car. It’s that hiking story. Or a biking story. Or Three Men in a Boat . Even classic English novels like Tess of the d’Urbervilles turn out to involve a lot of walking from one place to another. Because of the size of the country, you have this feeling when you walk out of one village and trek three miles to another village, you’ve actually gotten somewhere. The character of the place has changed."