Seek My Face: A Novel by John Updike (English) Paperback Book

Description: Seek My Face by John Updike John Updikes provocative and absorbing 20th novel, like his first, "The Poorhouse Fair" (1959), takes place in one day, a day that contains much discussion and some rain. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description A riveting novel that takes place in one day about an elderly painter and the New Yorker interviewing her—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. "A brief novel of deep feeling."—TimeOn a day that contains much conversation and some rain, the seventy-eight-year-old painter Hope Chafetz, who in the course of her eventful life has been Hope Ouderkirk, Hope McCoy, and Hope Holloway, answers questions put to her by a New York interviewer named Kathryn, and recapitulates, through the story of her own career, the triumphant, poignant saga of postwar American art. In the evolving relation between the two women, the interviewer and interviewee move in and out of the roles of daughter and mother, therapist and patient, predator and prey, supplicant and idol. The scene is central Vermont; the time is the early spring of 2001. Author Biography John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009. Review "A brief novel of deep feeling . . . What you recall is that reading Updike has always provided the pleasures you hoped were in store when you went through the trouble of learning to read."—Time "The premise of Seek My Face is clean and powerful, like a canvas by Barnett Newman. . . . Swirled over [it] is John Updikes superabundant prose, dazzling strings of looping sentences that wrap these two women in glittering constellations of words."—The New York Observer "A rewarding new novel from our reigning master of surprise, the last sequence of which is surpassing in its beauty."—San Francisco Chronicle Review Quote "A brief novel of deep feeling . . . What you recall is that reading Updike has always provided the pleasures you hoped were in store when you went through the trouble of learning to read."-- Time Excerpt from Book "LET ME BEGIN by reading to you," says the young woman, her slender, black-clad figure tensely jackknifed on the edge of the easy chair, with its faded coarse plaid and broad arms of orangish varnished oak, which Hope first knew in the Germantown sunroom, her grandfather posed in it reading the newspaper, his head tilted back to gain the benefit of his thick bifocals, more than, yes, seventy years ago, "a statement of yours from the catalogue of your last show, back in 1996." As a child Hope would sit in the chair trying to feel what it was like to be an adult, resting her little round elbows on the broad arms, spreading her fingers, a ring of fat between each joint, on the dowel end, which was set in the softly curved arm, a kind of wooden coin with a pale stripe in it, the butt end of the wedge that tightened the dowel. The chairs arms had been too far apart for her to rest more than one elbow and hand at a time. She must have been-what?-five, six. Even when new, in the twenties or teens, the chair would have been a homely unfashionable thing, a summer kind of furniture, baking in the many-windowed sunroom with the potted philodendron and the lopsided hassock, the hassocks top divided like a pie in long triangular slices of different colors of leather. When her grandmothers death in the fifties had at last broken up the Germantown house, Hope coveted the old chair and, her amused surviving brother making no objection, brought it to Long Island, where it sat upstairs in her so-called studio, where she would sometimes try to read by the north window, the sash leaking wind howling in off Block Island Sound while Zack played jazz records-Armstrong, Benny Goodman, a scratchy Beiderbecke-too loud downstairs; and then to the apartment with Guy and the children on East Seventy-ninth, in the dun-walled back spare room by the radiator that clanked like a demented prisoner while she tried to set her own rhythm with the loaded brush; and then to Vermont, where she and Jerry had bought and renovated and dug in for their last stand in life, a chair transported from muggy Pennsylvania to a colder, higher climate yet hardly incongruous in this plain, prim, low-ceilinged front parlor, the chairs round front feet resting on the oval rug of braided rags in a spiral, its square back feet on the floorboards painted the shiny black-red of Bing cherries, the browns and greens and thin crimsons of its plaid further fading into one pale tan, here in the sparse blue mountain light of early April. Strange, Hope thought, how things trail us place to place, more loyal than organic friends, who desert us by dying. The Germantown house became overgrown in Grandmothers lonely last years, its thick sandstone walls eaten to the second-story windowsills by gloomy flourishing shrubbery, hydrangea and holly and a smoke tree whose branches broke in every ice storm or wet snow, the whitewash flaking and the pointing falling out in brittle long crumbs lost down among the stems of the peonies, the roots of the holly. She had loved living there when so small, but after her parents moved to Ardmore visits back felt strange, the huge droopy-limbed hemlock having grown sinister, the yard with its soft grass smelling heated and still like the air of a greenhouse, the swing that her spry little grandfather, the first person Hope knew ever to die, had hung from the limb of the walnut tree rotting, ropes and board, in an eternally neglected way that frightened her. The young woman, a narrow new knife in the chairs fat old sheath, reads in her edgy New York voice, a voice that leans toward Hope with a pressure of anxiousness but also with what seems, in this shaky light of late life, a kind of daughterly affection, "For a long time I have lived as a recluse, fearing the many evidences of Gods non-existence with which the world abounds. The world, it has come to me slowly, is the Devils motley, colorful instead of pure. I restrict my present canvases to shades of gray ever closer together, as if in the pre-dawn, before light begins to lift edges into being. I am trying, it may be, to paint holiness. I suppose I should be flattered when some critics call this phase my best-they write that at last I am out from the shadow of my first husband. But I have, miraculously it might be said, ceased to care what they think, or what figure I cut in the eyes of strangers. End quote. This was five years ago. Would you say it is still true?" Hope tries to slow the young woman down, dragging her own voice as if in thought. "True enough, I would say, though it does sound a shade self-dramatizing. Perhaps fearing is strong. Feeling dread and distaste in regard to might have been more accurate and-and seemly." It makes a lump in Hopes throat to have this nervously aggressive intruder here, with her city-white face and her dark-nailed long hands and her doctrinairely black outfit-black turtleneck, black imitation-leather jacket with a big center zipper, black hair held off her ears by a pair of curved silver combs and falling in a loose and silky fan-shape down her back-finished off so ominously with heavy square-toed footgear, combat boots of a sort, laced up through a dozen or more eyelets like two little black ladders ascending into the flared bottoms of her slacks, the slacks made of a finely ribbed, faintly reflective fabric Hope has never seen before, a fabric without a name. The boots, with that new kind of high heel, wide sideways but narrow the other way, front to back, couldnt be very comfortable, unless man- nishness was always comfortable now. It is a new century-more appallingly yet, a new millennium. This millennial fact for Hope is a large blank door that has slammed, holding her life behind it like a child smothering in an abandoned refrigerator. The visitors voice, insistent with a certain anger yet femalely flexible, insinuating itself into her preys ear, asserts, "You were raised as a Quaker." "Well, raised is a kind term for it. My grandfather was an elder, true, but my father, especially after we moved to Ardmore, attended meeting only once or twice a year. The Ouderkirks had been Dutch Quakers; Dutch Quakers settled Germantown, a misnomer really, it should have been called Dutchtown, just as the Pennsylvania Dutch should be properly Pennsylvania Germans. Pockets of these Dutch Quakers had been living in the Rhine Valley; the Ouderkirks came from Krefeld; Penn himself had visited them in the sixteen seventies, telling them of his lovely colony, his holy experiment across the sea. When they first came over, in the sixteen eighties, some lived in caves until they could build their houses. My mother, though, was quite Episcopalian, typically lukewarm, but she would never have called herself irreligious. We all went to meeting together a few times, it seems like quite a few but in a childs mind a little does for a lot. I remember mostly the light, and the silence, all these grown-ups waiting for God to speak through one of them-suppressed coughs, shuffling feet, the creak of a bench. It upset me at first, you know how children are always getting embarrassed on behalf of adults. Then the quality of the silence changed, it turned a corner, like an angel passing, and I realized it was a benign sort of game. The Friends speak of living silence. Actually, someone did eventually speak. It had been arranged. The Quakers did make arrangements, but left space for God, so to speak, to upset the arrangements. There was a kind of elaborate courtesy to it all. Once there had been a bench up front for the elders and recorded ministers, but by the time I remember, the late twenties it must be, the very early thirties, I would have been ten in 1932, the benches were arranged in a square, so no one had any priority in the seating. Though my grandfather never led us to a back bench." Be quiet, Hope tells herself. This has ever been her fault, talking, giving, flirting, trying too hard to please, endeavoring to seduce. Her grandfather would use a Quaker phrase, "of the creature," for anything that was too much, too human, too worldly, too selfish and cruel. War was of the creature. Lust and intemperance of course, yet reason and excessive learning and disputation, too. The arts-save for the domestic, Edenic art of gardening, and the hidden art of making money-were of the creature, howls for recognition and singularity. Things of the creature were weak and dirty and unworthy; they were a form of noise. As a child Hope had chattered too much, feeling her round freckled face redden with excitement, her heart nearly bursting with its own beating, wanting within her ribs all of her, head to toes, scalp to footsoles, to be loved, to be held, to be desired. Even now, on the graves edge, six weeks short of turning seventy-nine this coming May, she is trying to charm the lithe black-clad stranger, charmless though she herself has become, in her baggy brown corduroys and slack-necked yellow cotton turtleneck and thick wool lumberjack shirt left untucked as if to hide her belly but in truth calling attention to it; her belly bulges but her breasts and buttocks are sunken, she has become beneath her clothes a naked witch by Schongauer, with imps of arthritic pain her familiars, or Rembrandts dreamy Saskia several decades further lost in sags and wrinkles. Her shiny auburn bangs, her signature when a young woman, are not even gray now but white, so thinned and dry and lacking in body, each filament sticking out with a mind of its own, as to be a mere souvenir of what once covered her forehead with the smooth bulge of a coppery cuirass. Her hair was cut short then, two points curving in to touch the angles of her jaw, the wide jaw defining the pale pentagon that looked back at her from a mirror with a deceptive calm, firm in its freckled haze Details ISBN0345460863 Author John Updike Short Title SEEK MY FACE Language English ISBN-10 0345460863 ISBN-13 9780345460868 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 813.54 Year 2003 Imprint Random House Trade Paperbacks DOI 10.1604/9780345460868 AU Release Date 2003-11-04 NZ Release Date 2003-11-04 Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States US Release Date 2003-11-04 UK Release Date 2003-11-04 Subtitle A Novel Pages 288 Publisher Random House USA Inc Publication Date 2003-11-04 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:137918340;

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