His flight is less a rebellion, more a rush towards the new kind of conformity, scratched out against the great dominating influence of mass-media but nonetheless shaped by it. The moment Rabbit decides to make his escape is probably when gets home to see his wife slumped in front of a children's TV show with the host enjoining his audience to "know yourself". Rabbit is appalled at the banality; Rabbit is inspired by the sentiment. His drive towards freedom is soundtracked by the radio.

The novel ends with him still running, this time away from his infant daughter's funeral: "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. Ah: runs. Runs." Even with everything he has done, all the mess he has created, Updike knows there's something magnificent about his Rabbit.

Eventually, Rabbit would run through four novels (Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest), covering not only a life but also the latter half of the 20th century. It's a commonplace that the Fifties invented the teenager, but really the teenager was only a side-product of the decade's greater creation: the individual in lifelong pursuit of self-realisation. An age of personal freedom, carved out against the backdrop of screens that declared how a person should be: mass media defined a mean reality, and taught its consumers how to want the things that would mark them as an individual like everybody else. Liberty through the eternal eye of the camera.

The 21st century has been the undoing of that one, singular lens. Rabbit's predicament feels alien now partly because the things that hemmed him in are now almost exotically elusive for young people, but also because the media landscape he's both repulsed by and defined by doesn't exist in the same way anymore. At the very least, his disappointing wife would have been scrolling TikTok as well as watching television; Rabbit would probably have been listening to podcasts.

Actually, they'd probably have been making the content as well as absorbing it. The atomised individuals spawned by the media age have become, in turn, creators of their own atomised media in which they create perfectly consumable versions of themselves which just happen to replicate the tics and interests of every other individual in this ecosystem. Currently, two influencers are locked in a legal battle over who owns the greige, minimalist aesthetic both have made their trademark. One believes herself to be the original, and is suing the other for copyright infringement, claiming that she has been imitated right down to the level of specific camera angles.

It is, on the surface, an absurd claim: how can anyone "own" something as generic as an absence colour? Weirder still: both influencers in the case derive their income from selling the products they feature in their Instagram and TikTok posts, meaning their entire existence is predicated on being mimicked. A more likely explanation than plagiarism is that both influencers simply followed the cues of audience engagement and the algorithm until they arrived at two versions of the self that were very nearly indistinguishable from each other.

But the fact that the case exists at all suggests that even the blandest wants to believe in the myth of their individuality. "You want to feel like you have unique value that you're giving out into this world," commented another influencer unrelated to the case. The inevitable result of the feedback system, though, is that "you kind of middle yourself out". Every individual is their own brand online, and every brand is a variation of a wider product category. There are as many different versions of the "Instagram clean girl" as there are kinds of cereal.