Villages - Hardcover

Updike, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 024114308X ISBN 13: 9780241143087

Publisher: knopf, 2005

Synopsis

John Updike's 21st novel describes the life, romantic and otherwise, of Owen Mackenzie. Owen's education at M.I.T. and his successful business take him from the village of his birth, Willow, in eastern Pennsylvania, to Haskells Crossing, in eastern Massachusetts, where he expects to end his days. In the course of this modest life journey, the communal humanity of villages, chiefly embodied in their female citizens, seeks to humanize him, assuaging and chastening his childhood sense of singularity and foreboding. He knows that the quotidian surface holds an abyss of calamity beneath it, but he strives to cling to his dreamlike sense of leading a charmed life, an attempt in which he is encouraged by his two wives, Phyllis and Julia, and a number of other women.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

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.

About the Author

John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He is the author of over fifty books, including The Poorhouse Fair; the Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest); Marry Me; The Witches of Eastwick, which was made into a major feature film; Memories of the Ford Administration; Brazil; In the Beauty of the Lilies; Toward the End of Time; Gertrude and Claudius; and Seek My Face. He has written a number of collections of short stories, including The Afterlife and Other Stories and Licks of Love, which includes a final Rabbit story, Rabbit Remembered. His essays and criticism first appeared in publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and are now collected into numerous volumes. Collected Poems 1953-1993 brings together almost all of his verse, and a new edition of his Selected Poems is forthcoming from Hamish Hamilton. His novels, stories, and non-fiction collections have won have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award and the Howells Medal. Updike graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year at Oxford's Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of staff at the New Yorker, and he lived in Massachusetts from 1957 until his death in January 2009.

About this edition

• Publisher: knopf
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 024114308X
• ISBN 13: 9780241143087
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1