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16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Do I not like John Updike?, 16 Feb 2004
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.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Famous last words, 21 Oct 2009
WARNING: Amazon seems to have lumped together reviews for Seek My Face and for My Father's Tears, which are two different books. This is a review for My Father's Tears.
My Father's Tears is Updike's last book of short stories, published a few months after he died. That it is a posthumous work is poignant: a collection of fictional memories and old age anecdotes, it exudes a before-the-grave redolence, a sense that the author knew these were his last moments in this world. The stories are unconnected, but they all have aging men as protagonists, they all are about looking back or dealing with one's declining years.
My Father's Tears' tone and style is not, say, that of a Raymond Carver, made of tiny crucial twists and hinging on odd but telling details and situations. Rather, these are pedal-tone codas, sepia pictures of remembered depression and war-era childhoods, ruminations on a changed world. The lens is turned towards long-buried relationships only evoked again thanks to a glimpsed suburban alley, a school reunion; or, kaleidoscope-like, it sees dissolved family bonds reconfigure under new, variegated patterns.
Most of the stories are set in small East Coast towns, and the reader could be forgiven for believing the divorce rate in New England is 100%, with everyone having affairs the whole community knows about, but fair enough: painful emotional choices make for more engaging fiction. In the middle of the book is a piece about 9/11: slightly eye-rolling, but I suppose American authors felt they had to do that. Nor is the collection devoid of an autobiographical air. I found the stories got better towards the end, that their pace became more varied and their lessons richer. Perhaps it is just that one gets into their slow, nostalgic stride, or that the message sinks in that old age, the approach of death, are manageable prospects after all. Maybe, retrospectively, this is a book best to be read after the age of forty.
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Beauty of The Creator, 23 Feb 2006
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
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