Seek My Face

by John Updike

On a spring day in Vermont, seventy-nine-year-old painter Hope Chafetz tells the story of her life to Kathryn, a young interviewer from New York. Questions send Hope back to her youth, to the heady postwar days of American art and her relationships with the artists who defined their times. As the day wears on, Kathryn and Hope - interviewer and interviewee - try to understand one another across the gulf of age, experience and time that lies between them. And subtly, as each comes to know the other, their relationship changes!

Genres: Fiction, Art, Literature, American, Novels, Contemporary, Literary Fiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

John Hoyer Updike was an American writer. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike is well known for his careful craftsmanship and prolific writing, having published 22 novels and more than a dozen short story collections as well as poetry, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker since the 1950s. His works often explore sex, faith, and death, and their inter-relationships.

He died of lung cancer at age 76.

Reviews

[Bandit · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my first experience with John Updike and far from my traditional audio boom fare of fairly mindless. What a talent, no wonder he is so well regarded. The quality of writing is absolutely superb, on par with some of the finest that I've read. There is such emotional intelligence, such marvelous attention to details, such incredible grasp of human nature, such assuredness with which he renders his characters wholly three dimensional. The story is a biography of a woman as told by herself to an interviewer and in flashbacks. Remarkable woman with a fascinating long creative life, an artist herself and wife to some very famous artists as well, particularly her first husband, heavily inspired by Jackson Pollock. To any art fan this would be an interesting read just from that aspect, but this was really just such a terrific character study. The fact that a man can write such awesomely intricate women is incredibly impressive. The reading of the book was top notch. Excellent introduction to the author. Recommended.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seek My Face was one of the last novels John Updike wrote.

Its premise is this: a thirties-something, serious freelance journalist from New York City comes to New England to interview a seventies-something artist who also was married to two famous artists, had affairs with others, and eventually married a rich collector.

The idea is that the interview will help Kathryn, the journalist, write about Hope, the artist. Hope is a well-known painter in her own right (she’s a Lee Krasner stand-in), and still active. But she’s not the equivalent of her husbands and lovers, who are pastiches of Jackson Pollock, Roy Liechtenstein, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Barnett Newman and the like.

So the aesthetic arc Hope’s life follows runs from the earliest abstract impressionists to later Pop and Op Art types. At present she’s painting canvases in shades of gray, trying to find ways to make the various shades push and pull at one another.

The strength of the book lies in Updike’s ability to verbalize abstract impressionism’s aspirations. He doesn’t believe in abstract impressionism, but he does a great job considering a field of paint that has no object, no story, nothing to represent except the beautiful moment of being within which the abstract impressionists worked.

Updike is just about as good dealing with successor movements. He wanted to be a graphic artist before he became a writer, and he knows his stuff.

There’s something empty about the way in which Hope relates her experiences with men and the art world. The men, especially the Pollock figure, don’t come alive for me. The better you know Pollock as a man, I suspect, the less interesting you find him. He was an enfant terrible in a sense, a Westerner, an alcoholic, a rule-breaker, and someone who, inevitably, met an early and violent death. It’s hard to imagine most of his acquaintances didn’t find him a bore, which is what he wanted to be (setting painting aside).

Of course, Pollock’s art is powerful and unique, but in a novel, most of the main male characters can’t be paper thin, not palpable, just beings Hope, however well she knew them, describes.

That’s a big flaw.

Hope is personally quite interesting, almost exhaustively so. Updike pours into her his astonishing ability to perceive, name and connect things--be they doorknobs, reflections, alterations in the clouds, or the wings of nostrils. This can be funny, but at the same time, it’s an oddly concrete mode of rendering reality--very representational, not at all abstract, though somewhat expressionistic. I sometimes felt as though I were being subjected to Homeric catalogues. There’s a fair amount of descriptive brilliance that doesn’t make up for a real story.

The real story is bookended between the morning when the Kathryn arrives in Vermont and the afternoon when she leaves. One day. In between, there’s tons of talk and tons of internal reflection on Hope’s part. The issue is whether the two women can find and believe in one another, I suspect. The answer is that they can’t. Updike forces Kathryn to keep asking Hope personal questions about sex with her men, and Hope doesn’t like it, and most readers won’t like it, either. So no matter how hard Hope works at reframing the exchange, she keeps failing. She can’t mother Kathryn, she can’t take her back and make her see exactly what here life was like, she can’t even get Kathryn to understand what being 70+ is like, and yet still working.

Updike being Updike, you expect a lot of stylistic pirouettes and are grateful for them, you expect a lot of sex, and have your doubts about it, but you also cheer him on when he seeks the metaphysical in quotidian reality. He was a “believer,” a kind of optimist, and a single child whose primary narcissism was never injured. No matter how many times he experienced or witnessed personal setbacks (his own and others) he kept thinking God lurked around the corner, willing and able to make things better.

I think this book should have been cut by 25%, but I wasn’t the editor in charge of telling John Updike that, and I doubt he would have listened. He was like Hope: he wanted to talk. So he talked.

[Becca · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've got news for you, John Updike. Women just don't think like that.

[Leigh Swinbourne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seek my Face was John Updike’s fifty-fourth book and twentieth novel, and by this time (2002) the wunderkind of sixties American Lit had largely been sidelined, both by newer writers such as Don de Lillo, Paul Auster and Toni Morrison, and by the fierce shake-down he copped in the seventies from feminist critics for the sexism of much of his prose. Aside from sexism, his novelistic flaws at this distance seem obvious: weak structure, which was probably a disdain of structure, resulting in poor plotting and pacing; and far too much cluttering detail tied to an obsession, led on by the haughty example of Nabokov, to make every sentence a work of art. In regards to the latter, however, it must be said that virtually nobody can turn a phrase like Updike and I am one of many readers/writers who have fallen under the spell of what seemed miraculous sequences, before fatigue inevitably set in.

No-one except the scholars are going to read fifty-four books by one writer, so I am here to tell you that this book, pretty much lost in Updike’s opus, is a gem, containing all of his qualities and few of his failings. It is a roman à clef, an interview between a young arts journalist and an elderly painter, whose responses and inward reminiscences tell a lightly fictionalised history of post-war American art. The painter is Hope Chafetz, really Lee Krasner, and the guts of the book is her tempestuous recall of first husband Zack McCoy, Jackson Pollock. After his death she marries Guy Holloway, a mishmash of pop artists but mostly Andy Warhol, who would be spinning in his grave like a Rolling Stones’ 45rpm at being both straight and up-for-it. No matter. Any sexism is muted by this being a conversation between two women, although interviewer Kathryn does display a keen Updikean interest in Hope’s erotic history, and Updike’s characteristic virtuosic verbosity is constrained by his decision to adhere to Aristotelean unities of time and place: the interview is conducted over a single day.

Updike had originally envisioned a career as an artist, a cartoonist of all things, and spent a student year at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. Much of his prose is painterly; when reading the ‘Rabbit’ books, perhaps his outstanding literary legacy, I remember entertaining a theory that perhaps the writer felt that if he described the surface of the world with enough completeness, it would inadvertently reveal its depths. Anyway, Updike certainly has a great feeling for and understanding of art; the passion that Hope expresses is clearly his own, and being near the end of her life, she is a stand-in not only for his enthusiasms, but also his doubts and fears. Who will care about his creative work when he has gone? What does it amount to in the scheme of the cosmos, if there is such a thing?

The major interest for me in this book is Updike’s focus on Pollock, an artist who is antithetical in method and approach to him in every way, save one significant particular. McCoy/Pollock is described as an instinctual artist, one who plunges into the creative moment and trusts to his talent. No aforethought, no plan, just action and result. Because he is a genius, the result can occasion great art. I believe Updike was intrigued, and perhaps a little jealous, himself being so pre-meditated and deliberate, so cerebral. In Pollock, what would formally appear to be an unruly mess turns out to be a superb unity, whereas as it happens, formal unity is notably lacking in most of Updike’s oeuvre (there are other compensating virtues). I imagine the elderly writer standing before one of those sprawling mesmerising canvases at MOMA, scratching his white head, wondering how one might achieve this by losing control rather than exercising it.

And the significant particular? It’s Updike’s personal view but he makes a persuasive case in the novel, particularly towards the close, of all artistic endeavour being an attempt to reach the divine, in essence, a form of prayer. Seek my Face. Pollock is a drunkard, a boor, a caveman, violent and selfish, and yet, like Updike, the civilized and urbane man of letters, he is embarked on the same quest, possessed in like manner for like purpose. Perhaps Updike chose Pollock deliberately to make this point. Or to separate the man from the product. Pollock behaved badly in life, but then so did Updike. Is the art compensation? Is it anything at all? What is it? Whatever, it is no accident that Chafetz’s given name is Hope.

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know it's not a good idea to read biographical information into a work of fiction, but I couldn't help but feel that in this novel, John Updike, who died two years ago at the age of 77, was reflecting on his his own career and what it all meant. True, if he was, his reflection is well-disguised. The novel takes the form of a day long interview that a young female journalist has with an old woman, important because she was married to representatives of two major art movements of the 20th century, an expressionist (like Jackson Pollock) and a pop artist (like Andy Warhol) as well as being a well-known painter in her own right. The journalist is gathering information for a magazine piece on the painter and her life.

Hope, the old woman, who lives alone in rural Vermont, at one point doubts the importance of her words pouring out onto the journalist's tape recorder, "What kind of a capture is it, the words on tape, words on paper, if nobody listens, if nobody reads? It all just pours into the dark, the darkness that exists even in the midst of the light; the light itself is blind." Could not the question be equally asked of what worth, of what lasting value are the voluminous writings of John Updike - his novels, short stories, poetry, criticism? This is not to say that they are without value, but what will be their legacy? The young journalist dutifully reassures the old woman that no one would ever say she's wasted her life, but the self-doubt lingers.

The painter reminisces about both the paintings and her personal life that was intertwined with these famous 20th century painters. She talks, she fixes lunch and chats with the young woman about her own life in New York, she has long interior monologues, and only a small segment of her thoughts make their way into the tape recorder. And from there, she realizes that her words will be edited and used in ways she has no control over. She's half-flattered and half-annoyed by this attention that is being paid to her. Flattered in that in her old age, she is still seen as a person deserving of attention, if not entirely for herself, then for the famous painters she was involved with. Annoyed because she realizes that her story, her life, will only be represented partially and somewhat distortedly. She thinks about these men, their faults, her relationships with them, physical, mental, psychologically, the children that she bore, what became of them in their adulthood. Her life and her art are intertwined in complex ways.

She thinks about how it's strange that things and objects trail after us from place to place, "more loyal than organic friends who desert us by dying." With her, the paintings are the principal objects that are still with her, either physically or in collections. And why are the paintings so important anyway (or the same question could be asked of word creations)? She speculates that they're valued because "people want to nail down pieces of a world that was always sliding from under them."

I always like to think about the last words of a novel or story. Hope (a name suggesting the opposite of despair), after the journalist leaves at the end of the day, contemplates a chair which had belonged to to her grandfather. He used to plant coins in the cushion for her to discover, and she thinks now of looking for one. "But her hip and back hurt in anticipation of getting down, grunting, on her knees on the oval rag rug, and she is afraid of finding nothing."

"Finding nothing" - the words echo in summing up a life dedicated to art. I think Updike finds a wealth of meaning in this contemplative novel, but a large part of that "meaning" lies in the doubt and questioning that goes with any life and its accomplishments. Its face has to be sought.

[Ron Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two years ago, the British novelist A.S. Byatt wrote what the publisher called "a novel" about a man collecting notes for a biography on a famous biographer. "The Biographer's Tale" was one of those stultifyingly complex productions you're proud to have endured because you don't want to admit you've been had.

In his review of Byatt's novel for The New Yorker, John Updike predicted that "the patience of all but a reader superhumanly tolerant of extended digression will creak and snap under the load of near-random texts, assembled by an author whose love of collection, of assembling and ordering, in this case quite overpowers any urge to tell a smooth story."

If only he'd remembered that commentary when writing "Seek My Face."

Updike's latest book boasts another one of those super-clever premises we've come to expect from him since he finished writing great novels about what it means to be an American man. The story covers just a single day-long interview. Kathryn, a young writer for an online magazine, has finagled an audience with 79-year-old Hope in her Vermont retreat.

As a painter, Hope has won a smattering of awards and hung her work in some of the finest museums and galleries, but she knows her real interest to the world is the fact that she was married to two of the towering artists of the 20th century.

In the introductory note, Updike admits, "It would be vain to deny that a large number of details come from the admirable, exhaustive 'Jackson Pollock: An American Saga,' by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith." Indeed, Hope's first husband, Zack, is a dead-ringer for the famous drip painter who drove his car into a tree during his last alcoholic bout of depression. Her second husband, Guy, sounds like an amalgamation of several modern artists, but mostly he's a weird cross between Ward Cleaver and Andy Warhol. (Fifteen minutes of that would be plenty.)

The book starts in the morning when Kathryn switches on her Sony tape recorder, and it ends in the evening when Hope and her interviewer (and Updike's readers) are exhausted by the uninterrupted flow of so much reminiscence, small talk, critical theory, and gossip.

As a breezy summary of modern art in America, "Seek My Face" beats the paints off the pretentious catalog text at the Guggenheim. After all, it's got Updike's unparalleled style, his witty piercing of social behavior and private anxieties, and free reign across a canvas that's 50 years wide. But as a novel, it suffers the considerable constraints of its static setting. The action takes place only in a series of rushed anecdotes and digressions - "Now, where was I?"

Under the relentless eye of her interrogator, Hope brushes through the details of her first marriage, providing a memorable warning against living with someone who considers himself a great artist. Zack courted fame while spurning its protocol. He thirsted for praise, but attacked his supporters. He needed his wife's devotion, but rejected her love. She talks frankly about their sex life, too, and what little she leaves out, Updike supplies in unseemly, humiliating flashbacks.

With a lingering mixture of resentment and affection, Hope describes their tumultuous marriage in the middle of "the historical moment, the explosion when everything came together and America took over from Paris, and for the first time ever we led world art." Thrilling as that explosion must have been, at home it destroyed her marriage. She remembers when "how little she mattered to him hit her like a fist to her chest, his leaden dedication to something else, this sacrifice of all that was orderly and decent and daily in the world to the sullen, obsessive blaze of his art, his stupid, selfish art."

Updike is best in these painful scenes, either described or remembered by Hope, when Zack drowned his talent in alcohol and savaged his wife's artistic ambitions. Not content to ridicule her, sometimes he would even paint over her work with his own. But in the intervening decades, Hope has developed a surprisingly forgiving attitude toward the chauvinistic world in which she lived. "Art was a man's world," she reminds her interviewer. "They could hardly make room for women, even when they married us."

Frankly, what's most interesting about the novel, if one can wade through all the art talk, is Updike's analysis of the process of interviewing. As the victim of countless such withering sessions himself, he must be particularly sensitive to the climate of these strange, temporal relationships.

"Interviewers and critics are the enemies of mystery," Hope thinks, "the indeterminacy that gives art life." Having allowed "this nervously aggressive intruder" into her home, Hope vacillates between wanting to throw her out or to please her, desperate, despite herself, "to communicate with this opaque, rather rejecting young woman."

With a pang of inadequacy, Hope notices that "Kathryn is looking around, disappointed by the plainness - the Redouté calendar such as anyone could buy in a book-and-card shop, the cabinets with their soiled handles, the appliances 20 years out of date, the fading photographic keepsakes - vacation snaps and official school photos of grandchildren tacked to the refrigerator door with magnets in the shape of vegetables. 'Would you like to see my studio?' Hope asks."

Updike is a master at tracing these subtle currents of desire and disappointment that swirl around people trapped in a marriage or a career or an interview that runs on too long. But these moving moments are cramped in a structure that doesn't give them much air to breathe.

"Seek My Face" may justly suffer the same dismissal from ordinary people who don't know they should be intimidated by so many works of modern art: "Why would anyone bother doing that?" Why sew clothing from pieces of meat, make an enormous bunny balloon out of steel, or sculpt a life-sized statue of Michael Jackson with his monkey? Why scramble through the riches of a woman's life and a nation's art history in a single belabored conversation?

It's oddly reassuring in the final pages to hear Hope turn down Kathryn's offer to read a transcript of her interview: "Oh, my goodness, no," she says. "I couldn't bear to read it. And I honestly can't picture who the reader of this article is going to be." Painful as it is to admit, I felt the same way.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1205/p1...

[Jack Stonecipher]

John Updike wrote the hell out of this good lord

[Eduardo Gameiro · Rating 4 out of 5]

The beautiful subtlety and slowness in the writing of Updike is truly mesmerizing in this novel, perhaps more so than in The Terrorist. I think we still need slow novels, ones that really analyze character and the important issues at hand.
Updike is like a concetual reminiscent of what Andrew Wyeth was for the world of the visual arts, challenging the undemanding, fast-paced, easily forgettable novels which became so often bestsellers, while using a traditional learned style of writing. Indeed, Updike as an art critic to a certain extent was what one would call a traditionalist. This latter fact shows in the novel, Updike, using the voice of Hope Chafetz, a character supposed to be a fictional representation of Lee Krasner, completely dismisses the work of Guy, her 2nd husband after Zack (Zack represents Jackson Pollock, who died tragically in a car accident at age 44), Guy is a representation of the pop-art movement (Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Wharol, Lichtenstein, etc.), he represents an American who's so obsessed with the thrown out cans and cigarette buds on New York's streets, that he seems a foreigner.
Though, perhaps not as important in the world of literature as Wyeth or Hockney in the world of painting, as even the most controversial writings like Alexander Theroux's "Essays on Primary Colors", seem to attempt to at least have something deeply personal and engaging to say, and writing is still not commonly created as a work of a studio with paid post-grads. The deeply-moving slowness, noteworthiness, and nonconformity with the riddles of society, prove novels like this are still deeply important in today's Protagorean age. Even if you don't agree with Updike's views and skill to write a novel where the main protagonist is Lee Krasner in disguise, Updike has nevertheless a lot to teach readers. Even if the word teach, as opposed to simply display, might be an hyperbole for the many who choose not to read him.
And one must be fair, Lee Krasner would probably have hated her representation on Updike's novel, though in the end the author explained the character's shortcomings well enough to hand Krasner's representation enough justice. It takes a certain amount of skill and courage to produce a character who's defective in a variety of ways, while representing a lady with an imperishable art legacy, so as to prevent sacrificing a work of fiction.

[Liza Rodimtseva · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's telling of the expectations we now have of mid-century literary giants that the blurb on the front of this recent Updike glowingly calls it "reasonably inclusive". John Updike was part of a generation of novelists who helped conflate the post-war decline of the American Dream with the decline of rugged American masculinity, at least in parts of the public imagination. Updike had never been the toxic misogynist that Philip Roth was, though his reputation as 'a man's novelist' remains. Late in his career, he sets out to rectify the imbalance by imagining the life of Lee Krasner, an important painter whose legacy was always overshadowed by the drama of her marriage to Jackson Pollock. In the reminiscences of the fictional Hope McCoy, Updike explores the way that even very great women have had to find ways to grow their legacies in the negative spaces around the immobile blocks of men's greatness, and bids a metaphorical goodbye, from the vantage point of the early 2000's, to a swiftly disappearing social order in which a woman's relationships with men are expected to consume and define her entire life's journey. It isn't a perfect work; Updike's voice is still Updike's voice, and Hope's memories may sometimes seem less like those of a real woman than the author's own recollections of being young and aspiring in the 1940's. A working knowledge of mid-century American art is practically a requirement to appreciate the dense pages of art theory, and there are a few blatant creative missteps - why does Hope's second husband have to be modeled on Andy Warhol? Warhol certainly never consigned anyone to motherhood - but the portrait of the unstable genius feels true, and if nothing else, Updike proves that he can turn the same lividly carnal eye on a man's body as novelists have notoriously done to women. More than anything though, this is a book than could only have been written by an old man; it is a reminiscence of a long life, fully lived, a portrait of someone who only has their memories to live with, soft with melancholy and shot through with still-vivid pain and anger, too clear-eyed to be accused of nostalgia.

[Jennifer Collins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though the novel takes place over the course of just a single day, it ranges from the 1930s on through the end of the twentieth century in scope. As an artist is interviewed about her life--her work, her marriages, her children, her artistic husbands, and her thoughts on gender, art, and life as a whole--the novel moves gracefully between a female artist's ever-detailed memories and the long conversation she's engaged in with a young writer and student of art. As the dynamic between the two women changes over the course of the interview, the philosophical questions of art and love are more and more a consideration between them, as are questions of how being female has affected the artist's abilities to simply be an artist. And, of course, the disconnect between the artist and the critic is often at the forefront, humorous and disturbing as it may be at varying points. At the center of the book, though, is passion, which is celebrated.

I can't speak to how accurate the discussions of New York's art scene may be, or to how accurately the interview characterizes the art scene in America at mid-century, though it discusses both at length--I can, however, say that the novel is wonderfully entertaining, and beautifully conceived and written. I'd say this is a must-read for anyone whose life revolves around the creation of any form of art, or the criticism/analysis of it. Though the direct subject is painting, many of the discussions apply just so much to writing, dance, and any form of passion that consumes time, energy, and love without, necessarily, regard for the people affected.

Absolutely recommended.

[J.D. Frailey · Rating 4 out of 5]

The novel, one of Updike’s last, takes place in a single day as a younger woman interviews a 78 year old artist, Hope, who had been married to a drunken genius artist named Zach; I wasn’t too far in when it became pretty clear the artist from whom Hope was widowed is a thinly disguised Jackson Pollack. The day-long interview provides a contextual art history course from 1940 through the 1970s, with abstract expressionism and its American spinoffs supplanting the European masters as top dog. I loved the Ed Harris movie on Pollack so I was all in.
I see the book rates only 3 stars and some change in goodreads, I once took a writing course in which we were given an assignment of describing for three or four detailed pages some simple object, I chose my toothbrush; In some ways the book is 276 pages of describing not just a toothbrush, but every object in someone’s bathroom. But I think Updike is such an amazingly gifted and talented writer, I loved it. It’s like Georgia Okeeffe said about her giant flowers, people don’t really take time to look at a flower, so I’m going to make the flowers so big they have to look 😉

[Jim Leckband · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here are the real-life equivalencies of the artists in "Seek My Face"

Zack McCoy - Jackson Pollock
Roger Merebien - Robert Motherwell
Bernie Nova - Barnett Newman
Phil Kaline - Franz Kline
Onno de Genoog - Willem de Kooning
Hochmann - Hans Hofmann
Korgi - Arshile Gorky
Seamus O'Rourke - Marc Rothko
Guy Holloway - Robert Rauschenberg/Jasper Johns/Andy Warhol/Robert Lichtenstein/Claus Oldenburg

Updike does a one-to-one correlation for the Abstract Expressionists. He seems to put every famous pop artist's style as one of Guy Holloway's phases.

The laziness of Updike in duplicating the artists was annoying to me, and I'm not entirely sure that Updike is the right one to take on the task of portraying the anti-feminism of these art movements and the times in the character of Hope. His strength as a writer was what saved the book from being hopeless in spite of the presence of Hope.

[Diana Ubilla · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had a really hard time with this book. IT DRAGGED ON and ON and ON. I really wanted to extract something from it. I suppose I did in terms of learning about post WWII artist culture. I found Hope annoying- she was angry with the interviewer one minute and then adoring and then vulgar- it was just too much and to sum it up in one word- pretentious. Nobody talks that way or that much about them self. Not that easily. I had to force myself to finish. I did give it a 2 start b/c I did feel like I learned something about american art history though it did not endear me to art in general.

[Zachary Карабашлиев · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pure joy for anyone who knows and/or wants to know anything about modern/postmodern art in America.

[Elsabe Retief · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, joy to read.
It seems the universe wants to tell me something. Coincidently I have read "The Paris wife" (Hemingway seen from the perspective of his first marraige.). Before that "The woman" about the wives of Frank Lloyd Wright. Now John Updike did a tremendous job intertwining truth and fiction to elucidate 2 great artist perceived from a female partner's perspective. I have enjoyed the movie by Madonna - "W.E." about Wallace Simpson's take on the abdication of Edward and their lives in the wake of that. To top that, the movie "Hemingway and Gellhorn" was brilliant to further my trip on great men from up close.
As much as history bores me, I am addicted to the stories of people, their feelings and relationships. Written with delicate passion, painted on such patient canvasses.

[Casie · Rating 5 out of 5]

An older woman being interviewed about her life as an artist recounts her liaisons with thinly veiled fictional men who are in fact recognizably famous artists. A history lesson and an intimate portrait of personal inhibitions and revelations over the latter half of a turbulent century. Most pointedly, I have to say that there exist many good stories, but it's refreshing to delve into genuinely good literature again...voluntarily.

[Ian Gillies · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before John Updike became one of America's preeminent writers, he wanted to be an illustrator and cartoonist. He even studied at an art institute in England for a few years after graduating from Harvard before deciding that he did not have the talent of his fellow students. His interest in the visual is deeply entwined with his writing style. The man has an amazing eye for detail. It feels to the reader that his writing process is to hold an image in his mind's eye and faithfully transpose that picture into words on a page. The reader can dip into almost any page of Seek My Face and find passages like this; "When she and Jerry bought the place, a collapsing, disused cow barn was connected to the kitchen by means of roofed storage space filled with 10 gallon milk cans and other apparatus for the defunct dairy operation: this long low space now holds the tools of lawn and bed care...Even the little implements of flower gardening - trowels, scratchers, asparagus forks, hand clippers, wire peony supports always maddeningly tangled like Chinese puzzles...The musty odor of last year's fertilizers - Milorganite, Holly-Tone - and bags of buckwheat-hull mulch fills this long, unheated space with a distilled essence of earth under cultivation, the scent of a season ahead but still out of reach." Standing on its own, that passage and many others might seem a jumble of unnecessary detail. I confess, I had moments when it seemed so to me. But taking a step back, within the flow of the story, each of these imagined scenes builds a certain feel or inflection to the story line. In effect, Updike uses his descriptive power to add painterly highlights to the story. Seek My Face is about many things but one of its big subjects is an exploration of the American modern art scene of the decades from the 1940s to the 1980s. Updike's ability to capture the look of a scene, the texture, color and detail of a time, a place or an experience, is fit to that subject matter. The story is framed as a day long interview between Hope Chafetz, a painter in her own right, and Katheryn D'Angelo, an essayist with an interest in art history. (There is a bit of "My Dinner With Andre" feel to the novel.) Hope had been married to two of the most influential artists of the time and, later in life, to a successful art dealer. Her unparalleled insight into the ideas and personalities that shaped the culture and the art of that era flow out naturally into the story, half in her long monologues and half in her interior reflections on the truths ans self deceptions contained in those monologues. Hope is candid and usually clear eyed about her times, explaining the idealism of the New York art community in the age of post-war mainstream conformity, the wicked chauvinism, the emerging age of celebrity and the explosion of freedoms and cultural shifts in mid century America. This is also a book about family, aging and loss and cultural clash. It works at many levels and is a pleasure to read, if you relax and accept Updike's warm embrace of the particular and the intimacy of day to day life. Updike's curiosity, reach and rich, textured style is impressive. I had the sense that I was in the hands of a great master.

[Shelley Callico · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.75/5

I wanted to like this book because John Updike is my husband's favorite author. Updike is a master linguist and can write the hell out of a page-long sentence. The book is about a young writer who travels out to the Vermont Coast to interview Hope, an aging artist who was the ex-wife of several influential and famous artists. it is basically a loosely biographical portrait of Jason Pollak and other pop artists. I really didn't like either of the characters: Hope was not likable and didn't have any kind of character arc; nor the younger writer who just wanted to ask questions about Hope's sex life and the sexual orientation of her husbands. I was annoyed at both of them for most of the book which takes place in a single day. I also wanted something to happen...really anything...which never happens. it just drags on and on. I wanted this book to be a magazine article or an essay. Should have been at least 100 pages shorter. It also has no chapters at all. None. I have read a few other John Updike books. I know that his books have an inordinate amount of detail and also have a tremendous amout of gratuitous sex and misogynistic treatment of women. This one has been my least favorite.

[Tim O'Leary · Rating 4 out of 5]

After graduation with honors from Harvard, Updike furthered his considerable love for art at The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford. Formally schooled, then, like myself a B.F.A. considerably "less formal" at a major midwestern college earning, not only a fine arts degree, but the grade of 4.5 (forever after the highest university grade possible being a 4.0) for drawing. And no less a huge fan of modern art concentrating, like Updike, in graphic design. Field trips to art museums in Detroit and Chicago and Washington, D.C. were religious undertakings where such monumental works were experienced, as they should be; overwhelmingly close, in their massive, reverberating intensity and scale. Updike's art school's founders honored John Ruskin, who had an equally prolific creative career; a leading poet, writer, accomplished watercolor artist (great self-portrait), a sought-after lecturer, was an outspoken critic of art and architecture, and literature, and was therefore recognized as one of the most influental thinkers of the Victorian Age. Being an only child, Ruskin was educated at home owing his formative sensitivities to his mother's Evangelical Christian upbringing, embracing the teachings of the Bible through his lifelong adherence to, and campaigns for, social causes. Sound familiar? Updike's kindred spirit. And notably, also, a particular champion of J.M.W. Turner's romanticist paintings extolling the truth as could only be found as an extension of nature. Violent mariners scenes including the infamous slaveship "Zong" (a pivotal abolitionist masterpiece) seen in 1781 casting half its chained human cargo into the turbulent, storm-tossed Caribbean--missing Jamaica by 300 miles due to the a breakdown in the crew's command structure and ineptitude--where 100-200 souls perished. Court hearings would reveal that the crew contracted by a Liverpool slaving syndicate was seeking to cut their losses, due to a shortage of water, presumably then the ship's owners cashing-in on a fraudulant insurance claim of just 30 pounds of British Sterling per head (in 1800 A.D. worth $120). Turner, in addition, created some of the earliest "abstractionist" forms in his seascapes. Turner thematically paired the painting in his 1840 exhibit at the Royal Academy of Arts with his previously unpublished and unfinished poem (1812) in this extract so ending; "Declare the Typhon's coming. Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard the dead and dying--ne're heed their chains Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope! Where is thy market now?" A roman a clef, Updike's fictionalized modern art essay masquerading as a day-long interview is inspired by the life of Jackson Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, who in the story is narrated by her likeness so named...wait for it...Hope. No less related, Ruskin also authored five volumes of "Modern Painters" over a 17-year period (1843-1860) a period when Turner was Ruskin's artistic hero, whom he was convinced was the "painter and poet of the day" the period's champion of truth, who had no qualms toppling established painters and their time-honored conventions, bringing "fresh eyes" of the period's young unknown rebels to light. To quote "John Ruskin and the National Gallery": "His style was very lyrical, conjuring the works of art before his readers' eyes, and was well received in an age when the possibilities of reproductive illustration were limited and there were few public art galleries." I like this. Ruskin's Turner is Updike's Pollock. A mirror overlay of Updike's detail-laden prose, capturing the pastiche of Modern Art's postwar debut in the New York School. The incredible tribal virility of the artists (some genuine names revealed, other's having to be quessed at) and their uniquely American audacity giving form to creation in the moment, the expression of the self, male-dominated (despite sexual ambiguities), and often just as much contrarily forced to extremes in push-and-pull, shadow-and-light, color field-and-space, whereby creative genius reveals itself (albeit ever-so-flawed). And fleeting. Lovingly curated in what can only be Updike's autobiographical passion, this is his last novel intimately shared and never more ironically so than through a "painfully revealing" female perspective. To me, at least, convincingly so which has to be incredibly challenging knowing Updike's reputation for exceedingly graphic sexual fixation (read that: fetishism and sexism by objectification). Yet still giving voice to wives whose careers, though talented themselves as artists enough in every respect, conceded to supporting their husbands' only to be ultimately divorced and discarded. Treated as tag-alongs to the greats. Mere footnotes. Updike, in his title reference from Psalm 27:8 "Seek My Face" is a direct call to action; to pay homage where it has been long ignored and overdue. The protagonist finally admonishes her interviewer/guest, which for most of the day--her day given generously--she dismisses as being obsessed with sex-details which are private--Updike unashamedly echoing his critics--and with the constant whirring of her invasive tape recorder and stacks of laser-printed sheets of questions, she's regarded no less as an intruder--Hope closes by telling her to "Go and have it, dear. Have your life. Don't hang back. Don't let any man take it from you." This is a book made more remarkable for anyone who loves literature in a rare crossover to visual art. Word for word, brush stroke for brush stroke, Updike is it. The Master.

[Emil · Rating 3 out of 5]

random bok, läste 50 sidor. Vad tycks om den här meningen: "The Germantown house became overgrown in Grandmother's lonely last years, its thick sandstone walls eaten to the second-story windowsills by gloomy flourishing shrubbery, hydrangea and holly and a smoke tree whose branches broke in every ice storm or wet snow, the whitewash flaking and the pointing falling out in brittle long crumbs lost down among the stems of peonies, the roots of the holly."

[Nils · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite Updike. Well-written and thought-provoking, of course, but it failed to grab me and pull me in like much of his other work does. Gets a little lost in the background subject matter (contemporary/modern art) and in so doing made the characters a little less accessible and engaging for me.

[John]

John Updike: ethics and aesthetics of adultery
This review looks at the following novels by John Updike: Marry Me, The Poorhouse Fair, The Centaur, The Complete Bech, The Maples Stories, Brazil, A Month of Sundays, In the Beauty of the Lilies, Seek My Face and a few of the essays in the collections Hugging the Shore and Odd Jobs.
John Updike’s fiction is noted for its exploration of adulterous, though conventional, heterosexual relationships. Along with those other literary ‘titans’ and male-point-of-view novelists, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, he dominated mid-late 20th century American literature. It is only relatively recently that all of these writers’ varying degrees of misogyny or chauvinism has been called to account, although all three are still read and much of the how or the style of what they wrote is still intriguing. In the case of Updike his Flaubertian dedication to the craft of writing is still honoured, and maybe also there is something Flaubertian in his elaboration of adultery as a literary theme.
The first thing that strikes the reader of some of the early novels dealing with this theme, like The Centaur or Marry Me, is that Updike is very far from pursuing any kind of romantic treatment of adultery. Even in the later somewhat romantic novel Brazil, which teasingly reinterprets the classic romantic myth of Tristram and Isolde in its two young lovers Tristao and Isabel, we find they are fitfully unfaithful (and, at the end, are separated by death.) Updike’s anti-romanticism directs his criticism of other writers like Hemingway:
Hemingway’s heroes make love without baring their bottoms, and the women as well as the men are falsified by a romantic severity, and exemption from odours and awkwardness that [Edmund] Wilson, with the dogged selfless honesty of a bookworm, presses his own nose, and ours, into such solemn satisfaction. Hugging the Shore 1984: 198
In associating himself with Edmund Wilson’s approach to sex (in his novel Hecate Country), Updike is declaring himself by inclination anti-romantic. Truth to human life when exploring extra-marital sex is, for Updike, to be truthful to underlining the primary role of carnal instinctiveness in it. Adultery, betrayal, and the pursuit of sexual ecstasy are what Updike calls ‘that true life, the life of ecstasy and the spirits’ (Brazil 54).
So the romantic is displaced by amour in Updike’s adulterous world, a world in which we experience a detailed, refined, literary erotic of fleshed, naked, cheating bodies. But ‘the spirits’ referred to at the end of this quote from Brazil indicates, also, that for Updike the pursuit of sexual ecstasy provokes in his characters spiritual reflections on guilt and questions of right and wrong. Sexual passion brings in its wake knowledgeability -much like Adam and Eve discovering an awareness of sin and shame at their nakedness.
There is an aesthetic underpinning of this as well, seen across Updike’s novels, in which the stimulation of the flesh by desire, the material basis of human sexuality, provokes considerations of form, of representation. In his essays on Vargas Llosa and Saul Bellow Updike underlines how the two writers whilst writing about sex over-stress the materiality of the body - the spiritless fleshliness of flesh. Llosa’s In Praise of the Stepmother’s exploring its sexual theme to rigorous, materialist extremes, brings the reader up against the possible limits of his or her own commitment to sensuality. (Odd Jobs: 723). Similarly, in regard to Bellow’s Dean’s December Updike writes:
And what Bellow does with human bodies! Visually seizing upon lumps of fat and hollows of bone and ridges of gristle no one has ever put into words before, he makes of each body a kind of physical myth, a flesh-and-blood ideogram. (Hugging the Shore 260)
In contrast, the aesthetic and ethical are simultaneous dimensions of sexual desire in Updike’s adultery novels. This is seen in, for example, Seek My Face where the elderly famous artist Hope Chafetz (associated with a Jackson Pollock-like figure) becomes excited by the body of her young interviewer. She finds herself particularly fascinated by the septum of the young woman’s nose in which she ‘glimpses’ the ‘live creatureliness [that] brings the girl’s other features up into a feral glory’ (188). In The Poorhouse Fair Updike again focuses on the septum, this time of the dead flesh of the lying-in-state patriarchal figure of Mendelssohn:
Perfectly preserved his blind lids stretch above the crumbled smile. The skin that life has fled is calm as marble. Can we believe, who have seen his vital nostrils flare expressively, revealing in lifting the flaming septum, the secret wall red with pride within, that there is no resurrection? That bright bit of flesh; where would such a thing have gone? (The Poorhouse Fair 155)
There is much direct discussion about right and wrong, about religion and doubt(ers) in Updike’s novels. The advice that Dreaver, the Presbyterian moderator in In the Beauty of the Lilies, gives to the doubt-ridden minister Clarence is that The soul needs something extra, a place outside of matter where it can stand (79). But Updike does not mean by this some type of Platonic spirit realm but rather an accepting of the body as a means to, or an element in, the experience of ensoulment. So, early in this novel Updike describes how Clarence’s doubts coincide with a loss of a proportionate sense of things:
Without Biblical blessing the physical universe became sheerly horrible and disgusting. All fleshly acts became vile, rather than merely some. The reality of men slaying lambs and cattle, fish and fowl to sustain their own bodies took on an aspect of grisly comedy – the blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem. (7)
Clarence is a sympathetic figure because in Updike’s view a loss of faith leads to questioning and reflection on petrifying morals, and when it’s stimulated by passion so much the better. This is clearly, almost baldly, stated in the more lightly Doubting Thomas figure of Masefield, a lusty priest (having parallels with Greene’s similarly ethically ambiguous ‘whiskey priests’) in A Month of Sundays.
Ethicality is not, then, found abstractly outside of materiality, of the flesh, of ecstasy or the mundane. This is personified in The Poorhouse Fair, by the contrasting figures of Hook, the irascible elderly incumbent of the old people’s home, and Connor, the Prefect/administrator who takes over the reins after Mendelssohn. Connor is shown to be a humanist and prone to making mistakes – he is a very human figure (much like the self-deprecating George Caldwell in The Centaur). Sceptical, Connor likens the abstract idea of God to ‘a hollow noun’ (99), he is a religion-doubting figure in contrast to the religious and strongly opinionated, censorious Hook. Hook’s complaining and rebelliousness against the post-Mendelsohn order at the home incites the other residents to ‘stone’ Connor at the fair. But through this experience of pain and ridicule Connor is shown attaining spiritual knowledge:
The shock of the incident this afternoon had ebbed enough for him to dare open the door which he had slammed on the fresh memory. A monster of embarrassment, all membrane, sprang out and embraced him. The emotion clung to him in disgusting glutinous webs, as if he were being born and fully conscious. (135)
But, for Hook, in contrast, ‘Providence strikes. Virtue is a solid thing, as firm and workable as wood’ – he is a character of habit who cannot reflect and therefore cannot change. (98)
When Updike’s Couples was published he became associated with the permissive ‘swinging’ Sixties. But his novels of adultery are not peopled by randy, wife-swopping, thoughtless ‘swingers’. In the novel Marry Me (ironically, I think, subtitled ‘A Romance’) Updike explores how adultery and unfaithfulness, makes Jerry and Sally extremely conscious of right and wrong – they are continually making choices about whether or not to continue their affair. At one point in the novel Updike keenly compares their position of fevered moral questioning to ‘the only place where there is no choice is in paradise’ (167). Updike consciously distanced himself from the commodified, tread-mill of Sixties sexual liberation, seen in his essay on Vargas Llosa:
Without a surrounding society to defy, adulterous passion often wilts, and a daring elopement sinks into ranch-house funk of socially approved marriage. Sixties-style sexuality, with its hot tubs and bustling crash pads, was on to something; promiscuity, at least until it turns into a quasi-religious, obligatory form of exercise, suits our interior multiplicity. (Odd Jobs 725)
Against mindless sex Updike also makes a more elaborate claim that there is to be found a kind of resurrectionary force derived in the always risky ‘commitment’ to committing adultery. In A Month of Sundays the over-sexed Thomas Masefield may be something of a unreliable narrator in his diaries that dominate the narrative, but I don’t think Updike is being ironical when Masefield makes the following theological point about adultery:
Adultery, my friends, is our inherent condition: ‘Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart’. But who that has eyes to see cannot so lust? Was not the First Divine Commandment received by human ears, ‘Be fruitful and multiply’? Adultery is not a choice to be avoided; it is a circumstance to be embraced. (44-45)
(See, also, how this Biblical quotation ‘parches’ Clarence’s throat when he delivers it in his sermon in In the Beauty of Lilies 52) Masefield’s reflections on adultery baldly address theological questions that are usually more subtly treated in the early novels like Marry Me or The Centaur. It is well-known that later in life Updike took up Barth’s theology, and the idea of ‘sympathy’ as the basis of faith. I don’t think it is a coincidence that this interest might be related to how Barth faced a witch-hunt by the Church when his long-standing extra-marital relationship came to light. So, Masefield ruminates:
Dear Tillich, that great amorous jellyfish, whose faith was a recession of beyond with thee two flecks in one or another pane: a sense of the word as ‘theonomous’, and a sense of something ‘unconditional’ within the mind. Kant’s saving ledge pared finer than a fingernail. Better Barth, who gives us opacity triumphant, and bids us adore; we do adore, what we also live in the world is its residue of resistance – these mortal walls that hold us to this solitude, the woman who resists being rolled over, who is herself. (192)
This Barthian-type attitude is also often accompanied by the adoption of animistic/Lawrentian tropes in Updike’s novels. In the epigram to The Centaur Barth is quoted by Updike:
Heaven is the creation inconceivable to man, earth the creation conceivable to him. He himself is the creature on the boundary between heaven and earth.
This novel is page-by-page infused with references to the complex- ambiguous figures of classical mythology. And so at school George Caldwell’s son is conscious of being ‘the petty receptacle of a myth’ that is spun around his late father. Early in the novel George is seen flirting with Vera Hummell in the school changing rooms where she likens him to a centaur, and he reflects that ‘His nether half, an imperfect servant of his will, preened itself’ (25).
Animism also crops up in the Maples stories. We find Richard Maples out one early morning in open countryside. Taking the wilderness as an opportunity:
Richard took off his clothes, all; he sat on a rough worm rock. The pose of thinker palled. He stood and at the water’s edge became a prophet, a Baptist; ripples of light reflected from the water onto his legs. He yearned to do something transcendent, something obscene… (104)
Animism informs Updike’s regular literary alternative spins on physics when describing the context of his characters’ actions. In the Maples stories Richard takes a sceptical stance on arguments about the world based on Newtonian and Einsteinian physics (135-6). And in the late novel, Villages, Updike has the intuitively pragmatic Owen call the mathematical logic of Frege and Russell ‘creepy’ (82). Similarly, in Seek My Face a contrast is found between the ‘soul’s expectations and bottomless appetite to the measured world of science and matter’ (65). But, of course, it is really human sexual agency in Updike’s fictional world that is the prime shaper of the human very earthly experience of time and space - seen in A Month of Sundays where sexual attraction is described as something that ‘curves space and time’ (125). And in Marry Me we find:
The world is composed of what we think it is; what we expect tends to happen; and what we expect is really what we desire. As a negative wills a print, she had willed Sally. 133
(Updike, though, will give physical determinants of human behaviour its due – for example, in Brazil, where we find the henchmen’s:
…two guns had, like pencils, redrawn the space of the room, reducing the finitude of possibilities to a few shallow tunnels of warped choice. Their spirits had all become very thin, walking the taut wires of the situation. (63)
Similarly, in the short story ‘Unstuck’, the snow-bound Mark hears his wife’s words ‘”If you are young” come to him faint and late, as if, because of the warping after-effect of the storm sound crossed the street from her side against the grain.’
I have dug these rather abstractly-stated ideas out of a range of Updike’s singular (i.e. not the series of ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom novels) novels. But I read them in the sway of Updike’s compelling literary prose. Yes, Updike always wrote ‘like a man’s man’, he was a writer of his time and place (reacting against the ingrained moral conservatism of 50s America – no small thing to do), and very few people now read him because the position he puts the reader into identifying with is, on the whole, probably politically incorrect. But the prose remains, despite so much of its content and positioning of the reader, and one cannot help but admire it for the way it conveys Updike’s ideas, how it makes us reexperience our understanding of human relationships in provoking, original, and always interesting ways. Updike revels in the detail, the minutiae of the human world and its physical – generally suburban America - and natural contexts, so apparently effortlessly and yet what must have been the result of a concentrated Flaubertian-dedication to the production of literary prose.
Updike regularly refers to the impressionists and other artists when describing moods, places, skies and nature. It is said that he wanted to be a painter, and his prose is often deeply pointillist in its detail. But there is also an unabashed emotive-impressionist colouring to this detail. Updike might be described as a writer in the genre of realism because his detailed prose creates mood, contextualizes the ‘action’ and underwrites our identification with his particular ‘truths to life’. But Updike is not a realist, and rejected a realist conception of ‘representation’, as is seen in the aesthetic discussions n Seek My Face:
This so-called ‘aesthetic’, he stated in his rather, high, affected voice, honed on years of education, Stanford and Columbia and with some English vowels picked up from a post-grad year in Oxford, concentrating not in art but in philosophy, back to the Greeks, back to ontology, ‘is merely the sensuous aspect of the world – it is not the end of art but a means, a means for egging at, let’s call it, the infinite background of feeling in order to condense it into an object of perception, These objects of perception are basically relational structures, which obliterate the need for representation.’ (Seek My Face 44)
In all probability Updike’s literary legacy will not be as a writer concerned with adultery in late 20th century America, but as one of the great writers of novelistic prose. In the Bech novellas Updike has his alter-ego, the writer Bech, consciously reflect on the process and aesthetics of writing and of being a writer. When Bech states that ‘actuality is a running impoverishment of possibility’ (The Complete Henry Bech 58) it is hard not to think that Updike is, glancingly, referring to Saul Bellow’s concern with ‘actuality’ and with all de-spirted conceptions of reality. Bech’s thinking:
[…]as Valery had predicted, did not come neatly, in chiming packets of language, but as slithering, overlapping sensations, micro-organisms of thought setting up in sum a panicked seat on Bech’s palms and a palpable nausea behind his belt. (89).

[Paul Frandano · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel both admired and detested, lauded and reviled, viewed as gripping and bloodless, John Updike's Seek My Face is, in my undistinguished opinion, many things, most of them favorable: entertaining, instructive, beautifully lapidary in its myriad descriptions and startling similies, and a complex portrait of a woman, whose story, told as it unfolds, is clearly the work of an author who began as a visual artist, turned to writing, and has spent a great deal of time standing in front of, and making sense of, paintings. And as Updike observes in a brief introductory comment, he's leaned fairly heavily on books that tell the stories of (mostly) men and (only a few) women who embodied the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the United States. Those stories are fascinating, as fascinating as I found  this novel. Most of the names have been changed, of course, but glossaries are available all over the internet, so readers won't have to puzzle long over "Which one of these is DeKooning? Motherwell? Rothko?" etc.

The format Updike has chosen is roman a clef centered on Zach McCoy, whose story unmistakably  resembles that of Jackson Pollock in most particulars, as told by Hope Chafetz--a younger version of Pollock's widow, Lee Krasner, herself a significant painter--78, married thrice and outliving her last husband--in a day-long interview with Kathryn, a well-prepared netzine writer. Via Hope, Updike creates an account of the turn from Europe to America - and specifically New York City - as the global capital of painting in the late 1940s  and 1950s, focusing on the passionate, difference-seeking pioneers of Abstract Expressionism, their immediate Cubist, Surrealist, and Regionalist forebears, and, as the movement of stark, serious, humorless abstraction waned, those who followed, again recalled by Hope, whose second husband is a composite of Andy Warhol and Robert Rausenberg, into
Pop and Op Art.

As Hope responds to familiar questions about McCoy's artistic evolution, her tempestuous marriage to McCoy, and other aspects of a long life in art, Updike interweaves interior flashbacks to events Hope often choses to conceal rather than reveal, which fill in important narrative details that are the products of imperfect memory, which decays and shades into personal, often self-serving, recollection of what was or only might have been. This is all related in beautiful, Updikean prose embedded in paragraphs of Proustian length, words that paint pictures, coaxing us into what Updike's retina captures: images of seasonal change, advancing age, time's effect on material household objects, experiments with color and development of new technique, the saloons and salons in which the tight circle of artists interact, each desperate for a breakout moment. Hope's reveries are like a plate of Proutian madeleines that one by one prompt discursive reveries, washed down by tea.

This being Updike, theological questions invariably come up, primarily from Hope, raised in a Quaker family, approaching her time horizon, arthritic, still vigorously independent, but often reflecting on events like one of Updike's tormented Protestants. What might "the end" consist of, apart from Hope's characterization of "Performance Art"? "Life is the performance. Art is what outlives life." Lamenting the cultural slide into new forms of decadence, she sees art as redemptive, as mission-directed to avoid decadence, "heartfelt." "It has to be about us, just a skin away from being nothing. Not nothing, perhaps...but a tumbling back into the radiance."

At the same time, Updike, through Hope's speeches and thoughts--and despite the paradox of her name--sprinkles a kind of bitter departing-generational anger throughout the book, contemplating this young interloping Kathryn as an emblem of her contemporary, decadent generation, with her youthful attractiveness and attire, her sense of ease, of promise, of a long life yet to live, of her seeming presumption to know more about McCoy and the demons that drove him than Hope, who lived with him and motivated him.

I thoroughly enjoyed Updike's sly portrait of a generation of innovators, brought together in the lofts and studios of the artistic capital of America, and how they transformed both art and the standing of American artists in the world. Moreover, Updike reignited my interest in the revolution they wrought and in his own books on looking at pictures, led me to return to Naifeh and Smith's Pollock biography and Hughes' Shock of the New, and fixed in me a determination to travel back to the Museum of Modern Art for a fourth visit in as many decades. It's not for every taste, but Seek My Face will almost certainly please lovers of modern art and of beautiful, provocative writing.

[Anne Reynolds · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book at the same time I was reading an art history book, Katy Hessel's History of Art Without Men, and it was a good companion. The premise here is that a young woman journalist is interviewing a septuagenarian woman artist who had been a part of the art scene in New York during the fifties - seventies, married to two impactful artists of the time. It's written with no breaks in chapters, one long narrative that weaves from the interview to the older woman's reminiscences of her life.

It's got a lot of interesting musings on aging, and what it means to be an artist, and a wife, and the wife of an artist. But it's also got ... just a lot. Many details and descriptions.

[Neil Randall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written in 2002, Seek My Face is perhaps a lesser known Updike novel, but a nonetheless beautiful example of the storytelling art. Structured in the form of a two-way discourse, an interview between Hope Chafetz, the fictional ex-wife of not one but two major 20th century artists (and echoes of Pollock, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Pop Art and the Factory resound throughout the book) and Kathryn, an ambitious young New York journalist with strong views on the ground-breaking era and artwork, and, in particular, the renowned artists her interviewee inspired, cohabited with, and even had children by. Hope's sometimes, rueful, bittersweet yet always colourful reflections often distance the artist from the myth surrounding him (to Kathryn's obvious displeasure, for she sees these monolithic figures as untouchable geniuses) providing a fascinating commentary on artistic processes and techniques which have since become ingrained in the public consciousness - Pollock's abstract expressionism, splashing canvases with paint, Warhol's silk screen prints - as much as they do the singular talents of the artists themselves.

By the end of the interview/book, Hope, now a lonely old woman in her late seventies, to a degree abandoned by her own children, is perhaps struck by how much of herself she gave to these men, how much she sacrificed - especially in relation to her own neglected artistic work - and how little she got in return.

Seek My Face is a highly original and engaging novel, full of the sumptuous language and effortless observational flourishes one would associate with Updike at his finest. Highly Recommended.

[Michael Morow · Rating 5 out of 5]

A shrewd, intimate, and measured telling of the story of the abstract impressionist movement. The main character, a member of the movement, is only superficially based on Lee Krasner. Her interviewer, in this 2 character one day novel, a young woman from NYC & a generation Xer, is also finely portrayed with much insight for a writer 2 generations removed. The main character's first husband however is obviously based on Jackson Pollack, and this seems Updike's occasion to say a lot more about him and more candidly than in his art essay books. It works. Scenery and atmosphere also very finely rendered. If you are interested at all in American century 20 art, this will be a fast read.

It is a little Faulnerian in the telling, sentences which run on for half a page plus. As usual jam packed with the minutia and detritus of our time, another social record from John U.

The main character is a tad demeaned by patented Updike sexual disclosure, his unshakable authorial fetish. I like Updike and have learned to live with it. The disclosure, during the interview, is also out of character for Updike's Pennslyvania, Quaker raised artist and realistically would not have occurred in the somewhat charged atmosphere of mutual suspicion. The old boy just could never help himself. It is like splatting a master painting with ink, and it makes it difficult to defend Updike's otherwise high artistry.

At end, a fine conclusion wherein the artist recollects her Quaker father, goes far to raise the bar with this novel. Excise about 4 sentences and this one is about as good as it gets.

[Andrijana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Da bi se jedan segment ove knjige potpuno shvatio potrebno je da budete upućeni u istoriju posleratnog slikarstva u Americi, takođe da ste zaljubljenik u slikarstvo, da se bar malo razumete u tehnike slikanja, a i da volite rasprave o umetničkim delima.
Delo je na interesantan način komponovno, pored slikarstva obrađene su i mnoge životne teme, koje su meni lično bile interesantnije.
Apdajkov stil pisanja je savršen. Zbog stila imam želju da pročitam još neku njegovu knjigu, neku sa meni bliskijom temom.

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some of the most beautiful, deeply sexist writing I've read in a long time.

Updike seems more interested in fantasizing about what being the wife of a famous artist is like than actually engaging with the theories of art and creativity that are the ostensible point of the book. The tension between the journalist and the artist is entirely focused on two different but equally dated strains/caricatures of feminism that seemed to lead nowhere except to weird universalist claims about the nature of being a woman. I'd hope the premise would lead to a kind of Jamesian reversal--a journalistic violation of privacy in the name of truth, an artistic fabrication that defends against public intrusion, etc., etc.--but nothing that interesting ever happens. Maybe art is the only religion we have left though, you know?

On the other hand, I do love how hyperrealist and visceral (in the grossest sense of the word) his descriptions of the sensory world are.

[Colette · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mixed about this one. I enjoyed the 'historical fiction' aspect of it, and the perspective it provided on the 20th century art world. However, I didn't find the main character believable, and was especially annoyed by all of the little personal details that implied she was a rather stereotypical old woman (set in her ways, sticks to a routine, loves peace and quiet, doesn't like skinny modern girls from the city, blah, blah, blah). And maybe there was no other way to tell this story, but I found the interview pretty contrived, and was really irritated by the constant reminders that the woman kept telling details of her life despite intending to be quiet and stoic (again, stereotypical old woman qualities). The writing was nice, though, and moved fairly seamlessly between interview and inner thoughts, past and present. So I'm going to give another Updike novel a chance.

[Dorothy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book comprises one day in the life of an aging artist as she is interviewed by a journalist about her role in Postwar American Art. She had been married to 2 major artista as well as being known in her own right. The dialogue moves backwards and forwards over her life and work and htat of her contemporaries and reads less like a linear novel than a work of art it itself as it describes the development of abstract art and the ideas which fuelled it. The book is layered much as an artist layers paint on a canvas. Ultimately I felt that perhaps some editing may have been in order as towards the end nothing fresh was added and I felt I had already 'got the picture'.