Of the Farm

by John Updike

“A small masterpiece . . . With Of the Farm , John Updike has achieved a sureness of touch, a suppleness of style, and a subtlety of vision that is gained by few writers of fi ction.”— The New York Times

In this short novel, Joey Robinson, a thirty-five-year-old New Yorker, describes a visit he makes, with his second wife and eleven-year-old stepson, to the Pennsylvania farm where he grew up and where his aging mother now lives alone. For three days, a quartet of voices explores the air, making confessions, seeking alignments, quarreling, pleading, and pardoning. They are not entirely alone: ghosts (fathers, lovers, children) press upon them, as do phantoms from the near future (nurses, lawyers, land developers). Of the Farm concerns the places people choose to live their lives, and the strategies they use to stand their ground.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, American, Novels, Literature, Literary Fiction, American Fiction

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

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

[Vit Babenco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of the Farm is a simple story… Deceivingly too simple…
There are places we’ve spent our childhood in… Places of our memory… The farm of the novelette is such a place…

We turned off the Turnpike onto a macadam highway, then off the macadam onto a pink dirt road. We went up a sharp little rise and there, on the level crest where Schoelkopf’s weathered mailbox stood knee-deep in honeysuckle and poison ivy, its flopped lid like a hat being tipped, my wife first saw the farm. Apprehensively she leaned forward beside me and her son’s elbow heavily touched my shoulder from behind. The familiar buildings waited on the far rise, across the concave green meadow. “That’s our barn,” I said. “My mother finally had them tear down a big overhang for hay she always thought was ugly. The house is beyond. The meadow is ours. Schoelkopf’s land ends with this line of sumacs.” We rattled down the slope of road, eroded to its bones of sandstone, that ushered in our land.

Four people of different ages: the man, his mother, his second wife and his stepson… Their relations may seem simple and their relations may seem complicated… In real life relationships are always ambivalent…
To the man the visit is filled with the recollections of his past… To the woman and her son the visit is full of new impressions…

Walking with that perhaps ironical slowness, my mother led us into the house. Since my first return from college nearly twenty years ago, my homecomings had tapered to the moment that now again was upon me; my feet touched the abrasive sandstone sill of our back porch while the dogs with joyful savagery yapped in the pen next to the crippled privet bush once gored by a runaway bull that my grandmother had tamed with an apron. It had happened the first summer we lived on the farm.

There are places we live in… And there are places we’ve forsaken for good.

[Glenn Sumi · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is John Updike's fourth novel and, alas, not one of his best.

It was published in 1965, at a time when Updike was being hailed as the next great American writer after works like Rabbit, Run (1960) and Pigeon Feathers (1962) and dozens of pieces in The New Yorker. He and Alfred A. Knopf probably felt they could publish his grocery lists to glowing reviews.

Of The Farm began as a short story and should have remained one. Updike would revisit this setting a few times in more economical tales like 1990's "A Sandstone Farmhouse," collected in The Afterlife.

Thirty-five-year-old New Yorker Joey brings his second wife and her precocious young son to visit his cantankerous, ailing mother on her Pennsylvania farm.

Not much happens: Joey plows the field, there's a shopping trip, his mom says nasty things to everyone and breaks some very symbolic plates.

The rural setting gives Updike free rein to write lots about nature: plants, earth, animals. Clouds gather ominously before the inevitable storm.

The setting also allows Updike to show the uprooting of old grievances: about Joey's first wife, the recent death of his unhappy father, his abandoned literary goals.

The novel is brief - about 175 pages – but impenetrable, densely poetic and overwritten.

[SARAH · Rating 4 out of 5]

داستانی بی اندازه خواندنی......داستان مردی به نام جوئی که با پگی همسر جدیدش و ریچارد پسر همسرش تصمیم به بازدید از مزرعه‌مادری و مادرش در یک اخر هفته ...پر تنش می گیرند....داستانی پر از توصیف درخشان،توصیفاتی قوی و‌خواندنی ودر خدمت داستان ....انقدر این جزییات دلنشین و مناسب بوده ،...اپدایک استاد تصویر سازی است......شخصیت ها انقدر شفاف و قابل درک ان که شما میتونید صدای نفس هاشون رو از لابلای صفحات داستان حس کنید....تلاش این چهار نفر برای درک هم و نزدیک شدن..... فراز و فرود دیالوگ ها ،جدل ها ی واقع گرایانه شخصیت ها...... فکر کنم باز هم برم سراغ اپدایک.....داره ازش خوشم میاید،از دوستی که ایدایک رو بهم معرفی کرد کمال سپاس رو‌دارم.....:):) دوستان بفرمایید یه داستان ناب و خوب

[Sepehr Omidvaar · Rating 4 out of 5]

"این همه دوا و درمون، فقط برای طولانی‌تر کردن درد و رنج ما"

آپدایک از دل یک سفر به ظاهر ساده(بازگشت به زیستگاه) تجربه‌ای از کاوش در روح چهار کاراکتر داستانش، گذشته و روابط پیچیده‌شان بیرون می‌کشد.
در اوج سادگی بسیار درخشان و درگیرکننده

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some readers like to complain about John Updike. I rather like him. I am reading his novels in order of publication and since Of the Farm is only his fourth novel, I have a ways to go.

So far, I have found a white male heterosexual WASP trying to understand women and his relationships to them in an earnest quest. I admire that. If more men could speak in such eloquent and interesting sentences, it would help everyone.

Here we have a man on his second marriage visiting his cranky aging mother on her farm with his new wife and stepson in tow. Mom did not like his first wife; he is hoping she will like the second.

Mom does not seem to like anyone much, including her deceased husband. She is chronically disappointed in her only child. She speaks her mind bluntly.

Perhaps I felt so at home in this novel because my mom did not like my first husband (though she was always polite with him) and my older son's wife does not like me. Whatever we are all trying to do in our relationships, there is always and forever friction. Marriage is an exercise in melding all the baggage two people bring from their respective families. It could be laughable but we know it really is not.

[cycads and ferns · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Peggy,” my mother said, her eyes suddenly saturated with tears and reflected light, "people must be told when they're no longer fit to live, they mustn't be left to guess at it, because it's something nobody can tell herself.” And she left the table and the kitchen, slamming the screen door, her pink blouse clashing with the green outside.





Thirty years later I have made my way back to this short story and find it as insightful and moving as before.

[مهران نجفی · Rating 5 out of 5]

داستان شروع آرام و آهسته‌ای دارد. همه چیز روی دور کند گذاشته می‌شود و در ادامه هم –همانطور که از آپدایک انتظار می‌رود- خبری از ماجراهایی، بالاتر از سطح یک زندگیِ ساده نیست. صفحاتِ کم حجم داستان را، ساخته‌شدن و تکامل شخصیت‌ها شکل می‌دهد و بستر این امر، روی گفت‌وگوهای کاراکترها تمرکز یافته. این گپ‌وگفت‌ها یک‌جورهایی از هر دری هستند. از بحث و تبادل نظر روی کتاب‌های کمیک تخیلی –که درباره‌ی انسان‌های جهش یافته است و راستِ کار ریچارد است- گرفته، تا صحبت درباره‌ی زندگی مشترک قبلی پگی و جوئی رابینسون، خاطرات کودکی او در مزرعه و خیلی چیزهای دم دستی دیگر. اما همین صحبت‌ها، و واکنشِ –به نوبه خود خاص- هر کدام‌شان به نتیجه بحث، قصه را پیش می‌برد.
اساسا؛ رمان‌های آپدایک، برپایه‌ی روابط آدم‌های قصه‌هایش شکل می‌گیرد. همان‌طور که ما در "سنتائور" شاهد روابط ساده و در عین حال پیچیده‌ی یک پدر و پسر بودیم، اینجا هم نظاره‌گرِ رابطه‌ی جوئی رابینسون چهل ساله و مادر پیرش هستیم. بُعد داستان روایت‌گر فاصله‌ی عمیقی است که بین او و مادرش –و به واسطه‌ی آن با خاطرات روزهای زندگی پدرش- افتاده. "مزرعه" به نوعی خود این فاصله است. حجم وسیع و سفت و سختی که بین او و مادرش قرار دارد. و روی تمام خاطرات دوران کودکی‌اش سایه‌ای از یاس و دلزده‌گی پاشیده. پدر، در این داستان شخصیت قوی و مرموزی‌ست. ما فقط گه‌گاهی توی پیچاپیش خاطرات رابینسون، از پدرش می‌خوانیم، که هیچ‌وقت خدا حاضر نبوده عکس بیندازد. که همیشه از دوربین‌ها فراری بوده. و طبیعی است که توی آلبوم خانوادگی‌شان هم خبری از حضورِ مفهومِ پدر نباشد. و برای همین پدر، به خلائی سنگین و اثرگذار در داستان تبدیل می‌شود. مردی که زیاد حال و حوصله‌ی پرداختن به ظاهرش را نداشته. و همواره از مزرعه متنفر بوده. و این تنفر تفاهم مشترک جوئی و پدرش بوده که حالا بعد یکی دو دهه، هنوز او را به پدرش پیوند می‌دهد. و تضاد اصلی جوئی با مادرش در همین امر بوده. نگه داشتن مزرعه، و اصرار لجوجانه‌ی زن برای نگه داشتن مزرعه، که از پدر جوئی مردی بی‌تفاوت ساخت و باعث محو و کمرنگ شدن تمام روزهای خاطرات کودکی جوئی شد. مرگ پدر، در واقع لحظه‌ی وداع رابینسون با مزرعه بود. البته شما در طول داستان متوجه می‌شوید که این‌ها همه برداشت‌های شخصی او از وقایع گذشته است. اما همینی هست که هست. مگر ما آدم‌ها همه به سبک خود برداشتی از گذشته نداریم؟ چون کاملا مشخص است که پدر جوئی در کار دیگری موفق نبوده، و تنها راه چاره‌ی گذران زندگی‌اش، نگه داشتن همین مزرعه بزرگ و کشت و زرع بوده.
ادامه مطلب: http://mehran.blogsky.com/1392/08/10/...

[Suzanne Thackston · Rating 2 out of 5]

I so disliked this slender little self-conscious bit of egoist twaddle. Yeah, Updike can write, but every line drips with polish and precision and angst over whether it's worthy of appearing in 'one of the greatest writers of the 20th century's stupid book. Not one line comes across as passionate or coming from his heart or as if HE believes it. It's a heavy-handed personal creed being wrapped in storytelling form because Updike thinks he's such a great storyteller. I can see the talent over which everyone raves, but it does not inspire me to want to read one more thing he's written. I'd prefer fewer ridiculous metaphors (you can almost feel him preening over them) and more raw WRITING.

[Shauny Free Palestine · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first John Updike novel. I remember reading about “Rabbit, Run” years ago but it was during a time I didn’t much care for post modern literature so I never gave the author a chance.

However, my taste has changed over the past couple of years and I find myself eager to read the next Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, or Philip Roth.

At first, I wasn’t sure what to make of “On the Farm”. There’s something about Updike’s prose that is a little self-conscious. My immediate thought was that he isn’t in the same league as the aforementioned writers.

Fortunately, as the story progressed, I started to appreciate the subtle nature of the story. On the surface, the characters, including the misogynistic, newly married protagonist, his wife, the overbearing and manipulative mother, and the wife’s son from her first marriage, appear to be fairly unremarkable.

I can’t quite pinpoint when but at some point, I started to appreciate the characters peculiar traits, and by the time the novel ended, I was won over and I came to the conclusion Updike is a considerably talented author.

The only reason I don’t write this higher is that it’s quite short and the events are somewhat slight, at least to be considered memorable. Nevertheless, I’ll be sure to finally read his most notorious book, “Rabbit, Run”, in the near future.

[سیــــــاوش · Rating 2 out of 5]

خوندنش منو یاد داستانهای "کارور" انداخت. کسی که به سبک داستان نویسیش میگن "رئالیسم کثیف" و داستانهایی پر از نماد و استعاره مینوشت. در مزرعه داستان موقعیت یک انسان معمولیست که خوب توصیف شده (جوئی) کسی که از همسر اولش جدا شده و حالا با همسر دوم و پسر خونده ش به مزرعه ی مادرش رفته.
روابط انسانی در ذات خودشون پر از نماد ونشانه هستند پس میشه از تعریفهای جویی در داستان به چی رسید؟
از اینکه بچه هایم را در خواب ببینم وحشت دارم اما بعد از جدایی هر شب خواب آنها را می دیدم. برای اولین بار خواب آنها را دیدم داشتم چمن ها را می زدم که تراکتور ناگهان یله شد پیاده شدم مزرعه زیر پایم تغییر کرد, جایی مثل یک ویرانه , فقط سبز مثل مرداب و در حال سوختن و خاکستر شدن مثل جایگاه زباله. آن جا موجودی مضطرب زیر خاک خاکستری پنهان شده بود لبریز ازاحساس ترحم آن موجود را برداشتم وفهمیدم زنده است صدایی ضعیف گفت منم بابا منو نمیشناسی؟ او را به سینه فشردم و قول دادم از او جدا نشوم...
یا
آگاهی از وجود همسرم, آرامش حضور در کنار او, حسی چون آسمان دارد, خنک و در انزوا, ساکن و ایستاده. نگاهی که نظاره گر و محافظه کارانه, که حین سقوط به ژرفایی عمیق, از من در برابر ترس از فضای بسته مراقب و محافظت میکند. این حس را هیچ وقت در وجود همسراولم حس نکردم, همین آسمان را.

مثل اینکه همه ی اینها نماد کسیه که سعی در فراموش کردن گذشته و پناه بردن به یک زندگی جدید رو داره اما انقدر مستاصله که در روابط پر تنش مادر و همسرش هم نمیدونه باید چه رفتاری داشته باشه...

[Scott Foley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of The Farm details the complex relationship between a son in his mid-thirties and his elderly mother. The son brings his new wife and her son from a previous marriage to his mother's remote farm, and it's obvious from the beginning that the mother and the wife are not going to get along.

Though a brief novel, Updike delivers an intricate and dramatic story peeling away the complicated layers that make up relationships. Throughout the book, the man is constantly on alert, hoping to defuse any arguments between the women in his life, but he refuses to stand up to his mother nor does he seem totally invested in being committed to his wife.

In fact, the man is an incredibly interesting character because he is so flawed, so monumentally incapable of mediating the warring women in a healthy manner, that he almost leaps off the page. Surely he'll remind you of someone you know ... perhaps even yourself. The women were also expertly written, something that doesn't always happen with a male author. I found the mother and wife realistic, respectable, and equally as flawed as the main character.

Though lacking any real physical action, Updike's study of mothers and sons and husbands and wives is wickedly enticing and, as always, written very well.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thought I'd read my last Updike years ago, after enjoying the Rabbit books and loathing The Witches of Eastwick but read an essay by David Foster Wallace in which he hails this, The Poorhouse Fair, and the Centaur, so read this. Updike is undoubtedly a great wordsmith but the somewhat hackneyed plot (to be fair, maybe not so overdone in 1965 when he published it) and overall implicit misogyny that mars much of his work made it less likable.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

The last view years of his considerable writing life, it sometimes seemed that John Updike was almost writing parodies of himself, but this slender, early novel, shows why Updike, when he was on his game, was as fine an American writer of the 20th century. If you've never read him, start here.

[Pierce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not sure why I enjoyed this so much. Some of it might be the copy I found, a neat little €2 paperback with a pulp cover and red dyed edges.

Intense and solid small story. Probably my most enjoyed Updike. Funniest part was the sentences Updike imagined a ten-year-old would be capable of.

[Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

This early story shows that Updike was always brilliant with descriptions. I love this little piece of dialogue between a son and his mother:

"Her nighties aren't transparent."
"No, but her eyes are and I see my son's ruin in them."

It's a brilliant, short and tight novel.

[Mehdi Akbarian · Rating 3 out of 5]

دیگر وقتش رسیده بود؛ مرگ آخرین لطفی است که ما به جهان می‌کنیم، آخرین مالیاتی است که پرداخت می‌کنیم.

[Jonathan Stemberger]

Of the Farm by John Updike. Random House Publishing Group, New York, 1965.
John Updike’s novel Of the Farm is about a man named Joey that returns to his old home in the country in order to visit his mother. It is not a novel for those who seek constant action; the story spends a lot of time on dialogue and description of past events and life on the farm which gives the piece a slow elderly feel. The descriptions Updike writes provide the reader with a full understanding of what is going on in main character Joey’s head. This can be seen very plainly in his sexual thoughts toward his wife like on page 56 “her thighs were enough spread to reveal stray circlets of amber pubic hair” and “Peggy was wearing, the straps a little awry on her shoulders, a loose orange nightie I liked, and as she bent forward to call me through the screen her smile was wonderful”. The farm provides a good limited setting in which Joey can revaluate his pressing life in the city. It also helps the reader to have a set context to learn about the characters.
In the book Joey deals with second doubts about his lifestyle, he feels tension between having to be there for his aging mother, and be the busy city guy to his second wife Peggy and her son. Updike defines the characters not only through their action, but through their body language, explaining their positions and manners. Joey sees Peggy as being annoyed with their visit on the farm by her body language “she flung a downy forearm across her eyes. Her lips parted under the thrust of her skin. I said “I love you.”” The plot of the piece is built up in a slow drawn out momentum, carried by arguments between Joey’s wife and mother. Joey mentions these disagreements in many places like on page 98 “My wife and my mother talked, talked from eight-thirty to ten, and though their conversation- in which eddies of disagreement nonsensically dissolved as one or the other left the room and returned with a refilled glass of wine.” The ending is not very dramatic, it feels sort of anticlimactic.
Updike’s largest strengths are his images and dialogue; he writes whole sections of the novel in such pose that it does not feel like prose, but poetry. The language and diction is indeed very rich, but consequently might disguise the lack of concentrated plot.

[Old Man JP · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joey Robinson has brought his newly married second wife, Peggy, and her eleven-year-old son, Richard, with him to visit his elderly mother on her farm. His mother is very straightforward and blunt in her speaking and has taken an immediate dislike for Peggy, just as she had with Joey's first wife and begins saying some very rude things. Peggy, however, is capable of returning her own blunt rebuttals and so this sets up a conflict that Joey must navigate. As the story goes on, we find that his mother really had very few good things to say about anyone in the family, including Joey and his father. It's a very strange situation because in spite of the constant barrage of belittling things that are being said, the visit continues. The story then becomes even stranger because of the circumstances that it ended in.

[Renee Roberts · Rating 2 out of 5]

First book I've read by John Updike. His most famous, Rabbit, Run, receives a lot of comments about disliking the main character. That's usually a turn-off for me, so I decided to start with a shorter novel to try his work. Unfortunately, this one is the same. I didn't like any of the characters. A man recently married to his 2nd wife takes her and her son for a weekend visit to his dying mother's farm to mow the fields. He spends the time pitting the women against each other, then resenting the winner in each of the snipey arguments. No one grew. Bleh.

[Txe Polon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excelente juego de psicologías, con una trama centrada en el desarrollo de unos personajes de lo más potentes. Y con magníficos diálogos, a veces tan aparentemente incoherentes como realistas.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

The protagonist of John Updike’s short novel Of the Farm is 35-year-old Joey Robinson, and he seems to be a man conflicted about everything. For example, he is recently divorced and also recently remarried. He seems to have fond reminiscences of his first wife, Joan, yet he seems genuinely infatuated with his new wife, Peggy. However, his mind also entertains flaws and faults in both women.

He is also ambivalent about his mother. Their conversations seemingly seesaw wildly from irritability and disagreement to harmony and easy accord. They get into a needless argument about whether or not Joey should mow the acreage surrounding the farm to comply with some local ordinance or other. He persists in the mowing, but is unable to complete the task because of rainy weather. Joey and his mother find each other blameworthy for certain things: he blames her for making his father move from the suburbs to the farm; she blames him for making it difficult (impossible according to her) to see her three grandchildren, who now live in Canada with Joan.

With the divorce, Joan won custody of their three children, the youngest of whom is Charlie. With Joey’s recent marriage, he acquired an 11-year-old stepson, Richard. Joey cannot help juxtaposing Charlie and Richard: he misses Charlie chronically, which might account for his respectable efforts to get close to Richard. Through those efforts, quite innocently, he learns of several instances of Peggy’s errant moral behavior while both she and Joey were awaiting their respective divorces.

Other conflicts abound among all the characters. Richard, for example, gets on famously with his step-grandmother, and seems interested in all things farm-related. However, when asked about a return visit to the farm, he declares there is nothing to do here. Joey’s mother is conflicted about the farm itself: she knows, because of a health condition, it is unwise and unsafe for her to live alone on the farm, yet she cannot bring herself to sell it.

Updike’s characters in Of the Farm are all fully defined and extraordinarily credible in their flaws as well as their strengths. Their conversational exchanges with each other are human and organic, although occasionally, there is an unexpected directional change in the dialog from, say, friendly to hostile or argumentative. Joey is a reliable first-person narrator. And Updike’s handling of things pastoral is perfect; some of the descriptions of timeless aspects of the farm are superbly written. The prose will take readers in leaps and bounds from start to finish. The fact that the novel covers a weekend in terms of time also makes it seem a fast read.

But readers should not search too hard for a plot, because I don’t believe there is one. The story is an exploration of human interactions, and thus it includes love, betrayal, life, death, the old, and the very young. Nevertheless, Updike pulls it off: he has written a fast-paced, plotless page-turner that will engage readers from start to finish.

[Rachel Drobnak · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m not just giving this 5 stars because it’s about a farm!

After the first 3 pages, I fell in love with the prose and introspection that Updike creates. This was a beautiful short novel about a man’s weekend trip back home to help his recently widowed mother on the farm and to introduce his second wife and stepson. But it’s so much more that than: a conversation about what could have been, what should have been, and what will be. The characters are perfectly flawed (misogyny abounds) and tensions rise and fall so seamlessly.

“It’s hard to move without touching other lives.”

[Marc Blanchard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Growing to kind of loathe Updike’s style.

[Nick Barber · Rating 3 out of 5]

A plane ride and almost 2 months of traveling ahead of me, I needed a short novel to bring along: Of the Farm beckoned from a stack of books in my mom’s apartment. There was a line from the Patricia Lockwood review of Updike that had stuck with me: that his early novels, before the volume of his worst tendencies was ratcheted up to an 11, are “landscapes delicately dotted with the dandelions of misogyny.”

The dandelions — “my wide-hipped, heavy-lidded wife,” (he describes Peggy as wide-hipped several times), “the submissive curve of her back,” Peggy is described as a “wealth whose ownership imposes upon my body a sweet strain of extension,” “the secret rage of menstruation” (???)— dot this farm alright, threatening to overtake the boyish, rapturous attention at the heart of the novel. But ultimately, I think, they are kept at bay, just for now at least. The farm still survives, “the froglike shininess of fascination” in his writing staves of the specters lurking in the shadows of its fields.

While Rabbit, Run had done very little for me, this one crackled to life with the tempestuous force of a son’s feeling for his mother: “there was no hint in my mother’s atmosphere — a volatile pressure system to which I am more sensitive than to weather itself — of a latent storm of resentment…” His mother, the one holding up a mirror to his misogyny, ultimately rescues the book: “That’s an idea you have,” she says to Joey, “that women like to suffer. I don’t know where you got it, not from me; they don’t.” (blessedly, Peggy is also given the opportunity to say, “you’re really sort of a bastard”).

But it’s Updike’s descriptions that salvage it all, (a minor writer with a major style as someone once said about Updike). Who writes better about weather? The “spectacle” of an impending storm “was on the high grand scale of history, so that the elidings and eclipsings and combinings of cloud-types suggested political situations — high thin cirrus playing the aristocrat, a demagogic thunderhead moving at the head of an amorphous gray mob.” At another point he looks toward the meadow, where the “grass of the lawn drenched in a glistening stillness, an absolute visual silence like a full-measure rest in the flow of circumstance, each waxen leaf and silvered blade receiving the hazed August sunlight so precisely my heart beat double, as if split.” (!!!!)

The plot, if there is any to speak of in this novel, has a play-like sensibility. It puts its competing forces together with very little sense of pacing or real plotting. But it is all held beautifully, almost inevitably, together by that portrait of his mother, whose “face, turning to me, seemed vast, as the slanting veined faces of rocks in tidewater look vast, wet and stricken, between waves.”

I left it still slightly baffled that Updike can write such consistently wonderful things about Joey’s (and, ultimately, his own) mother - and then with the same hand, paint Peggy without any of the same attention and curiosity.

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

Updike, by common consent, is a major voice in American letters. I first came across him in high school, when we read his short story The A&P, which is simply masterful. Later, I grabbed up his The Witches Of Eastwick in some secondhand shop, and we had a falling out: I hated it. Didn't even finish the stupid thing. It wasn't till this year, when he died, that I was reminded of his existence: in one of my classes we read this article (http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/02... article itself is seriously recommended; not least because it is the best example of editorial grace I've ever come across; on reading it, I realized that it was the adult version of what I was trying to do in my brief stint with the school newspaper.) which rekindled my interest in the man.
So, on a whim, I picked up this novel. It is beyond good. Every incident ties back into this one, central, elusive theme. I would need about six pages to even begin working on how good it is, I just suggest reading the book. But, then again, maybe not. Updike has this thing where sex is constant and creepy. As a component of the sinful characters he's attempting to describe, however, I felt as though the occasional sexual outburst was perfectly at home in the story.
The quality of his writing from a technical standpoint as I understand it is just out of this world. Listen to this: "All misconceptions are themselves data which have the minimal truth of existing in at least one mind". The distant thud you just heard was the sound of my jaw hitting the floor on considering that statement again. He's good.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short character study novel where Joey Robinson, 35 years of age, takes his new second wife Peggy and stepson Richard to visit his dying, bad tempered mother who lives alone on an 80 acre farm in Pennsylvania. There's little plot but there are well written sentences providing interesting insights into the relationships between mother and son, husbands and wives, parents and children. I enjoyed the descriptions of the landscape and the at times, fiery dialogue. Updike fans shouldn't be disappointed.

[Annie Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

it was p good. nothing extraordinary

[Christine Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inhabiting Place – Of the Farm

In John Updike’s story "Pigeon Feathers" and short novel "Of the Farm," an 80-acre farm plays a central role. The fictional place is based on Updike’s mother’s birthplace, a property near Plowville, Pennsylvania, where Updike moved with his family at the age of thirteen. The farm had been owned by Updike’s grandparents, sold by his grandfather when the family moved to Shillington (a town renamed Olinger in Updike’s stories), and repurchased by Updike’s mother. The author spent his formative teen years there, isolated and encouraged by his mother to write.

Lesson: Engage your fictional place in conflict, just as you do with characters, to make it come alive

The fact that a fictional place is based on a real place is not reason enough to make readers believe it. In Updike’s work, the farm is an animate presence, consistent one story to the other. When I read "Pigeon Feathers" I developed loyalty to its cast of inhabitants, including a boy named David who is a stand-in for Updike. In "Of the Farm," I initially felt as if the new inhabitants were imposters. The Updike stand-in here is a man named Joey, who visits the farm on a mission to help his mother and gain her acceptance of his new wife. In Pigeon Feathers, the farm and David’s relationship to it had been so convincing that I initially found myself wondering: What right did Joey have to use David’s home for his own childhood memories? But Joey stakes his claim.

This liveliness of place comes not just from Updike’s descriptions, such as this narration by Joey: "We went up a sharp little rise and there, on the level crest where Schoelkopf’s weathered mailbox stood knee-deep in honeysuckle and poison ivy, its flopped lid like a hat being tipped, my wife first saw the farm." It comes also from giving the farm a role in the story; it’s a source of pleasure and pain, love and conflict.

In "Pigeon Feathers," there is friction between David’s parents over the farm and in "Of the Farm," even though Joey’s father has died, the friction that had been between his parents lingers as a palpable force threatening Joey’s new marriage. Early in "Of the Farm," Joey expresses his relationship with it: "…whenever I returned, after no matter how great a gap of time, to this land, the acres flowed outward from me like a form of boasting." But he lives with the memories of conflict between his parents caused by the farm and considers this possibility: "… my mother had undervalued and destroyed my father… had brought him to a farm which was in fact her giant lover, and had thus warped the sense of the masculine within me, her son."

When Joey mows the field, sweating in the hot sun, his technique is: to slice in one ecstatic straight thrust, up the middle and then to narrow the two halves, whittling now at one and now at the other, entertaining myself with flanking maneuvers acres wide and piecemeal mop-ups. His mother’s method is: to embrace the field, tracing its border and then on a slow square spiral closing in until one small central patch was left. Their differing styles with the tractor amplify their personal differences, as Joey describes: I imitated war, she love. In the end, our mowed fields looked the same, except that my mother’s would have more scraggly spots where she had lifted the cutter over a detected pheasant’s nest or had spared an especially vivid patch of wildflowers.

Joey’s mother is married to the farm. The only way she’ll leave it is through death. The mowing metaphor foreshadows the negotiated truce that the inevitable event will bring. He will inherit the farm—his mother’s farm—with all its history of sorrow and joy.

Lesson: Animate the landscape by putting it “in the body”

A masterful writer wouldn’t be content with the “vivid” descriptor in the above sentence, and Updike is masterful. He has Joey convey the liveliness of the wildflowers: "Black-eyed susans, daisy fleabane, chicory, goldenrod, butter-and-eggs each flower of which was like a tiny dancer leaping, legs together—all of these scudded past the tractor wheels."

As with the writing of character, putting the landscape “in the body” makes the fictional place real and felt. As Joey mows on the tractor, his senses heighten to the landscape, now become erotic…"Crickets sprang crackling away from the slow-turning wheels; butterflies loped and bobbed above the flattened grass as the hands of a mute concubine might examine, flutteringly, the corpse of her giant lover. The sun grew higher. The metal hood acquired a nimbus of heat waves that visually warped each stalk. The tractor body was flecked with foam and I, rocked back and forth on the iron seat shaped like a woman’s hips, alone in nature, as hidden under the glaring sky as at midnight, excited by destruction, weightless, discovered in myself a swelling which I idly permitted to stand, thinking of Peggy. My wife is a field."

Lesson: Orient the reader

The action of "Pigeon Feathers" centers around the barn and house, while that of Of the Farm revolves around the field, garden, berry patches, and house. The same structures and natural elements appear in both the story and novel, but in different proportion. The fictional surroundings in both feel real and consistent.

As writers, we can map our fictional places or use other methods to discover and know these places well before or during the writing process. As readers, it’s not essential that we are able to map a place in order to believe it, but with Updike we could. Consistency of place—an author’s grasp of direction, scale, weather, light, landscape, landmarks, flora, fauna, architecture—orients readers and allows us to feel “at home” with the story.

For more book discussions of writing craft and lessons from masterful authors, visit Christine Walker’s blog https://readtowritebooks.com
For videos about writing fiction, visit her youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXwb...
For an online course in Writing Fiction, visit https://courses.christinewalker.net

[Taylor Ross · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was the last entry in the Library of America collection of John Updike Novels 1959 - 1965 and it was by far my least favourite in the bunch. I think I wasn’t particularly interested in the subject matter, divorce and attachment to land you own, and I think the short length of the book made many of the actions of the characters seem unbelievably abrupt, giving and taking offense what seemed unnaturally quickly. Also the over-precocious child who speaks like an adult is something that always bothers me in novels.

[Riley Haas · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a genre in American drama in which a family get together or reunion builds to a emotional climax where everyone's feelings are revealed. It is not a genre I love. I am familiar with many plays in this genre but, honestly, I'm not sure if I've ever read a novel in that genre until now. So I don't know whether or not this novel had a big hand in popularizing the genre, or if Updike was just writing something in an already popular style.
There is also a particular style of writing that emerged in the 19th century that examines the psychology of the characters. This style was a necessary development in novels and I went through a Dostoevsky phase so I understand the appeal of this type of writing. But sometime in the late 19th century or early 20th century it got taken to absurd extremes. I am okay with psychological analysis of the characters by an omniscient 3rd person author. I am even okay with a 1st person author offering psychological analysis when the story is told in flashback. Where I struggle with 1st person psychological analysis is when it appears to be in the moment. Nobody is this astute in real life and so I find it adds a huge air of unreality. (Also, if he narrator really is this astute in the moment, as in this novel, why is he unable to control himself? That's a problem to me.)
A third issue: I don't like the characters. I get that this is the point but I always struggle with a novel where the only sympathetic character is an overly bright child, or perhaps his mother, who is referred to by both other main characters as "stupid" more than once, even though the novel doesn't really offer any kind of proof that she is stupid.
But at times all of that is swept away by the beauty of Updike's writing; his ability to describe particular places or scenes, or his ability to describe particular emotions (either those of the protagonist or the other characters). There are sentences in this book that nearly completely won me over so that everything I've written above no longer mattered while in the grip of that sentence or even that paragraph. It's true throughout the book but it's particularly true in the moments around Joey's mothers attack; there are moments there that just about made me change my view of the whole novel.
It's a shame for me that I don't like the genre and I don't like the style, because I really like the writing and it does make me think that I should read more Updike, as I'm likely to enjoy a different style of book more than this one. It is not my kind of novel, but I cannot say for a second that it's less than good.