Seek My Face: A Novel [Paperback]

John Updike (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 4, 2003

John Updike’s twentieth novel, like his first, The Poorhouse Fair, takes place in one day, a day that contains much conversation and some rain. The seventy-nine-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 stories from her career and many marriages, the triumphant, poignant saga of postwar American art. In the evolving relation between the two women, interviewer and subject 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, the early spring of 2001.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A meditation on art, aging, and memory, John Updike's Seek My Face is the fictional equivalent of a PBS documentary on postwar American art. Seventy-nine-year-old Hope Chafetz, a painter of merit but, most importantly, wife to two major American artists, allows a young journalist named Kathryn to interview her for an online magazine. Having expected perhaps a two-hour talk over coffee, Hope is dismayed to find that her guest has brought sheaves of questions, a tape recorder, and the kind of scrupulous attention to detail--even sexual detail--that Hope would rather avoid. She gives an entire day to Kathryn, who, like memory itself, seems oblivious to Hope's need to eat, rest, or breathe fresh air.

Seek My Face draws on the story of Lee Miller and Jackson Pollock, the model for Hope's first husband. These are the best parts of a slow, sumptuous, and intricately detailed novel that lacks any significant action except in retrospect. Hope's second husband is depicted as an amalgam of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Wayne Thiebaud--a useful survey of the period, but not compelling characterization. One can sense the author folding in important art-historical points and details toward the end, like last-minute ingredients in a cake that may be too heavy to rise. Readers who stay with Hope and Kathryn through the day, however, will be rewarded with a gorgeous, resonant, and almost antimodern ending. --Regina Marler --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Couched in the form of a day-long conversation between 79-year-old painter Hope Chafetz, living in seclusion in Vermont, and a chic young interviewer from New York, Updike's 20th novel is an ambitious attempt to capture the moment when America "for the first time ever... led world art." As a fictional survey of the birth of abstract expressionism, pop art and other contemporary genres, the narrative offers a somewhat slick overview of the roiling currents of genius and calculation, artistic vision and personal ambition that characterized the art scene in the postwar years. Updike's ability to get inside an artist's psyche is considerable, as Hope's monologue convincingly demonstrates. Because he tries to distill and convey an era of art history, however, there is a static and didactic quality to the narrative; much of it sounds like art-crit disguised as exposition. As a reader can infer from an author's note in which Updike acknowledges his debt to the Naifeh and Smith biography of Jackson Pollock, Hope's life bears a strong resemblance to that of Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner. Hope's memories recapitulate the dilemma of an artist whose personal expression is thwarted by marriage and the omnipresence of alcohol and drugs, and since this is Updike country, Hope is more than candid about her sex life with Zack (Pollock); her second husband, Guy Holloway (loosely modeled on Warhol); and her third, art critic Jerry Chafetz. Updike's descriptions of landscapes and interiors are painterly in themselves, closely observed and sensuous. On the whole, the novel is a study of the artist as archetype, "a man who in the end loves nothing but his art." On that level it succeeds, but readers who long for plot and action may be disappointed.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; X edition (November 4, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345460863
• ISBN-13: 978-0345460868
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,066,402 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. 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, and since 1957 lived in Massachusetts. He was the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. John Updike died on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars vintage updike, November 17, 2002

By 

John Lewis "uneasy_rhetoric" (Sacramento, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Seek My Face (Hardcover)

Updike is a familiar room. Even though the thoughts, the words, even the intellectualism, remain the same, they don't get boring. They're comfortable.

This 20th novel is less a plot driving story and more a ramble through 20th century art, both fictional and real. The observations on art are, as far as I know (not being an art scholar), insightful, and Updike does a good job weaving the "artistic" in with the "mundane" of the pricipal narrator's existence.

Unfortunately Updike does not write well from a woman's perspective. There are cracks in the way the characters think and interact that reveal a male writer. The main character, an artist in her late 70s, rambles on about how quaint things were in the old days and then suddenly seems completely comfortable with a modern sexual vocabulary (would we expect anything less from Updike?); this grates because there is little indication, up to that point, that the character is anything but a vehicle for nostalgia.

That being said, Updike remains an insightful observer of contemporary life, and, just when you think he's used one modern cliche too many, he comes out with a simple observation that also becomes thought provoking: "What isn't Zen in feeling, looked at blankly?"

Updike has aged right along with the characters in his books, and this book, like "Toward the End of Time" and several of his most recent short stories, show someone who, while not entirely comfortable with growing old, is starting to come to terms with it.

Anyone who is a fan of Updike's work should appreciate this book -- those not familiar with Updike's work would be wise to start elsewhere. Fans of Jackson Pollock might also want to take a look at it to see how he has incorporated the Naifeh biography of Pollock into his narrative.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars 101, but in narrative comp or art history?, August 6, 2003

By 

James T. King (Chagrin Falls, OH USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Seek My Face (Hardcover)

John Updike's "Seek My Face" is best thought of as an idealized oral history of America's post-WW II emergence as an aesthetic powerhouse in art world. Here, the primary narrative device is a single day's interview between the now elderly Hope, widow of several famous American artists, and the thirty-something Kathryn, working for her on-line magazine. As the day wears on -- and it does drag somewhat -- and the interior monologues unfold, both women become somewhat neurotically hip voices of their respective generations. Likewise, both come to signify what's changed -- and what has not -- regarding the woman's role in contemporary society.

Hope's narrative musings are their most coherent and informative as the author takes his cues from Lee Miller's actual marriage to Jackson Pollock, rather than with the elements detailing her subsequent marriages. There Updike develops an amalgam of the "uber-modern American artist" by adding dollops of Warhol, Lichtenstein, Thiebaud, etc. together. While this may create a useful survey of the period, the collage nature does not create sharp, compelling characterizations.

The more knowledge of art theory and history one brings to this novel, the greater the reward. It might have been a better read had Updike stayed only with the now-mythic Pollack and his muscular "push-pull" of the elements of composition and media that emerged before he achieved his own self-destruction. The post-Pollack elements are murky in comparison, somewhat like a kindergartener's overworked finger-painting. If only someone had yanked the page away just twenty seconds before.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Face Worth Seeking, April 11, 2003

By 

"ggolem" (Herndon, VA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Seek My Face (Hardcover)

If you ever wondered what it would have been like to be married to Jackson Pollack and Andy Warhol during the 50's and 60's, all the while trying to raise three children and having an artistic career of your own as a woman in a male dominated art world, well, this book will let you know.

Through multiple layers of dialogue and memories, John Updike unfolds this novel much like the creation of a painting. The masterful strokes of literal paint takes you on a journey through mid twentieth century art history - the beginnings of Modern Art.

The most surprising aspect to this journey is that it takes place in only one day, all within the dialogue between two people in the form of an interview. This is a deeply personal story, full of vibrant life. The dialogue between the main characters, Kathryn and Hope is rich and complex. What unfolds during the interview is the life of a 78-year-old artist looking back on her life, remembering her myriad relationships and how each relationship is a reference point to important moments in modern art history.

As Hope looks back on her life, layers of time unfold the search for real art, real expression and real love coming up against the hard reality of life. Birth, death, fame, money, friendship, infidelity, humility and sacrifice are topics explored in the story of a wife and her husbands, a mother and her daughter, an interviewer and her subject. This is a story glorifying the full circle of life, a life worth living in a book very worth reading.