Seek My Face [Hardcover]

That is an ever more difficult question to answer. I defer to nobody in my admiration for the Rabbit books and have never understood the theory that the later volumes in the series represent a decline. On the other hand it has seemed to me that, in some of his more recent fictions, notably Gertrude and Claudius, Updike has been writing plenty about not very much. Seek My Face suffers from the same problem. Beautifully written most certainly, with a wise and kindly development of the central relationship between artist and interviewer, but with little to involve the reader who is less than enthralled by pages of text-book art criticism. And can it be that John Updike, in his 54th book, is reduced to setting himself technical challenges? I cannot imagine any other reason for writing Seek My Face in one chapter of 270-odd pages (sentence and paragraph lengths in proportion), giving the reader no way-stations to pause for rest and recuperation.

Hope Chafetz is a 79-year old widow who, late in life, has built a reputation as an artist. She has had three marriages. Her first two husbands, Zack (now dead) and Guy (suffering from Alzheimer's and divorced from Hope), were also both artists who established substantial reputations. Her third husband Jerry (dead) was a wealthy financier and amateur art collector. The story takes place over a single day during 2001 in which Hope is visited by a young New Yorker, Kathryn D'Angelo, to whom she has agreed to give an interview about her work; the interview is to be published in a magazine and is intended to focus on Hope's work, though it soon becomes clear that Kathryn is at least equally interested in Zack's, and perhaps also Guy's, work. The novel is written as a continuous 276-page narrative - no chapters or sections - and recounts Kathryn's questions and Hope's answers, and simultaneously Hope's private thoughts in response to the conversation.

I read this book because I have read and enjoyed quite a lot of Updike's other novels rather than because of any special interest in art or art history, about which the book has a lot to say; indeed, it reads in parts more like a treatise on recent art history than a conventional novel. My comments, though, are limited to its merits or otherwise as a novel. From this perspective it has two main strengths, in my view. First, Updike writes well, as always. He is an acute observer both of people and of nature, and there are lots of nice descriptive passages in this book. For example, the impact of Hope's increasing frailty on her ability to perform basic tasks of daily living and household maintenance are sympathetically chronicled, and her love of nature is reflected in several lovely passages describing the Vermont countryside in which she lives.

The book's second main merit is its thoughtful and extensive reflections on the ageing process as experienced by Hope. As she recounts episodes in her past life during the interview she considers afresh incidents that happened several decades ago, and as often happens in such circumstances, she then changes her previous view of them and in the process, amends her views about her own life and about the meaning of life in general. Updike captures very well the reflective thoughtfulness with which many older people look at life in general and at their own past lives in particular.

As well as these strengths, though, I also feel that the book has weaknesses as a novel. One such weakness is that Hope is effectively the only character in the book. We learn a lot about her former husbands, but only from her perspective; and there is none of the interaction among characters, and resulting character development, that would be standard in most novels. The publisher's blurb claims that there is, asserting that "As the day wears on, Kathryn and Hope.....try to understand one another......And subtly, as each comes to know the other, their relationship changes." To my mind this assertion is completely false. Kathryn plays no real role beyond asking interview questions, and for all the purpose that she serves in the book, she might as well have emailed them and not bothered turning up in person. We never get to hear her view about anything that Hope says, and we learn next to nothing about her life. She isn't a significant character, and there is no meaningful interaction between her and Hope.

A second weakness is that there is a basic implausibility about the novel's set-up. Although the subject of the interview is ostensibly Hope's work as an artist, during the course of the day she gradually reveals more and more personal details, including detailed and intimate information about her sex life with each of her three husbands as well as with various other lovers. Really? Would anyone willingly tell such intimate things to someone who is not only a complete stranger, but who is armed with a tape recorder which faithfully records all this intimate information, and who is explicitly intending to write up the interview for publication? I couldn't begin to suspend my complete disbelief in this set-up. I can see why Updike wants to include this material: the subject matter of the book is Hope's reflections on her life, and this is clearly an important part of her life. Unfortunately for Updike, though, he has so structured the book that the only way he can include the material is by having Hope recount it to Kathryn.

Overall, I felt that as a novel this is unsatisfactory. I am sure that readers who are more interested than I am in art history will get plenty out of it, but for others, especially anyone who isn't familiar with Updike's work and wants to sample it, I think there are many better places to start (try any of the `Rabbit' novels, for example) and I really wouldn't recommend it.

John Updike's millennial book is ostensibly is a memoire conceived for the new century in the form of an interview. The subject in Hope Chafetz and her interlocutor is Kathryn Angelo. Hope is an artist now seventy eight who has been three times married, first to Zack McCoy (Jackson Pollack) then to Guy Holloway, a mix of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and others.

Her third husband was Jerry Chafetz is an art collector who I have not yet identified. The interview form allows Updike and the reader to see the events of Hope's live though her own consciousness, for not only do we have her replies but her reveries and censorings as the day progresses. "Thank you" she remarks to Kathryn as the latter leaves,"for letting me go on and on, making it real to myself again" "Had she been too frank?.....;" It is this making real that Updike seeks... "Seeks my Face"

There are probably two further strand hidden in the title. The first is spiritual, reflecting Updike Christian commitment. The words are found in Psalm 27 and provide one of the epigraphs

"You speak to my heart and say "Seek my face." "Your face Lord I will seek"

Katheryn quotes Hope as writing that "she is trying to paint holiness" and the book is framed by an invocation of Hope's Quaker upbringing. Within this frame the creativity of mid twentieth century art is admired for its expression, of being lived, in contrast to the art as a sensation that followed typified by that produced Holloway, who combined domesticity, with setting off the studio to direct his atelier to produce pop art, videos, blown up cartoons etc etc in the manner of an insurance executive. In 2001 Guy is senile with alziemers, an image of what befell the ambition to create what might in corporate speak be called a 'word class' New York School to take over from snooty Europe.

Hope's answers to Kathryn's questions are interspersed with reveries and recollections of places incidents and emotions. At the same time the hard reality of domestic life are described. Occasionally prose poetical passages invoke nature and landscape. The text is for slow reading, and re reading, to appreciate the way Updike persuades the reader to accept the single voice of Hope while bending both place and time and tone to create fictive but convincing narratives which hang together.

I found it a struggle over several train journeys, but, in the end, rewarding to complete the book