The Poorhouse Fair

by John Updike

THE POORHOUSE FAIR was John Updike's first full length novel, published four years after he graduated from Harvard. It concerns the events surrounding a fair put on by members of a poorhouse and is an allegory about charity. Short and succinct, it speaks to those fears all of us have of growing not old, but dependent.

"Since the successful poetic novel--for lack of a more precise term--has long been the most rarefied form of prose fiction, John Updike, the poet and short story writer, has done a startling thing in his first novel...by producing, with almost academic precision, a classic, if not flawless, example of one." --Whitney Balliett, writing in The New Yorker

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Novels, Literature, American, 20th Century, Literary Fiction

159 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

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

[Robin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dour and depressing. And worse than that: dated and uninteresting. This debut novella, at a scant 127 pages, dared me on a sentence-by-sentence basis to give up and set it aside. Set in a facility for the elderly in the 1960s, I was hard pressed to find a single character I enjoyed reading about. They are all grumpy, decaying, stinky old men. I don't even want to imagine the state of their underwear and/or teeth. All so curmudgeonly, and in a way that isn't in the least bit entertaining. The one woman that gets air time sports a bonnet (to hide her baldness) and a sizeable goitre. Lord, how depressing!

There's a lot of ambient, rambling description here too, long paragraphs of it, which had me tapping my foot with impatience. The best part of the book is the dialogue - here young Updike shines and I glimpse his brilliant and elegant prose that I've come to admire so much.

As I mentioned, this is John Updike's first novel - and the 8th of his that I have read. It's barely recognizable from his later work, which focuses more on marriage and sex and all the pitfalls of monogamy. Juicy stuff that elicits plenty of reaction, all along the spectrum. Ballsy stuff, that occasionally makes you want to throw the book across the room. Memorable stuff that reminds you why he's a literary heavyweight, won two Pulitzers and a raft of other awards. I'm glad I didn't start with this drowsy piece or I likely would have stopped right here.

Ah well, can't win em all... and we all know he came into his full strength later on. If you haven't, read Rabbit, Run, dear readers! It's a world away from this decrepitude!!

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

I keep persisting with Updike; it’s the triumph of hope over experience I suppose. This is his first novel, written in 1957 and set in 1977. Thankfully it was better than the last one I read; Memories of the Ford Administration.
I am reminded of a quote from Harold Brodkey’s autobiographical work about his death from AIDS; “Living with AIDS is like being a character stuck in a bad John Updike novel”.
This is a rather brief novel set in an almshouse and it takes place in one day; the day of the annual fair. It’s a half-hearted attempt at Modernism with a touch of dystopia. The Poorhouse is basically a residential care home for older people who are whiling away their remaining days. As is usual with Updike the female characters are rather limited and not very well drawn.
There are two strong characters; Hook is a man in his 90s who has a strong sense of his own wisdom and a feeling that modern life is going to hell in a handcart. The main redeeming character in the book is Connor the manager of the home. He is a young man with a mission, a sense of what is right and wrong. He has that particular malice that only those who have the zeal to do good to others no matter whether they like it or not can have. His attempts to relate to the residents inject some humour into the proceedings as events spiral out of his control.
There is a sense of anarchy in the older men and making Connor a rational humanist was a clever move. However I didn’t feel Updike really understood or have control of the older characters and what was actually a rather good premise didn’t quite work. The minor characters are not strong enough to carry the points Updike is trying to make. For once I think this novel was too short; it needed more character development to carry the storyline. However the thought of asking for a longer Updike novel worries me!
It’s brief and worth reading for a couple of the characters, but lacks the real punch it could have had.

[Irene · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of Updike’s earlier novels, a short book set on a single day at a county home for indigent elderly. The primary tension is between a retired teacher who articulates a value system based on traditional social structures and accepts human suffering as normal with a religious hope in eternal happiness and the young director of the home who passionately believes in an egalitarian world where no one suffers from want or injustice and who rejects a religious hope in eternity as a distraction that undermines human progress here. The characters are very well drawn. The philosophical debate is well woven into the fabric of the story.

[lynnvariety · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my first Updike novel, and I enjoyed the poetic minutiae from the very first sentence (as soon as I figured out what an osier was). Humorous and sad misunderstandings pepper this story, which arcs through a single day in a home for the elderly. That this home and its inhabitants are imagined by the author twenty years from the novel's writing adds an interesting twist; the device enhances Updike's contemplation of where American society was heading in the 1950s. If you didn't know the novel was written in this context, you might read the entire text thinking it was commentary on the author's own time, a fact that speaks to Updike's apparent prescience. Only one sentence really tips his hand in this regard, in which he names the president of the novel's era as the fictitious Lowenstein.

In this future (aka the 1970s), science is rising and religion is fading. Religious and moralistic ways of thinking, embodied by the ancient poorhouse resident Hook, are contrasted with secular humanism and Progress, represented by the young poorhouse prefect Conners and his assistant Buddy. Updike doesn't seem to favor one viewpoint (he was religious but had his share of doubts), but rather he presents heartrending scenes that underscore the beautiful idealism of humanism even while its evangelists treat the elderly with barely restrained condescension, paternalism and at times cruelty.

Extremely well-wrought and captivating characters provide varying threads of perspective throughout the novel. What's more, the changing perspectives highlight in each character a pervasive inability to communicate their true thoughts and feelings to each other. Readers are privy to knowledge of a character's true intentions while the other characters wildly misinterpret him or her, and in turn fail to communicate themselves well.

All these interpersonal misfires inform larger problems with communication. Hook's last grasping attempt to think of advice for Conners exemplefies the entire older generation's inability to pass on their wisdom. Updike outlines a shift in societal thought far too severe for the disparate generations to overcome, though he gives one nihilistic hope: one character ruminates that people are aging backwards in time, into the opinions of their parents and grandparents. While Conners' philosophy prevents him from seeing this as a good thing, there's hope yet that he might see where his elders were coming from.

RIP John Updike, March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009

[Joanne]

This is the first John Updike book that I have read. It's a story that describes a single day at an old folks home that is having it's annual fund-raising fair. It's really a comedy of errors in a touching way, showing how people have trouble communicating and are suspicious of people's intentions. Updike also addresses the changes in society perceived by the elderly. Written in 1958, the novel is apparently set in the future (probably around late 1970s) and forecasts some of the changes in morality and religious commitment that has occurred since 1958. In his words,the people "came to the fair to be freshened in the recollection of an older America..." I would love to see it be made into a movie because of all the colorful characters and the little quirky events that fill the day, cause concern, and illustrate the constant clashing of human cells in the microcosm of this community.

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have always confused John Updike and Philip Roth. I don't think they are all that similar, though I can't be sure because I have never read either of them except for this first novel by Updike, read by me in 2002 for I don't know what reason. The confusion must stem from the fact that both writers began publishing in 1959, both were considered egregiously sex obsessed in their material, and both were the hottest male fiction writers of the day. Anyway, as I wrap up my reading list for 1959 I will be reading Roth's Goodbye, Columbus. As I move on, I will read 4 novels by John Updike and 3 by Philip Roth in the 1960s. That should handle my confusion or maybe not.

Another odd point: here is a second novel in 1959 about the elderly (the first being Muriel Spark's Memento Mori.) Maybe it is a last gasp before the 1960s youth culture takes over.

So yes, The Poorhouse Fair is a day in the life of a state supported "old folks home" as it was called in those days. The residents are there because they are old, have no family left and are penniless. This does not mean they are completely beaten down however; they are a feisty bunch.

A new director has recently taken over the place. His efforts to make improvements have raised the hackles of the elderly residents and they have begun to rebel. It all comes to a head on the day of the eponymous fair.

It is a great story about the personalities of aging people. Right out of the gate, Updike is an amazing writer with deep insight into his characters and the dynamics of a group of people. I look forward to more.

[Michael Meeuwis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here's something I didn't know: John Updike's first novel is set in an institution for the elderly in a sort of mild, gently dystopian future. Some interesting nods to the future, prescient and less-prescient: multicultural and multiracial pop stars, but also economic central planning. Some passages of being in nature, early in the novel, are absolutely lovely; the book as a whole sort of drags in the middle and late passages. Sumptuous diction through. Not at all what I expected of Updike--no pubic hair anywhere!--and made me want to read more of his early fiction.

[Gary Peterson · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a letdown! was my reaction. But I'm unfairly bringing the weight of Updike's later work to bear on this fledgling effort. I jumped into The Poorhouse Fair as I neared the end of Updike's The Same Door, which collects short stories written around the same time (late 1950s). This novel had a fresh outta creative writing class feel to it, as if it were written to impress more than to entertain and edify.

Speaking of edification, I most enjoyed the lengthy theological discussion about two-thirds of the way into the book. Hook was my favorite character, and Conner a close second, so it was fascinating to see them square off, bobbing and weaving when addressing the big questions. It was Updike's religious themes that initially drew me to his work many years ago.

Gregg was a thoroughly loathsome character. And he never gets his comeuppance. Gregg's profanity is f.ing censored in the 1964 Fawcett Crest paperback I have. This struck me as odd since Updike drops at least one f-bomb in The Same Door and it was left intact. I wasn't sure if this initializing the offending words was a stylistic choice of Updike's or a mandate by the publisher (akin to what the fuggers did to Mailer's Naked and the Dead).

I admit I did not detect this was a dystopian novel set in the then-near future until close to the end when a reference to a half dollar with President Lowenthal's face on it threw me for a loop. Then I remembered overlooking incidental references to the poorhouses and to how the elderly were being warehoused. The science-fiction elements are so slight I suspect many have read this novel never knowing it was set in the future.

Finishing the book was a chore, and it felt a lot longer than its 120 or so pages. I doubt I will re-read it. Updike's next novel was the iconic Rabbit Run, a book with eminent re-readability. That and his many short stories are much better launching pads for readers eager to uncover the rich rewards of reading Updike.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Poorhouse Fair, John Updike’s first novel written when he was 26 years old, is of the “a-day-in-the-life-of” variety. But rather than just one person, this short tale features the residents of a county poorhouse living out their remaining days in everything from fatalistic bliss to boiling frustration. The novel is for the most part plotless and, in hindsight, one can perhaps glean Updike flexing his fledgling literary muscles, The Poorhouse Fair simply heralding greater things to come.

The platform for action is a traditional annual fair hosted by the poorhouse for the neighboring community of Andrews, New Jersey. Some residents sell handmade crafts, less to generate extra pocket money than from habitual momentum. However, when rainy weather halts preparations for the day and drives everyone indoors, Updike teases readers with a possibility for conflict

Characters are wonderfully portrayed. John Hook, former schoolteacher is 94 and has outlived all his contemporaries and his family members. Ruminative and nostalgic for times gone by, he is somewhat equivocal that a better world has been traded in for one of less substance. Gregg seems to be the misfit of the group in any number of ways. His language, saturated in profanity, is abusive and irreverent. He is filled with an energy that makes him a ready-made antagonist for the most innocent of things. There is also George Lucas, perpetually worrying an earache with a matchstick, and tragically blind Elizabeth Heinmann, self-effacing enough even without her blindness. Mrs. Mortis makes patchwork quilts, and is determined this year not to sell all her wares in less than five minutes to an unscrupulous town merchant, who no doubt profits enormously from her modest industry.

Presiding over the poorhouse is a prefect, Stephen Conner and his young, sycophantic subordinate, Buddy, cravenly anxious to do his boss’s bidding. Like the geriatric residents, Conner is also biding his time. His performance at this poorhouse will be the stepping-stone for promotion, if only the errant and contradictory old folks would allow him to dictate what is best for them. Accordingly, Conner is almost universally disliked.

While waiting indoors at close quarters, Conner and Hook drift into a somewhat intellectual debate with religious undertones. Against his better judgement, Conner lets his vainglorious self-importance get the better of him and remarks to the devout Hook: “The truth is, Mr. Hook, that if the universe was made, it was made by an idiot, and an idiot crueler than Nero.” Hook tries a valiant response of humor and humble philosophy: “This I do know, that that part of the universe which is visible to me, as distinct from that which is described to me by scoffers, unfailingly consoles.”

Later, when the weather clears enough for the fair to get under way, collective hostility against the prefect erupts into a pathetic, and semi-comical stoning of Conner by poorhouse residents with small pebbles. And this is where the conflict tease manifests itself. Conner firmly, but incorrectly believes that Hook is the instigator behind the stoning…and there the conflict fizzles.

To add to this incompleteness, the last dozen or so pages inexplicably mushroom into a confusing catalog of random, fragmented, babel-like dialogues by poorhouse residents and townspeople departing the fair as it winds to an end. It is lucky for Updike that instead of this as a last thought in readers’ minds, he leaves them with a lingering taste of elegant and precise prose.

[Corey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Updike is one of my favorite authors. This is his first novel and I couldn't make it all the way through it. Maybe only 2/5 stars because it bored me.

[Mark Valentine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Its reading seems so simple: There is no plot really and the Fair almost does not happen--and when it does, it is hurried, crowded, and overlapping. What made this novel such a pleasant reading experience for me was two things--Updike's gift in illustrating fully-dimensional characters, and next, his gifted ability with syntax. Some of the sentences are elegant, or innovative, and always crystal clear.

Also, I need to mention that I really liked the presentation of the dialogue that the characters shared, especially between Hook (the retired schoolteacher) and Connor (the pansy prefect) about religion; and then there is Gregg (the perpetual cuss), who cannot speak without artful embellishment.

This is a different novel than most of what is pulped out there today. I felt like I had discovered a narrow back road in the county, Literaria, and spent a day forgetting other obligations while I roamed among these characters on this day, the third Wednesday in August.

[Molly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Absolutely awful. And depressing. There is one lovely scene between a husband, his wife, and a pet bird, but otherwise... Updike definitely could only go uphill from here.

Revised: It wasn't the worst thing I've ever read... it was just fairly dismal and not for me. The writing was pretty good- except the dialogue scene in the end where he seemed to be saying 'hey, look, I took a creative writing course once!' There are alot of powerful themes and symbols throughout the book that would make for some good discussion in a book group... that is, if the members of your book group actually READ the book and THOUGHT about it AT ALL (insert pointed stare here)

[Evan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m pleased that Updike resisted the trend of writing a sprawling debut novel. At only 127 pages (Fawcett Paperback edition), “The Poorhouse Fair” avoids the confections and other pitfalls that are common of first offerings while still displaying it’s 26-year-old author’s prodigious abilities. It’s an important, if often overlooked, piece in the author’s collection because it begins to construct the world about which Updike will write prolifically until his death in 2009, highlighting the clash between the vestiges of pastoral tradition that Updike experienced in childhood and the progressive modernization/secularization of American society after World War II.

[Celeste · Rating 2 out of 5]

Novel takes place during the course of one day in the life of the old people and their caretakers at the "poorhouse". Set in the un-specified future where the government has assumed responsibility for the poor and elderly. It resembles a nursing home and delves into the mindset of the individual residents. Many resent their loss of independence and do not want charity - but have no other choice. The fair is the one day of the year that they still have some control.

[Jeremy]

"There is no goodness, without belief. There is nothing but busy-ness. And if you have not believed, at the end of your life you shall know you have buried your talent in the ground of this world and have nothing saved, to take into the next."

[Tammy]

Recommended in the book, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair.

[Steve Shilstone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Young John breaks out a bunch of 8 dollar words to describe weather and scenery, but he peoples the old folks' home with plenty of fine solid 3 dimensional humans.

[Riley Haas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Updike is a great literary stylist. Even in this very early novel, he does an excellent job. His sentences are often beautiful. And even when they are not beautiful, they are so full of detail about the person and/or the scene that they leave a vivid picture in the mind. I am prone to imagining how novels would be shot as films - I guess because I have watched so many movies in my life - but reading Updike you sometimes don't even have to imagine; it feels as though he has already done the work a screenwriter or storyboard artist would need to do. This skill of his, to render detail so well, should make him a great writer. So should his ability to sometimes create poetic beauty out of English prose.
However I don't love Updike. I have no read something like 4 or 5 of his novels and I haven't loved a single one of them. As far as I can figure, it's because he doesn't move me. And once again, now that I've finished one of his novels, I'm trying to figure out why.
I don't like his characters. I know we're often not supposed to like the characters in the novels we read and I usually (though not always) don't have a problem with that. But there's something specific about the characters of his early novels I have trouble relating to. It's as if they're not old enough to get the benefit of the doubt of being characters of another time - say like the characters in early 20th century literature - but they are not modern enough for me to recognize as modern. In his early novels, nearly all of Updike's major characters (basically everyone of them but the children) are older than my father and mother. I suspect that something about this is one reason why I find them all so unbelievably old fashioned. I guess one way of putting it is as if a modern writer is writing about pre-modern people. (They are not pre-modern, of course, but they sometimes feel as though they wished they were.) This is particularly true of the characters in this book who are, of course, mostly really old and therefore even more conservative and traditional.
Then there's the thing I should appreciate about him but don't: at this early stage, at least, Updike was very much concerned with significant moments in time - a day, a weekend, what have you - rather than with Plot. I am normally very open to this. I usually like this. But, for some reason, when I read his early books, I find myself desperate for some actual tragedy. Would it kill him to kill somebody?
Anyway, this is very well written. Especially for a first novel. But I found myself hoping that something - anything - would happen during the actual Fair only to discover that, of course, the climax had already passed, as I feared it had, when the minor incident after the rainfall occurred. And I was once again wondering why I should care so much about these small moments in peoples' lives. Because I'm not sure he made me.

[David A. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Updike was for a time considered the top of the pops, the greatest stylist in American letters. I'm very familiar with his short story "A&P," which seemed to appear in every anthology of literature for decades, but this is the first of his novels I've read, which as it happens is also the first one he wrote. Updike is somewhat of a mismatch for me from the get-go, in that I generally struggle with description-dense writing, and Updike is known for his meticulous, rich descriptions. However, there are authors who go very deep into description whom I hugely respect or even love: Cormac McCarthy and Yukio Mishima come to mind.

I went through three phases in reading this very short novel:

1) disliked it at first; I found it a very slow start, and had to re-read passage after passage--again, mainly because of the description-heavy style;

2) began to like it quite a bit for a long stretch of the middle, where the characters and the action became clearer and more compelling;

3) was left totally cold by the ending, where Updike decided to be "experimental" rather than just tell the story he'd begun.

Surely greater literary experts than I could explain why I'm wrong about this, and why this ending is, in fact, perfect and a work of genius. To me, it felt as though Updike had no ending, so he decided to obfuscate with experiments in literary form rather than zeroing in, in greater depth, on the characters he'd established and the consequences of those characters' actions and relationships.

[Steve Dustcircle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well written but bland as flour.

[Simon Harrison · Rating 2 out of 5]

Difficult to see how and why Updike was allowed to continue writing after this. A stinker of a debut.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

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).

[Viola · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Poorhouse Fair describes the events over the course of one day, a special day at the poorhouse, the day of their annual fair. And what is a poorhouse? Rather than what its name implies, the poorhouse is a retirement home for the aged. I suppose that the inhabitants are also poor, but it’s their old age, not their poverty, that defines them.

Some of the writing is brilliant, beautiful, and evocative. Descriptions that in and of themselves take you on a journey. Take one of the opening lines: “In the cool wash of early sun the individual strands of osier compounding the chairs stood out sharply; arched like separate serpents springing up and turning again into the knit of the wickerwork.” Cool wash of early sun. Separate serpents springing up. What gorgeous imagery! What beautiful alliteration!

But other times, the descriptions get in the way and the writing becomes unbearably convoluted. Updike includes so many descriptions in between his subject, verb, and object that you easily lose track of what he is trying to say. Take this line for instance: “Gregg’s small brown hands, the thumbs double-jointed and spatulate and the backs covered with dark lines as fine as hair, sought leverage with a quickness that recalled to Hook that his companion had been, before alcohol and progress had undone him, an electrician.” What? Gregg’s hands what? This sort of writing is cumbersome and drains the reader’s energy, thus, making this short novel feel like a very, very long one.

Overall, I cannot recommend this book. As of 2014, this novel has become dated and irrelevant, and its mixed quality of writing can’t save it.


One additional commentary. In the introduction to the 1977 edition of the novel, John Updike reveals that he intended this novel to be a futuristic one as a counter to George Orwell’s 1984. Well, I can’t fault someone for being ambitious, but sadly, Updike fails miserably. For one, I can’t imagine that any reader today would recognize this as a futuristic novel. Everything about it reeks of the past. And when I encountered one of Updike’s futuristic imaginings, like a President Lowenstein, I was just confused. Second, 1984 has certainly stood up to the test of time, whereas this one is heading (deservedly) towards obscurity.

[Liam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange, slim debut novel from Updike. Pretty difficult to follow at times, and in sections where it basically is a transcription of three overlapping conversations, I skipped most of the dialogue. I hate to say that, but this was not an easy book to want to finish. Glowing, supernaturally good descriptive prose (natch) and some fantastic little riffs. Here's a good one:

""Lucas worried off the cap, held in place by a newfangled set of wires, and, keeping the bottle dressed in the paper bag, poured a bit of liquor into the cup Gregg held, enough to cover the bottom. Before taking a sip Gregg carefully swirled the cup, and like a flexible brass coin the half-inch of liquid swayed in the white cavity. Then with some delicacy of gesture he took his swig. As in the flavor of certain vegetables acres of bland rural landscape are contained, stone houses, fields, and grassy lanes, so this rasping hard taste flowered in Gregg's mouth into high brick blank walls, streets of pocked asphalt bleeding in summer heat, the blue glint on corrugated iron where it is not rusted orange, the sun multiplied down a row of parked cars, tangerines pyramided behind plate glass, manhole covers, filth in gutters, condoms discarded on windowsills, and unpainted doorways scratched with wobbly slogans like F. THE POPE."

See? I mean, consider, this is Young Updike; all the annoying traits of his prose are evident (near-abstract language, aimless realism, dialogue that at times wouldn't pass the Turing test) though because this is a story about old folks living in a poorhouse 20 years in the future (from when it was written, mid-fifties), there's very little if any of the "penis with a thesaurus"-type writing that was so all the time everywhere in the Rabbit books (thus far the only other Updike I've read to completion). But it is interesting to see what he was capable of at my age or slightly older, and the forward is written very gracefully (this was the 1977 edition, I believe). Looking forward to continuing my informal Updike completioning.

My final summation: good for Updike fans, or maybe those who want a taste of Updike but who don't want to jump face first into the Angstrom tetralogy. Not sure the appeal for anyone else, but who can say.

[Dacod · Rating 3 out of 5]

Offering an alternate dystopian hypothesis from Orwell's 84, Updike's '59 prediction book presents readers with a future in which "There's no call for marching bands any more. The parades they have now are all floats with whores on 'em advertising soap" (121). BLEAK STUFF.
"The Poorhouse Fair" is a unique experience in that it requires readers to understand characters who are distant and unwelcoming; they don't come right up to you and tell their stories, but rather expect you to make the effort to get to know them. Whatever, some people just don't care about good social interactions and what else should we expect from the elderly 'inmates' of a dull old folks home for the impoverished. The classic Hook v. Conner dynamic provides a future in which Big Brother is not so much a controlling and destructive force as he is a weak Conner seeking to be understood and respected by his constituents.
Whereas 84 shows the power force erasing the common man, Po'house shows how the common man destructs those who try to lead in a confusing--and for some reason predominately Spanish speaking and singing east coast (circa 1970ish). After all, the end of the novel shows Hook, the common man, wondering how to teach Conner (Big Brother) how to learn from his mistakes. "He stood motionless, half in moonlight, groping after the fitful shadow of the advice he must impart to Conner, as a bond between them and a testament to endure his dying in the world. What was it?" (185)
It's clear from the beginning that Updike is an excellent writer with a great ability to write in language that is poetic but rarely feels overdone or illegitimate. The only reason I haven't given a better rating is because I'm not smart enough to really grasp everything that Updike did. Take for example the whole mixture of random conversation near the end of the novel. What was the dead cat about? What about the rabbit ears? Who knows, I have a lot of questions but I'll have to read this again in the future to answer them.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Notes:
Intro
--written as a deliberate anti-Nineteen Eighty-four
--foresaw widespread voyeurism, and a nation of pleasure seekers
--strange absence, television
--philosophical ambition: an attempt to present the meaning of being alive, as conveyed by its sensations
--the banal American chatter that dissolves the novel at the end manifests a positive, even cheering anima
--U pleased with his solution, for those days, to the problem of printed obscenities; better my abbreviations (a.hole) than non-words like "fug")

note to the 2004 Ballantine edition, from Beverly Farms, MA
--a futuristic novel
--survivors will find reasons-dreams, hopes, fantastic beliefs-to reinforce their necessary optimism.
10..A wise old owl / sat in an oak.
The more he heard, / the less he spoke.
The less he spoke, / the more he heard:
Let's imi-tate / This wise old bird
17..Conner hated, more than anything, pain dumbly endured. Oppression, superstition, misery--all sank their roots in meekness.
29..there are instances of an abscess at the root of a tooth inserting poison into the bloodstream until the host suffers a coronary.
41..He was entering into the frame of mind of an old man idling beneath a tree, grateful for slow spectacles.
46..the decrepits had everything their way today.
63..soda pop truck driver: His impulse was to hop astride his mount and flee to Newark, where he was planning, I gathered, to deflower a local bloom. [sounds like Ignatius Reilly talking]
64..pettishly (ill-tempered, peevish)
98..poverty alone held the generations together
103..Conner shunned admiration, and gained it doublefold
123..dazzlirg distortions of the sun ??

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another book I probably wouldn't have finished if I wasn't reading it for book club. This book just didn't really incite any reaction in me whatsoever. The characters were neither compelling nor irritating. The plot was neither engaging nor especially boring (well the book was really short and pretty easy to get through either way). The writing is straightforward if somewhat dry, although I wasn't a fan of Updike's frequent lengthy visual descriptions. They seemed irrelevant & not very artistic & I mostly skimmed them.

I've heard the book was written as a sort of anti-1984. In that case, I'll guess that plot & characters were secondary for Updike to concepts. But I also didn't find the discussion of ideas in the book particularly interesting. The contrast of atheist & communist ideals to old-fashioned religion and morals was pretty simplistic for a modern read.

I did enjoy Updike's jumps in perspective and the huge disparities between characters perceptions of each others' thoughts & motives & the characters actual thoughts and motives.

Overall, I feel very neutral about this book. If you want a short & easy read just so you can say you've read some Updike, have at it.. (tho I've heard his short stories are better)

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Updike's first novel is the strangest and most modern of his books I've read, both in its structure and style and the soft science fiction setting he uses. While most of his points about society are spewed in a heavy-handed manner from his characters, the ridiculousness, but believability of his poorhouse residents makes this quite a comic novel.

Notes:

More of a modernist novel than Updike's other works, this strikes me, at first, as an almost cold work, like Beckett's fiction. When we start to get to know the characters better, the warm humor comes through, and the absurdity is almost Vonnegutian. There's not really a center to the story, with which our sympathies should lie, though all the characters deserve our pity. The daydream-like conversations about heaven, especially the blind woman's riff about her blindness freeing her from jealousy, is touching if a bit quaint, the familiar Updike.

Far into the novel, we find out we're not in Updike's present, but some mildly dystopian near-future, and in this he captures the zeitgeist of the yet-to-be 60s and 70s quite well. The book ends with a montage of mundane conversations about house painting and penicillin, a juvenile way of making of a heavy-handed point.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

Updike's first book of poetry did not feel like a first book. His first book of short stories did not feel like a first book. But Poorhouse Fair very much felt like a first novel. The writing has a light touch, but there really isn't a main character or a plot. I've read books that managed nicely without them, but this just felt like ten different ideas strung together with ten different characters. There was no hook, no reason to turn the page, and nothing to identify with.

When I heard that this book was Updike's response to 1984 I was excited. I recently finished 1984 and thought this would make it more interesting to have that fresh on my mind. Poorhouse Fair is set about 20 years in the future, and while he has some interesting takes, it pales in comparison to 1984 and nothing about it really came together for me.

There is no goodness, without belief. There is nothing but busy-ness. And if you have not believed, at the end of your life you shall know you have buried your talent in the ground of this world and have nothing saved, to take into the next.

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first book I've read by Updike, and I was pleasantly surprised; I didn't really expect I would like him. Probably I was mislead by the fact that he was a bestselling author into expecting something less serious.

This is, I think, his first novel. I was written in 1959, and apparently set about a decade later, but this is hard to notice; it is as if the Eisenhower administration were extended another ten years, the feel is totally 1959 and I just read it as if it were set then, which it really is. There isn't any science fiction component, so I'm not sure why it is supposedly set later.

The story takes place in a poorhouse -- basically an old age home for the indigent, the day of their annual fair. The characters are interesting, complex and well drawn. Updike considers serious questions about reform and bureaucracy, as well as discussing religion and other subjects.

Now that the fifties are the favorite period for conservative nostalgia, it is interesting to read a novel from the fifties where that is the "modern" time, and the characters are nostalgic for earlier times.