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Villages
John Updike’s twenty-first novel, a bildungsroman, follows its hero, Owen Mackenzie, from his birth in the semi-rural Pennsylvania town of Willow to his retirement in the rather geriatric community of Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts. In between these two settlements comes Middle Falls, Connecticut, where Owen, an early computer programmer, founds with a partner, Ed Mervine, the successful firm of E-O Data, which is housed in an old gun factory on the Chunkaunkabaug River. Owen’s education (Bildung) is not merely technical but liberal, as the humanity of his three villages, especially that of their female citizens, works to disengage him from his youthful innocence. As a child he early felt an abyss of calamity beneath the sunny surface quotidian, yet also had a dreamlike sense of leading a charmed existence. The women of his life, including his wives, Phyllis and Julia, shed what light they can. At one juncture he reflects, “How lovely she is, naked in the dark! How little men deserve the beauty and mercy of women!” His life as a sexual being merges with the communal shelter of villages: “A village is woven of secrets, of truths better left unstated, of houses with less window than opaque wall.”
This delightful, witty, passionate novel runs from the Depression era to the early twenty-first century.
From the Hardcover edition.
This delightful, witty, passionate novel runs from the Depression era to the early twenty-first century.
From the Hardcover edition.
321 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
42 people are currently reading
1034 people want to read
About the author
John Updike
861 books2,425 followersJohn 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.
He died of lung cancer at age 76.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 154 reviews
July 24, 2025
My second Updike. And a little less run for this one. Again, the quality of writing and the fine line to identify these characters are always the same. No doubt, the subject, banal, impressed me less.
The treatment of re-exploring one's life through the eyes of an older man with all his experiences is rather interesting. The rather oriented angle of sexuality did not bother me too much, as I am not an extreme Puritan. It is, instead, the heart of the novel, where this choice of narration turns into a somewhat voyeuristic catalog, which annoyed me a little.
Perhaps also, I would have preferred more development in the context of each era crossed and less narcissism in questioning the character. But the two ends of the novel are somewhat very successful and save the whole without worry. Updike remains an American pen to discover by those who do not know him yet.
The treatment of re-exploring one's life through the eyes of an older man with all his experiences is rather interesting. The rather oriented angle of sexuality did not bother me too much, as I am not an extreme Puritan. It is, instead, the heart of the novel, where this choice of narration turns into a somewhat voyeuristic catalog, which annoyed me a little.
Perhaps also, I would have preferred more development in the context of each era crossed and less narcissism in questioning the character. But the two ends of the novel are somewhat very successful and save the whole without worry. Updike remains an American pen to discover by those who do not know him yet.
July 26, 2009
On the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) anytime a movie is totally preposterous, some wag on the forums starts a "100 things I learned from _____" thread.
I'm a little reluctant to do so with "Villages", because it's possible, given the author's fame, that I totally missed the point of the book. (I didn't learn how to evaluate literature in high school, and failed the only literature class I took in college.) On the other hand, probably all the good things about this novel have already been written, so here goes:
100 Things I Learned from "Villages" (Warning! Spoilers!)
100. Women who talk a lot like to have sex a lot. (Who knew?) Conversely, women who major in math at MIT don't like sex much because they are always thinking about numbers.
99. If you're a middle-aged computer nerd, you can have sex with every married woman in the village. Conveniently, each will be more sexually adventurous than the last, although you will not be able to arrange a three-some.
98. The fact that most married women are interested in having affairs can be explained by evolution.
97. A middle-aged computer nerd can turn his office into a sex-den, and nobody will notice except the willing women.
96. The smartest woman at MIT won't mind that her husband has scores of affairs, because she'll blame herself (see #100).
95. A man who revels in his adultrous life will most likely end up marrying and being faithful to the minister's ex-wife (hint: she talks a lot).
94. In bitter divorces, most likely you'll be OK and your soon-to-be ex will conveniently die in a car accident.
93. If you ruin your marriage with adultrous affairs, your kids will be upset, but the only consequence for you is they will wreck your Stingray girl-magnet. Even knowing this, you'll be unable to resist their requests for the keys, due to your deep sense of guilt.
92. Whoever said, "The unexamined life is not worth living" had not read "Villages".
I'm a little reluctant to do so with "Villages", because it's possible, given the author's fame, that I totally missed the point of the book. (I didn't learn how to evaluate literature in high school, and failed the only literature class I took in college.) On the other hand, probably all the good things about this novel have already been written, so here goes:
100 Things I Learned from "Villages" (Warning! Spoilers!)
100. Women who talk a lot like to have sex a lot. (Who knew?) Conversely, women who major in math at MIT don't like sex much because they are always thinking about numbers.
99. If you're a middle-aged computer nerd, you can have sex with every married woman in the village. Conveniently, each will be more sexually adventurous than the last, although you will not be able to arrange a three-some.
98. The fact that most married women are interested in having affairs can be explained by evolution.
97. A middle-aged computer nerd can turn his office into a sex-den, and nobody will notice except the willing women.
96. The smartest woman at MIT won't mind that her husband has scores of affairs, because she'll blame herself (see #100).
95. A man who revels in his adultrous life will most likely end up marrying and being faithful to the minister's ex-wife (hint: she talks a lot).
94. In bitter divorces, most likely you'll be OK and your soon-to-be ex will conveniently die in a car accident.
93. If you ruin your marriage with adultrous affairs, your kids will be upset, but the only consequence for you is they will wreck your Stingray girl-magnet. Even knowing this, you'll be unable to resist their requests for the keys, due to your deep sense of guilt.
92. Whoever said, "The unexamined life is not worth living" had not read "Villages".
August 6, 2025
Fără dezbateri inutile — o carte de cel mai înalt nivel. Cum ar putea un roman de Updike să fie slab?
L-aș recomanda de citit cu lingurița, înghițituri mici. De savurat ca pe o înghețată unică în lume, delicioasă până la spasm.
Nu puteți rata întâlnirea cu John Updike, indiferent cu ce carte a lui, tradusă în română, ați începe.
Omul ăsta ar fi putut lua câte un Pulitzer (măcar) pentru fiecare carte publicată. Pentru cine dorește, am notat pe parcursul lecturii tot soiul de amănunte apreciative. Minus traducerea “overacted” a lui Căstăian. Dar și așa, cartea originală răzbate în românește cu toată forța.
L-aș recomanda de citit cu lingurița, înghițituri mici. De savurat ca pe o înghețată unică în lume, delicioasă până la spasm.
Nu puteți rata întâlnirea cu John Updike, indiferent cu ce carte a lui, tradusă în română, ați începe.
Omul ăsta ar fi putut lua câte un Pulitzer (măcar) pentru fiecare carte publicată. Pentru cine dorește, am notat pe parcursul lecturii tot soiul de amănunte apreciative. Minus traducerea “overacted” a lui Căstăian. Dar și așa, cartea originală răzbate în românește cu toată forța.
November 29, 2024
The book disgusts me. I hate cheaters and the main character is exactly that. There are no Villages there is only a satisfaction he had after every woman he met in his life. Every single woman wants him badly, and simultaneously he has mommy issues... also he finishes so quickly and apologises after. Big ew ! If this book initially had a deeper meaning, I surely didn't catch it..
December 28, 2012
For decades there's been a "Bad Hemingway" contest. You take Papa's style - his short, monosyllabic sentences, his klunky rhythm, his simple grammar, his lack of adjectives, his self-conscious macho posing - and try to make it even worse by caricaturing it. It would be interesting to have a "Bad Updike" contest: his dysphoric, relentlessly physical sex, his unlikable one-dimensional characters, his inability to inhabit female consciousness except insofar as women exist for the endless delectation of men, his sometimes breathtakingly beautiful, sometimes overwritten sentences. Trouble is, we already have a winner: John Updike. All this is on display in Villages, Updike's own caricature of his worst qualities, along with some of the good ones. You don't read Villages for the story, the character development, the description of relationships or, God help us, the sex. You read it for the wonderful Updikean descriptive passages that come along every few pages. Even at 70, he was a writer of both extraordinary power and breathtaking shallowness. Villages has one of the most unlikable and unlikely central characters I've ever encountered, a man named Owen Mackenzie. He starts out as a rather shy, not terribly bright boy in Pennsylvania, somehow gets a full ride to MIT, marries a lovely classmate who is obviously better than he, becomes an early software pioneer, makes a good deal of money. Then, somewhere in his 30's, he moves from being a rather awkward but faithful husband to world class womanizer. How did this change take place? Updike never tells us, but he does tell us at embarrassing length about the physical details of Owen's affairs. He's merrily screwing along when, with no warning at all, he "falls in love" with the minister's wife, quits all his womanizing, divorces his wife, and marries the new woman, who conveniently falls in love with him as well. Nothing leads up to this, but then nothing leads up to anything in what Updike called his BIldungsroman. It's a wretched performance by a writer who contained greatness but was never quite a great writer. Still, it's worth reading for those flights of description and the occasional character portrait that nails a person's individuality like a great snapshot. Updike, I think, was not a long ball hitter. But he could get off a line drive as true as any writer, living or dead. There are much better Updike books than Village. But if you want a summing up of all his qualities, good and bad, in unintentional satirical mode, this one's for you.
July 14, 2020
It's been an interesting, as well as a good read. The book is not as rife with sex, licit and illicit, extramarital and adulterous, as it might be, and despite the focus of Owen the protagonist-narrator on his own sexual life, the book is for the most part taken up by an elaborate background of geographic, social, economic and technological America - without which it would no doubt be a lot less interesting to read. The philosophical musings of Owen, delivered from the closing act of a long and comparatively eventful life, sketch a moderately imaginative and conventionally hedonistic life, a "charmed life" of an only child on the palm of American privilege. Updike knows his business, when it comes to American white middle-class "village" life, as well as its poetic and even romantic portrayal. It's not a scene I am especially curious about, but the writing makes it interesting, and that is no minor trick.
Unexpectedly however, this book found me at a time where its personal impact came from outside of itself, namely by how I'd found some readers' criticisms bewildering, about the book's implicit and explicit sexism and misogyny primarily. It's not the substance of these criticisms that affect me, but the implied idea that as a reader I must somehow take personal alignment morally, and use that as a measure for a work of fitctional literature, as well as my enjoyment thereof. Of course, there's nothing special about that notion, but for reasons unfathomable, it struck me through this book, though I guess by no intention of the author. I only hope it won't corrupt me - the notion, not the book...
Unexpectedly however, this book found me at a time where its personal impact came from outside of itself, namely by how I'd found some readers' criticisms bewildering, about the book's implicit and explicit sexism and misogyny primarily. It's not the substance of these criticisms that affect me, but the implied idea that as a reader I must somehow take personal alignment morally, and use that as a measure for a work of fitctional literature, as well as my enjoyment thereof. Of course, there's nothing special about that notion, but for reasons unfathomable, it struck me through this book, though I guess by no intention of the author. I only hope it won't corrupt me - the notion, not the book...
December 1, 2008
This is about as useless a book as there ever was, and the only reason I didn't give it no stars is because occasionally he'd do a fancy trick and win, but it was all in his imagery and had little to do with the plot. I've put it down with less than 100 pages to go. This is pretty deep dislike, I'm sure you understand.
I guess: if I want to read a novel about the history of 20th century programming, I'll screw a nerd instead. Which I don't want to do, because then I'd be bored. The end.
I guess: if I want to read a novel about the history of 20th century programming, I'll screw a nerd instead. Which I don't want to do, because then I'd be bored. The end.
May 22, 2016
Thankfully, this book revealed itself to be a pile of misogynistic drivel from its very first pages, so I knew very soon not to bother with it for too long. Within the first 20 pages, Updike hammers into the reader's mind that women "let themselves be fucked" as he puts it. He repeats it so often that I found myself wondering whether he holds the sexist viewpoint that women submit and give themselves to men without truly enjoying sex as such, seeing as how frequently his character looks down on women, even as children. Even if Updike is trying to make a statement, he goes about it in such a grating, demeaning manner, never passing up an opportunity to point out the inferiority of the female gender, that it is hard to separate the writer from the character.
Unnecessary, unlikable, pretentious from the start, with a hint of desperation that made me feel icky, littered with drab depictions of Pennsylvania, descriptions of appearances that bordered on clinical and sex scenes so depressingly stale, sexless and full of redundancy as to inspire revulsion.
And that is without even going into the things already criticised in other reviews.
Examples:
"Owen was grateful he did not live in an apartment, just as he was glad not to be a girl or left-handed."
(Thoughts of a boy)
"Being a daughter, wife and mother all in the same house was stressful, she let him know, though he wasn't sure why it would be. He was himself a son and grandson, a classmate and playmate, all at once, and could easily have been somebody's brother. It was as if just being a woman by itself was enough to cause unhappiness."
"...all the time their mouths kissing, until he came, came in his underpants, where the dried jism made a brittle stain he later picked off with his fingernail, hoping his mother wouldn't notice it when she did the wash. In the house they had now she did the wash in a dim cobwebby space under the cellar stairs, on a newer machine than the tub-shaped one that had seized his hand in the Willow basement; his machine had a lid that closed, and a spin-dry phase in its cycle instead of a wringer."
...Really? I would have preferred to read about this guy's dates, as it's a mistery how he even made it past any.
Dreadful.
Unnecessary, unlikable, pretentious from the start, with a hint of desperation that made me feel icky, littered with drab depictions of Pennsylvania, descriptions of appearances that bordered on clinical and sex scenes so depressingly stale, sexless and full of redundancy as to inspire revulsion.
And that is without even going into the things already criticised in other reviews.
Examples:
"Owen was grateful he did not live in an apartment, just as he was glad not to be a girl or left-handed."
(Thoughts of a boy)
"Being a daughter, wife and mother all in the same house was stressful, she let him know, though he wasn't sure why it would be. He was himself a son and grandson, a classmate and playmate, all at once, and could easily have been somebody's brother. It was as if just being a woman by itself was enough to cause unhappiness."
"...all the time their mouths kissing, until he came, came in his underpants, where the dried jism made a brittle stain he later picked off with his fingernail, hoping his mother wouldn't notice it when she did the wash. In the house they had now she did the wash in a dim cobwebby space under the cellar stairs, on a newer machine than the tub-shaped one that had seized his hand in the Willow basement; his machine had a lid that closed, and a spin-dry phase in its cycle instead of a wringer."
...Really? I would have preferred to read about this guy's dates, as it's a mistery how he even made it past any.
Dreadful.
October 1, 2009
Ho hum! I felt as if I had read this story before in previous Updike books. I came across as a mix of Couples and Roger's Version. Computers, the tedious and endless affairs of suburbanites who indulge in extramarital affairs out of nothing but boredom . . . downright uninteresting, lacking in insight, and comparatively uninspired prose. But I do have to give Updike a bit of applause for including in this one the following sentence:
Former President Reagan hangs heavily over the infant millennium: this froggy-voiced actor, this handsome snake-oil salesman who persuaded the poor to vote with the rich, as if indeed they were (itals) rich, has become a haze of pure existence, unemcumbered by any memory of his venturesome life or even by his faithful wife's name, while his own name, thanks to his grateful party, is attached to the capital's airport and a huge downtown building of appropriately vague purpose.
I'd add that this "building of appropriately vague purpose" also includes layers of unnecessary security preventing easy accessibility.
Overall, this one is not worth picking up. If you want to read Updike, pick Rabbit Run, The Centaur, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest, (Rabbit Redux is a little forced in its story line) or even The Witches of Eastwick. They are all so much better example of Updike's world and vision.
Former President Reagan hangs heavily over the infant millennium: this froggy-voiced actor, this handsome snake-oil salesman who persuaded the poor to vote with the rich, as if indeed they were (itals) rich, has become a haze of pure existence, unemcumbered by any memory of his venturesome life or even by his faithful wife's name, while his own name, thanks to his grateful party, is attached to the capital's airport and a huge downtown building of appropriately vague purpose.
I'd add that this "building of appropriately vague purpose" also includes layers of unnecessary security preventing easy accessibility.
Overall, this one is not worth picking up. If you want to read Updike, pick Rabbit Run, The Centaur, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest, (Rabbit Redux is a little forced in its story line) or even The Witches of Eastwick. They are all so much better example of Updike's world and vision.
November 20, 2010
I found this a very disappointing read from one of America's best known novelists. Basically an account of the life of a man, the villages he has lived in Connecticut/New York, his career in the post war fledgling IT industry, and the women he was drawn to. The book jacket described the work as "witty and passionate" but I found the descriptions of his many sexual encounters, narrated in a detached voice, with almost clinical anatomical details, became very tedious. The history of his role in the IT world were equally boring to this reader....I think the only reason I finished this book on audio was that it acted as a soporific and literally sent me to sleep.
July 10, 2024
I enjoyed reading because a lot is well written and observed but it was very misogynistic. He also thinks a lot about his mother and children when he has sex which was very weird
December 20, 2012
this book has got flaws, to be sure. you find yourself frowning every now and then at the dated world view especially where relationships are concerned. but then, the narration is retrospective and the focaliser happens to be a male piece of shit embracing the sixties. a bit of misogyny is part of the deal. then there's the sex. a bit too much of it, it limits the perspective.
still, i loved two things about this book: the language (it goes without saying that updike poeticizes the mundane with utmost skill) and how palpable it made the reality it presented. the detail was amazing. it's like mad men on paper without the overglamourisation.
i think i liked it.
still, i loved two things about this book: the language (it goes without saying that updike poeticizes the mundane with utmost skill) and how palpable it made the reality it presented. the detail was amazing. it's like mad men on paper without the overglamourisation.
i think i liked it.
October 9, 2008
too much like updike
March 10, 2009
The storyline just progressed too slowly for me. Plus I didn't like to see the blatant disregard for the sacrosanct of marriage and the whimsical and the laissez-faire attitude of infidelity.
October 21, 2020
When did you first use a computer? John Updike's Villages, written in 2004, follows Owen Mackenzie's career as a computer programmer, which began in the days when computers were in their infancy. My first experience with a computer was in 1975, as a freshman at the University of Missouri - Kansas City. The library had a rudimentary computer terminal that offered a bank of 10,000 multiple choice questions for pre-med students. In Villages, during Owen's days studying in the late 50's, came a pretty hilarious early computer reference, when a student in a discussion of advances in technology says, "Pretty soon we'll have a computer no bigger than a refrigerator." Updike's novel moves back and forth between three segments of Owen's life - his childhood, his work and child raising years while married to Phyllis, and his retirement years when he is married to Julia.
Updike was so great at evoking his characters' memories of idyllic childhoods:
"He believed everything he was told and took comfort, abnormally much, from the town's presiding public presences - the schoolteachers, and the highway crew, who from their tarry truck threw down cinders in winter and smoking gravel in the summer, and the three town cops, one short, one fat, and one with a rumored drinking problem. He took comfort from the little old lady, her glasses on a cord around her goitrous neck, who accepted their monthly electric bill at her barred window in Borough Hall, and the mailman, Mr. Bingham, who with the heroism of the well-publicized postal-service slogan heroically plodded his way up and down Mifflin Avenue twice a day, leaning at an angle away from the weight of his leather pouch in which Mickey Mouse comic books and secret decoding rings and signed photographs of movie stars would sometimes come to Owen."
Updike even brought back a memory from my own childhood that I hadn't thought of in decades:
"... shallow troughs that carried roof water out to the gutter."
I remember those - they ran alongside driveways! Gosh, I'm not sure where I saw those. Not in any neighborhood I lived in. The Hill in St. Louis? My great aunt Lil's neighborhood in Dundalk, Maryland?
Having lived for 9 years in a beautiful small town in Northern California, I enjoyed his great description of small-town life:
"... content with the relatively thin local pickings in exchange for the old town's tonic air of freedom, a freedom bred of long neglect, of being bypassed and as yet little spoiled, of being no place special and triumphantly American in that."
Updike always gets me using the dictionary. That's a good thing. "irruption": a violent incursion or invasion.
There's plenty of Updike's erotic writing here, too. Much of the story centers around Owen's sex life, largely extramarital, in all its physical, emotional, moral and biological iterations, complexities and ramifications. The twist in this Updike is that there is a scene of great tenderness toward the end of the story. Tenderness is not an emotion that Updike seemed to write into many of his books. We may feel tenderly toward some of his characters, but they don't often feel that way toward each other.
But this morning I decided that what makes Updike's writing special to me is his ability to TRANSPORT me completely to a setting. With no other author do I feel as totally immersed in a place and time, with all of its accoutrements and idiosyncrasies of language, clothing, architecture and thought. He gets to the deepest truths of our thoughts, how things make us feel, what reminds us of what, how present and past actions and sights get connected in our minds.
Updike was so great at evoking his characters' memories of idyllic childhoods:
"He believed everything he was told and took comfort, abnormally much, from the town's presiding public presences - the schoolteachers, and the highway crew, who from their tarry truck threw down cinders in winter and smoking gravel in the summer, and the three town cops, one short, one fat, and one with a rumored drinking problem. He took comfort from the little old lady, her glasses on a cord around her goitrous neck, who accepted their monthly electric bill at her barred window in Borough Hall, and the mailman, Mr. Bingham, who with the heroism of the well-publicized postal-service slogan heroically plodded his way up and down Mifflin Avenue twice a day, leaning at an angle away from the weight of his leather pouch in which Mickey Mouse comic books and secret decoding rings and signed photographs of movie stars would sometimes come to Owen."
Updike even brought back a memory from my own childhood that I hadn't thought of in decades:
"... shallow troughs that carried roof water out to the gutter."
I remember those - they ran alongside driveways! Gosh, I'm not sure where I saw those. Not in any neighborhood I lived in. The Hill in St. Louis? My great aunt Lil's neighborhood in Dundalk, Maryland?
Having lived for 9 years in a beautiful small town in Northern California, I enjoyed his great description of small-town life:
"... content with the relatively thin local pickings in exchange for the old town's tonic air of freedom, a freedom bred of long neglect, of being bypassed and as yet little spoiled, of being no place special and triumphantly American in that."
Updike always gets me using the dictionary. That's a good thing. "irruption": a violent incursion or invasion.
There's plenty of Updike's erotic writing here, too. Much of the story centers around Owen's sex life, largely extramarital, in all its physical, emotional, moral and biological iterations, complexities and ramifications. The twist in this Updike is that there is a scene of great tenderness toward the end of the story. Tenderness is not an emotion that Updike seemed to write into many of his books. We may feel tenderly toward some of his characters, but they don't often feel that way toward each other.
But this morning I decided that what makes Updike's writing special to me is his ability to TRANSPORT me completely to a setting. With no other author do I feel as totally immersed in a place and time, with all of its accoutrements and idiosyncrasies of language, clothing, architecture and thought. He gets to the deepest truths of our thoughts, how things make us feel, what reminds us of what, how present and past actions and sights get connected in our minds.
April 9, 2025
I picked up a used copy at my local bookstore almost on impulse. I have a fondness for Updike since I grew up in Ipswich where Updike lived and worked for many years and went to school with his children. He was for a while in the late sixties and early seventies, a kind of local celebrity. Part of my interest in reading Updike is that he often used recognizable places and people as fodder for his fiction, and it was always fun to see if you could suss out who or what he was actually referring to in his stories. Updike also used his own personal experiences, memories and feelings, (as any writer does) to create every male character he has ever written, but in this book I feel there are so many similarities between Updike, and his main character Owen Mackenzie that I wonder if the book is more autobiographical than one might suspect.
I know Updike's general Waspy worldview and swinging sexual mores has not aged particularly well, but he still writes incredibly well and and is able to evoke certain places and times in a way that at seems almost transcendentally poetic. I loved the descriptions of small town life in the Pennsylvania of the 30's and 40's, and descriptions of Boston and Cambridge in the 50's. They feel like some kind of historical record. I also enjoyed his descriptions of the fictional town of Middle Falls Connecticut, which bears a more than passing resemblance to Ipswich, MA.
I have to admit that I was bored with the cataloging of Owen's growing infidelity that comprises the bulk of the middle of the book. "Oh look, bored, upper-class, white suburbanites dabbling in infidelity". Ho-Hum. It feels very dated, almost sad. His sexual conquests are very male-gaze oriented and a little embarrassing. The women feel interchangeable: it's hard to keep strait who is who, and you kind of don't care. They are less fully fledged characters than a collection of body parts and quirks, like window dressing or accessories to Owen's story. They read a little like something you'd find on Reddit if it was written by a Pulitzer-prize winner. It's basically porn; literate, well written porn, but porn nonetheless.
Owen's children come off in a similar way. Sketchy, interchangeable, unimportant, background accessories in Owen's life.
And yet, Updile seems to be genuinely trying to understand himself and that particular world, as if he's never really understood how anything works, especially human relationships.
The book only became really interesting to me in the last chapters, as he is winding down the infidelity and dealing with the realities of aging in a rapidly changing world. This is the part of the book that made me feel it was especially autobiographical, not only because of the similarities between Updikes's life and Owen's, but also because this book came out in 2005, just four years before Updike died from cancer, and I feel like he was looking back on his life in much the same way as his main character. He does this with clarity, and humor and a bit of pathos that is lacking in the rest of the book. I also related to this life review as an older white male from the same part of the world. I am at an age where this kind of life review happens more often as you look back on all the things that you did, both good and bad, and try to figure out why things happened the way they did, and what, if anything, it all means.
This last chapter made the rest of the book feel more honest and worthwhile. Updike was always an author who chronicled a very particular place and time, and that place and time is now long gone, and he seems to know that, and that it's both brutal and inevitable.
He seems to be asking, once you strip away your work, and the titillation of illicit sex, what is left? The answer seems to be, not much, and for that brutal honesty, I thank him.
I know Updike's general Waspy worldview and swinging sexual mores has not aged particularly well, but he still writes incredibly well and and is able to evoke certain places and times in a way that at seems almost transcendentally poetic. I loved the descriptions of small town life in the Pennsylvania of the 30's and 40's, and descriptions of Boston and Cambridge in the 50's. They feel like some kind of historical record. I also enjoyed his descriptions of the fictional town of Middle Falls Connecticut, which bears a more than passing resemblance to Ipswich, MA.
I have to admit that I was bored with the cataloging of Owen's growing infidelity that comprises the bulk of the middle of the book. "Oh look, bored, upper-class, white suburbanites dabbling in infidelity". Ho-Hum. It feels very dated, almost sad. His sexual conquests are very male-gaze oriented and a little embarrassing. The women feel interchangeable: it's hard to keep strait who is who, and you kind of don't care. They are less fully fledged characters than a collection of body parts and quirks, like window dressing or accessories to Owen's story. They read a little like something you'd find on Reddit if it was written by a Pulitzer-prize winner. It's basically porn; literate, well written porn, but porn nonetheless.
Owen's children come off in a similar way. Sketchy, interchangeable, unimportant, background accessories in Owen's life.
And yet, Updile seems to be genuinely trying to understand himself and that particular world, as if he's never really understood how anything works, especially human relationships.
The book only became really interesting to me in the last chapters, as he is winding down the infidelity and dealing with the realities of aging in a rapidly changing world. This is the part of the book that made me feel it was especially autobiographical, not only because of the similarities between Updikes's life and Owen's, but also because this book came out in 2005, just four years before Updike died from cancer, and I feel like he was looking back on his life in much the same way as his main character. He does this with clarity, and humor and a bit of pathos that is lacking in the rest of the book. I also related to this life review as an older white male from the same part of the world. I am at an age where this kind of life review happens more often as you look back on all the things that you did, both good and bad, and try to figure out why things happened the way they did, and what, if anything, it all means.
This last chapter made the rest of the book feel more honest and worthwhile. Updike was always an author who chronicled a very particular place and time, and that place and time is now long gone, and he seems to know that, and that it's both brutal and inevitable.
He seems to be asking, once you strip away your work, and the titillation of illicit sex, what is left? The answer seems to be, not much, and for that brutal honesty, I thank him.
June 4, 2019
Ho amato moltissimo questo romanzo, in primo luogo e soprattutto per la scrittura di Updike: diretta, succosa, ricca, colorata, articolata, vivace, frizzante e moderna. Poi l'ho amato per l'approccio senza barriere e senza ipocrisie verso gli argomenti fulcro, il sesso, l'infedeltà, il matrimonio. E ancora per i personaggi, il protagonista in primis, ottimamente tratteggiati e presi per mano dall'autore che li cura, li cresce e li accudisce.
Ottimo libro.
Ottimo libro.
March 18, 2019
Primo incontro con Updike: una prosa elegante e limpida, mai volgare, anche se l’insistenza del racconto delle esperienze erotiche un po’ stanca, una capacità notevole di condurre il lettore nel mondo dei suoi personaggi non sempre simpatici ma molto reali, abilissimo nel mostrare una società benestante e contraddittoria, allo stesso tempo moralista e sfacciata, disorientata ed egocentrica senza sensi di colpa. Di questo autore voglio leggere altro
April 5, 2019
This is a curate's egg of a book. Growing up and growing old in small town America is beautifully captured in some wonderfully evocative prose. Wedged between is an awful section on infidelity in small town America. Owen McKenzie himself wondered why he engaged in these squalid affairs, I certainly did, and as for the stomach turning sex scenes! Least said, soonest mended. Miss out the central hundred or so pages and you've got a good read!
September 16, 2021
don’t care enough to even finish reading it. lacks both substance & style
June 18, 2018
John Updike's 2004 novel, Villages, takes us into the life of Owen Mackenzie from his boyhood in Pennsylvania to his final days in Massachusetts with stops in Cambridge for education (MIT versus Updike's Harvard), New York City for professional development (ditto Updike) and Connecticut (not haunted by an Updikean ghost as far as I know). As usual, Updike writes with astounding stylistic flourishes and a broad grounding in science, natural and manmade. The manmade science here is computer science, specifically programming, which becomes the purpose to which Owen puts his degree in electrical engineering. The natural science is the science, or knowing, or experiencing, of human sexuality.
We'll chuck the professional journey Owen follows, largely used for narrative purposes, and focus on the heart of the matter. As his wife tells him on the eve of their divorce (after four children and a long series of infidelities on Owen's part), he never really grew up. He looked and acted like a man but did so with the sense of impunity a child might assert when said child took more than his share of life's goodies.
There are lots of inventive and graphic and various sexual encounters and partners in this novel. There is high school exploration, there is college infatuation, there is pre- and post-marital fooling around, and there is a kind of untrustworthy finale with Owen's rather motherly second wife. The high school girls are more assertive than Owen expects, his long-time first wife Phyllis is a reserved beauty (also a brilliant mathematician), and the affairs run from trysts after the conference program concludes in Vegas to nuzzles in the Connecticut woods with first-timers to locked-door office randiness with an underling to pounces on women in Middle Falls, a Connecticut village, who are bored or vulnerable or compliant or, in one case, quite knowing in what strikes Owen as a rather manly way.
The fact that the four children has with Phyllis are barely sketched-in has more to do with Updike's focus on unraveling Owen than any lack of writerly breadth--Updike could do anything with prose fiction, of course. In the process he may have reveal a lot about women's sexuality or, from a knowledgeable woman's point of view, he may simply be indulging in lascivious, self-centered fantasy--perhaps like Owen himself.
As vividly as Updike wrote about middle class sexcapades in New England, making his fortune with Couples in the late 60s, one might think (I might think) that he wrote even better in more restrained and allusive stories, or, in the Pennsylvania-based Rabbit books. Rabbit shows much more heft than Owen does; the fixes he finds himself in hurt more; he really, really wants more; and his choice in women, ah, Janice, is more three-dimensional, earthy, confused and costly.
Updike's underlying theory of the case in Villages is that villages are places where procreative urges are facilitated in service to human survival. He makes many stabs at giving Owen a sense of existential freedom by means of women, but Owen is not quite such highfalutin' material. He's after the next partner in mischief, the next exploration of female anatomy, the next opportunity not to make his marriage to Phyllis work.
Owen and Phyllis's last conversation is a penetrating study in her understanding of him and of herself. It's a fine confrontation. He gets it, but he can't deal with. Fortunately for him, and unfortunately for her, the plot is what really springs him loose.
We'll chuck the professional journey Owen follows, largely used for narrative purposes, and focus on the heart of the matter. As his wife tells him on the eve of their divorce (after four children and a long series of infidelities on Owen's part), he never really grew up. He looked and acted like a man but did so with the sense of impunity a child might assert when said child took more than his share of life's goodies.
There are lots of inventive and graphic and various sexual encounters and partners in this novel. There is high school exploration, there is college infatuation, there is pre- and post-marital fooling around, and there is a kind of untrustworthy finale with Owen's rather motherly second wife. The high school girls are more assertive than Owen expects, his long-time first wife Phyllis is a reserved beauty (also a brilliant mathematician), and the affairs run from trysts after the conference program concludes in Vegas to nuzzles in the Connecticut woods with first-timers to locked-door office randiness with an underling to pounces on women in Middle Falls, a Connecticut village, who are bored or vulnerable or compliant or, in one case, quite knowing in what strikes Owen as a rather manly way.
The fact that the four children has with Phyllis are barely sketched-in has more to do with Updike's focus on unraveling Owen than any lack of writerly breadth--Updike could do anything with prose fiction, of course. In the process he may have reveal a lot about women's sexuality or, from a knowledgeable woman's point of view, he may simply be indulging in lascivious, self-centered fantasy--perhaps like Owen himself.
As vividly as Updike wrote about middle class sexcapades in New England, making his fortune with Couples in the late 60s, one might think (I might think) that he wrote even better in more restrained and allusive stories, or, in the Pennsylvania-based Rabbit books. Rabbit shows much more heft than Owen does; the fixes he finds himself in hurt more; he really, really wants more; and his choice in women, ah, Janice, is more three-dimensional, earthy, confused and costly.
Updike's underlying theory of the case in Villages is that villages are places where procreative urges are facilitated in service to human survival. He makes many stabs at giving Owen a sense of existential freedom by means of women, but Owen is not quite such highfalutin' material. He's after the next partner in mischief, the next exploration of female anatomy, the next opportunity not to make his marriage to Phyllis work.
Owen and Phyllis's last conversation is a penetrating study in her understanding of him and of herself. It's a fine confrontation. He gets it, but he can't deal with. Fortunately for him, and unfortunately for her, the plot is what really springs him loose.
March 18, 2009
I've never read any Updike except for his reviews and essays in the New Yorker, which I really liked. So I thought I'd give his novels a whirl, especially since everyone loooooooves him. But I just could not stand anything about this book. Here's an excerpt from the inner thoughts of the main character (I just can't call him a "hero"), to give you an idea why:
"Why do women go along with men? Perhaps it was a simple question of electrical engineering: in a world full of plugs, nature must provide sockets."
Ew.
The main character is a blundering, entitled buffoon who believes that his life is charmed, so he can do whatever he wants, including having sex with basically every woman in his social circle. That his actions have consequences for a growing number of people around him doesn't even cross his mind, much less make him lose sleep. At one point, after being too "forward" with a woman he has his eye on, he swiftly changes the topic to something lighter, thinking to himself that women's desire to please always overcomes their discomfort, and that he can take advantage of that fact. There is a lot in here trying to describe the characteristics of men and women and what distinguishes them, and it's all very misogynist and certainly doesn't apply to any of the men and women I know. The main character is just a repulsive person, and the women with whom he conducts his affairs disgust as well. I'm really not sure why this book was written, because although I am sure that this type of person exists in the world, I don't really want to read about it. Ignorance is bliss in this case.
That said, I will probably try another of Updike's novels, I guess one of the Rabbit ones, to see if it's any better. I sure hope so.
"Why do women go along with men? Perhaps it was a simple question of electrical engineering: in a world full of plugs, nature must provide sockets."
Ew.
The main character is a blundering, entitled buffoon who believes that his life is charmed, so he can do whatever he wants, including having sex with basically every woman in his social circle. That his actions have consequences for a growing number of people around him doesn't even cross his mind, much less make him lose sleep. At one point, after being too "forward" with a woman he has his eye on, he swiftly changes the topic to something lighter, thinking to himself that women's desire to please always overcomes their discomfort, and that he can take advantage of that fact. There is a lot in here trying to describe the characteristics of men and women and what distinguishes them, and it's all very misogynist and certainly doesn't apply to any of the men and women I know. The main character is just a repulsive person, and the women with whom he conducts his affairs disgust as well. I'm really not sure why this book was written, because although I am sure that this type of person exists in the world, I don't really want to read about it. Ignorance is bliss in this case.
That said, I will probably try another of Updike's novels, I guess one of the Rabbit ones, to see if it's any better. I sure hope so.
June 15, 2016
Me ha gustado, aunque a Updike le podríamos reprochar, por nonagésima cincuenta y cuarta vez, que a veces escribe tan updikeanamente bien que uno parece atrapado por su talento. Novela de formación que recuerda a otras mejores - como la preciosa El Centauro - con pasajes sobrecogedores y una mirada muy especial, el relato de Owen Mackenzie, su paso a la universidad y su vejez se tiñe de una inesperada oscuridad hacia el final.
Tal vez el libro se lea como tantos otros, sin ser tan bueno como esa pequeña y difícil celebración teológica que es La versión de Roger - una teología pagana, claro - o sin ser tan abusivamente costumbrista como Parejas - con el descubrimiento que a veces desencaja las escenas.
Bueno, quiero decir, que está Dios viendo todo esto incluyendo la tragedia y oscuridad ("interior y exterior"), lo adúltero y este eros tan bien relacionado con los impasibles ascensos sociales de nuestro protagonista, el hombre común updikeano tocado por la gracia de ser ahora ingeniero de sistemas en una américa floreciente de la segunda mitad del siglo veinte.
Me gusta el peso moral del sexo, el modo en que Updike se pregunta - casi como sus críticos - si este sexo que vivimos con y a partir de Owen no es un peaje moral; el cierre es buenísimo, pero el viaje por las décadas es demasiado liviano, tiene la facilidad de sus textos periodísticos y le falta ese punto enrarecido que consigue a veces.
Pero es Updike, claro.
Tal vez el libro se lea como tantos otros, sin ser tan bueno como esa pequeña y difícil celebración teológica que es La versión de Roger - una teología pagana, claro - o sin ser tan abusivamente costumbrista como Parejas - con el descubrimiento que a veces desencaja las escenas.
Bueno, quiero decir, que está Dios viendo todo esto incluyendo la tragedia y oscuridad ("interior y exterior"), lo adúltero y este eros tan bien relacionado con los impasibles ascensos sociales de nuestro protagonista, el hombre común updikeano tocado por la gracia de ser ahora ingeniero de sistemas en una américa floreciente de la segunda mitad del siglo veinte.
Me gusta el peso moral del sexo, el modo en que Updike se pregunta - casi como sus críticos - si este sexo que vivimos con y a partir de Owen no es un peaje moral; el cierre es buenísimo, pero el viaje por las décadas es demasiado liviano, tiene la facilidad de sus textos periodísticos y le falta ese punto enrarecido que consigue a veces.
Pero es Updike, claro.
August 6, 2009
This novel, read magnificently in its audio version by Edward Herrmann, is vintage Updike. A man in his 70s remembers & celebrates the women in his life--mother, grandmother, girlfriends, 2 wives, lovers--their beauty, their sexuality, their contributions to his developing selfhood. Typically, there's lots of vividly described sex. The central question seems to be: Why do women fuck, when it comes with such tremendous costs for them, costs that men such as the book's subject mostly ignore? He sets the question (less successfully) in the context of the villages within which this fucking (& its consequences) occur. As he concludes, (in a statement probably not adequately set up by the preceding narrative): "Life is madness. Villages exist to moderate that madness." Beautifully, perceptively wrtten, as always, with Updike's usual keen insights into the vicissitudes of the cultural experiences of middle-class American males since WWII, it could have explored more thoroughly & perceptively this moderating role of villages.
September 14, 2013
I'm saying this a lot at the moment because I seem to be targetting really excellent books but this has to be a candidate for book of the year.
It starts with Ed and his wife Julia in their dotage, talking to each other as though they were babies...
Then it goes back in time and reveals Ed's sexual history, from teenage fumblings in the back of cars to his first marriage to Phyllis and then his numerous indescretions.
This reaches a climax when they eventually split and phyllis dies in a car accident. He has run off with the Vicars wife.
Its told in a really straightforward manner with no end of great insights and sentances. Apparently, Updike has a habit of making "anti-heros" with real human failings, as was evident with the Rabbit series.
The story is simple but from a man in his last days its a real insight into life..... there are so many great comments about the way that we interact in society and with each other, including our wives and our families.
Absolutely loved it and will certainly head back for more.
It starts with Ed and his wife Julia in their dotage, talking to each other as though they were babies...
Then it goes back in time and reveals Ed's sexual history, from teenage fumblings in the back of cars to his first marriage to Phyllis and then his numerous indescretions.
This reaches a climax when they eventually split and phyllis dies in a car accident. He has run off with the Vicars wife.
Its told in a really straightforward manner with no end of great insights and sentances. Apparently, Updike has a habit of making "anti-heros" with real human failings, as was evident with the Rabbit series.
The story is simple but from a man in his last days its a real insight into life..... there are so many great comments about the way that we interact in society and with each other, including our wives and our families.
Absolutely loved it and will certainly head back for more.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 17, 2011
Typical Updike. His prose always reminds me of paintings, this story is no exception, though this time his protagonist is framing the world though a single mathematical inquiry, and approaching life as a computer programmer.
The story rating is a 2-3, but the audio presentation is what truly pleased me: Edward Herrmann’s (of ubiquitous History Channel narrations/Mr. Richard Gilmore in Gilmore Girls) reading is simply wonderful. I find that Updike is the perfect writer to have read aloud to you, and Herrmann was more than the perfect reader.
The story rating is a 2-3, but the audio presentation is what truly pleased me: Edward Herrmann’s (of ubiquitous History Channel narrations/Mr. Richard Gilmore in Gilmore Girls) reading is simply wonderful. I find that Updike is the perfect writer to have read aloud to you, and Herrmann was more than the perfect reader.
January 30, 2009
I tried hard to get into this book. I love Updike and really wanted to get into this story. Problem was that 4 chapters in I still wasn't sure where the story was going and I didn't like any characters enough to care. I actually sold this one to the used bookstore unfinished - something very unlike me.
June 28, 2015
A look at the life of a relatively ordinary man with the unique lens of how a village and its mores shape that life. A bit raw at times as is often the case with Updike but ultimately sad. The life lived seems to center on wanting newer and more. Though in old age there is consideration of that quest.
June 11, 2023
In his twenty-second novel, written in his early 70s, Updike returns to what is important to him--impending death, hazed with religious consolation; childhood before the age of ten in a semi-rural Pennsylvanian 'string town' or Philadelphia exurb; and various mid-life adulteries, which socialise and refine the pov character. It would be a mistake, though, to think the novel under-motivated, say compared to previous ones; it may be urgent for the 70yo Updike to remember these things. The basic situation is familiar; unlike someone born even ten years later, Owen is virginal before marriage, and has his sexual education between ten and twenty years later. The refinement in this text is to make Owen (who with his too much nose and sandy hair looks like Updike) a computer programmer, a reluctant visionary who understands the interface with a screen will be something other than a command line. The effect, wilful and slightly strained, is to make America's story in the second half of the century more like Updike's.
The son of an accountant laid off by the metalworks and grandson of an embittered hardware store owner whose improvements of domestic appliances are not taken up by manufacturers, Owen grows up in a sexually repressive atmosphere. A condom is a 'stork-stopper'. At MIT, he gravitates to Phyllis, one of the few coeds, whose father is a Harvard professor and scholar of floridly neo-Platonic prose. Phyllis is higher-minded, more of a pure mathematian and admirer of the intricacies of set theory than he is. But the world of computers is not cut out for women, and she drifts in grad school after her honors thesis in Riemannian geometry, while Owen, seen by her as a 'bird', free-spirited and rapacious, overcomes the school's cultural alienness by graduating in the top third of his class. He is tapped by a more business-minded friend, Ed, to start up a consultancy for the middle-sized firms needing storage systems and retrieval and processing routines underserved by IBM. The cheapness of office and warehouse space out beyond Hartford sees them set up in Willow, Connecticut.
Owen starts having affairs because, although his wife is more real to him than other women, the sex has become infrequent, routinised and grudging. His conquests or tutors blur into each other, though there is a description of the breasts of each of his mistresses. He ends up with the Protestant minister's wife, marrying her (the frame setting, of an affectionately geriatric couple) despite Phyllis's protestation she will extricate him from his muddle. He asked so much of sex, or of her through sex, that she did not blame herself for being stinting, or for his more-or-less well-understood in the village progress of affairs. Owen characteristically wants sex but not to imperil his family and marriage. Divorcing the professor's daughter is the first adult act of his life. Updike's celebration of sex can tend to the self-satisfied--'one-night stands had their undersides of sorrow, but had he ever been more crazily happy, more transcendently himself, than when Mirabelle was blowing him while he sped at ninety miles an hour into the flat Nevada desert, straight into the rising morning sun?'--but even here, one cannot be sure the self-parody isn't parody, some kind of slant or top-spun irony or insight. A slightly worse fault for me, with this novel, is a habit of broad-brush euphemism ('his final village') and the tricking of Updike's remniscences as historical commentary, as sex comes with the crumbling of the 'old austerities' and in Eisenhower's second term, 'bourgeois comfort took on girth'.
The son of an accountant laid off by the metalworks and grandson of an embittered hardware store owner whose improvements of domestic appliances are not taken up by manufacturers, Owen grows up in a sexually repressive atmosphere. A condom is a 'stork-stopper'. At MIT, he gravitates to Phyllis, one of the few coeds, whose father is a Harvard professor and scholar of floridly neo-Platonic prose. Phyllis is higher-minded, more of a pure mathematian and admirer of the intricacies of set theory than he is. But the world of computers is not cut out for women, and she drifts in grad school after her honors thesis in Riemannian geometry, while Owen, seen by her as a 'bird', free-spirited and rapacious, overcomes the school's cultural alienness by graduating in the top third of his class. He is tapped by a more business-minded friend, Ed, to start up a consultancy for the middle-sized firms needing storage systems and retrieval and processing routines underserved by IBM. The cheapness of office and warehouse space out beyond Hartford sees them set up in Willow, Connecticut.
Owen starts having affairs because, although his wife is more real to him than other women, the sex has become infrequent, routinised and grudging. His conquests or tutors blur into each other, though there is a description of the breasts of each of his mistresses. He ends up with the Protestant minister's wife, marrying her (the frame setting, of an affectionately geriatric couple) despite Phyllis's protestation she will extricate him from his muddle. He asked so much of sex, or of her through sex, that she did not blame herself for being stinting, or for his more-or-less well-understood in the village progress of affairs. Owen characteristically wants sex but not to imperil his family and marriage. Divorcing the professor's daughter is the first adult act of his life. Updike's celebration of sex can tend to the self-satisfied--'one-night stands had their undersides of sorrow, but had he ever been more crazily happy, more transcendently himself, than when Mirabelle was blowing him while he sped at ninety miles an hour into the flat Nevada desert, straight into the rising morning sun?'--but even here, one cannot be sure the self-parody isn't parody, some kind of slant or top-spun irony or insight. A slightly worse fault for me, with this novel, is a habit of broad-brush euphemism ('his final village') and the tricking of Updike's remniscences as historical commentary, as sex comes with the crumbling of the 'old austerities' and in Eisenhower's second term, 'bourgeois comfort took on girth'.
December 29, 2021
Of all the editions they have here on Goodreads they don't have the one I read, which is a paperback but with the cover shown on a hardback, of the Jean Auguste painting, The Turkish Bath. Maybe I'm rich, with a super rare edition.
That cover, of a large number of nude women, lets you know that in the 2004 Villages, Updike will write about sex, as he often did. He and others of his generation have been MeTooed for the way they write about it, but I find it appropriate for a man of his era writing about his time. It'd be a shame not to read books like this because Updike's observations about many other things are so deep and astute that you wonder how he got so much of it down into words. Anyone interested in the history of computers will appreciate the era covered here, as the main character is an MIT graduate who goes from being in the forefront of the industry to relegated to obscurity in the field.
As usual, maybe as always, his prose is so good and his observations so insightful that even if you don't like what he's saying, you get a lot out of how he's saying it.
That cover, of a large number of nude women, lets you know that in the 2004 Villages, Updike will write about sex, as he often did. He and others of his generation have been MeTooed for the way they write about it, but I find it appropriate for a man of his era writing about his time. It'd be a shame not to read books like this because Updike's observations about many other things are so deep and astute that you wonder how he got so much of it down into words. Anyone interested in the history of computers will appreciate the era covered here, as the main character is an MIT graduate who goes from being in the forefront of the industry to relegated to obscurity in the field.
As usual, maybe as always, his prose is so good and his observations so insightful that even if you don't like what he's saying, you get a lot out of how he's saying it.
In Haskells crossing, people die. They show you how to do it. They do it out of sight, among professional nurses and faithful retainers, usually, though in rare instances they drop dead without warning while, say, pushing up the hill on the thirteenth hole, or in the middle of a nap after a boozy Sunday lunch. Death never loses its quality of unexpectedness. Life does not expect it; the living mind cannot conceive of it. Some citizens die soon after elaborate cosmetic surgery, or a difficult multiple-bypass operation, or an expensive house renovation, preparing for the years ahead; they die regardless.
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