One of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, Toby Litt, author of Corpsing, deadkidsongs, Exhibitionism, Finding Myself and Ghost Story brings us a monthly selection on cult literature.

This month features: Rabbit, Run by John Updike
Published by: Penguin Modern Classics
ISBN: 0141187832
Price: £8.99

Almost exactly halfway through John Updike’s reputation, there stands a large 'but'.

Critics, when writing of him, always reach this point, and are halted. They may have been liquid with their praise, thus far, overgushing, but after the 'but' things change, solidify, dessicate, start to crumble.

I would really like to avoid this; to stay the whole way through fluid enough to go with the flow of Updike's invention – sweet, bright, carbonated. ('I've just got this terrible thirst for orangeade,' says one charater in Rabbit, Run). He is (say it) a great writer: far better, morally and aesthetically, than America deserves. We should read his books, all of them, with the sensation of having entirely lucked out. (He's our contemporary!) Updike's generosity is so extreme that his orangeade tide has washed across a continent, leaving its every surface sugared and sticky. Celebrate! Lick!

But.

But I can’t.

Because the 'but' is there, firmly founded, not sand-built; so much so that I am sure Updike, housebuilder, home-maker, poured the concrete himself. In this, he seems a paradoxical Ozymandias, constructing his works entirely for the opportunity of moralising their ruin.

So, yes, Updike's talent for recording sensuous, sensual and sexual particulars is astonishing; I would almost say unequalled.

Her neck and shoulders are given a faint, shifting lambency by their coat of fine white hairs, invisible except where the grain lies with the light.

(That 'lies with the light' could not be better done.)

But his writing can seem unbalanced by this. God may be in the details but this doesn't mean one should make details one's God. With Updike, in some moods, novel is to observations as string is to pearls.

Yes, these novels engage, at the same time, and equally well, with social minutiae and infinite metaphysical questions.

"Well I don’t know all this about theology, but I'll tell you, I do feel, I guess, that somewhere behind all this" – he gestures outward at the scenery; they are passing the housing development this side of the golf course, half-wood half-brick one-and-a-half-stories in little flat bulldozed yards containing tricycles and spindly three-year-old trees, the un-grandest landscape in the world – "there’s something that wants me to find it."

But sometimes I find myself asking whether these questions emerge from the characters' inner lives – or obtrude, or erupt – or whether, now and again, they aren’t soldered, tacked, superglued on; because if spiritually ambitious author wants existential lumps then existential lumps there will damn well be.

Which brings me to the question of Rabbit – Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, hero of Updike's tetralogy (Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest and dangling participle 'Rabbit Remembered' in Licks of Love.) Rabbit, at twenty-six, is a former High School basketball star. His current occupation is demonstrating 'a kitchen gadget called the MagiPeel Peeler in five and dime stores'. Rabbit is unhappily married, with one child and another on the way.

'"Oh all the world loves you,"' one character says to Rabbit, halfway through Rabbit, Run. '"What I wonder is why?"'

Rabbit has no hesitation in replying, as he does elsewhere, '"I'm loveable."'

The conversation continues: '"I mean why the hell you. What’s so special about you?"'

'"I'm a saint," he says. "I give people faith."'

Here, I'd say, is an existential lump. Updike's reply to this, I'm almost certain, would be that I shouldn't patronize his characters by believing them incapable of this cast of conversation. That's not the issue, however. The issue is whether this conversation appears more natural to the characters than it appears useful to the author. The issue is of pitch, not tone. Updike's pitch, being metaphysical, is perfect. But this will not help you tune a piano, or play a tune. To someone with perfect pitch, the compromises of a well-tempered keyboard can sound agonizingly dissonant. Rabbit, at this conversational moment, is a piano ditty being presented (or being forced to present itself) as the music of the spheres.

Updike's getout, here and elsewhere, is America. Why both Rabbit and his nation remain stubbornly loveable is – in Updike's view – because although they may sin most grievously, their hearts remain open for Grace.

Susan Sontag said this in an interview:

'Americans are always talking about losing their innocence, but then they always get it back again.

The interesting point, for me, is not that at which innocence is lost, nor even when it is regained; it's of opening one's American mouth to say, yet again, that one has innocence to lose.

Rabbit, Run hinges on one deeply American proposal, made by Harry Angstrom almost exactly halfway through the novel: '"If you have the guts to be yourself... other people'll pay your price."'

This is the desire for self-determination of the Founding Fathers; this is George W. Bush’s foreign policy.

I do find Rabbit loveable. And this is because, beyond Updike's control, he escapes himself. Although this may sound stupid, I don't believe in Harry Angstrom as Rabbit. His emblematic animal simply doesn't fit him. Rabbit-like is what Updike desperately wants him to be; so he gives him an upper lip that doesn't cover his teeth and makes bolting for cover his defining move. But Harry Angstrom is another animal altogether: a Tiger.

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