Customer Reviews

Seek My Face: A Novel

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

One problem I have with John Updike's novels is that I can't tell right away if I'm going to enjoy it. His phenomenal way with words sometimes hides the fact that he doesn't seem to always know where he's going with a story. I can be enjoying the language and not until the end do I realize that I didn't care a whit about the characters.

I thought Seek My Face was going to be one of those novels. From the beginning, Updike eschews plot in favor of description, which, if I'm not in the mindset for concentration, often enables my mind to wander until I realize as I'm turning the page that I have no idea what I just "read."

The story takes place in one day during an interview between a journalist named Kathryn and painter (and, more importantly to this book, painter's wife) Hope Chafetz. Kathryn is ostensibly writing an article on Hope's work, but the talk begins to steer to Hope's first husband, Zack McCoy (an unapologetically fictionalized Jackson Pollack, according to the acknowledgments page) and their relationship.

This is Updike's twentieth novel in a career of fifty books, and in that time an author becomes confident in his style. Enough so, apparently, to feel comfortable jettisoning what most people would consider to be the rules. As a part-time copy editor, there were entire passages that I would have cut out and Updike feels no compunctions about stopping a piece of dialogue mid-sentence to launch into a paragraph-long reminiscence. This is particularly upsetting at the beginning of Seek My Face, when a reader just getting into a new novel needs to be coddled a bit, led in gently to the narrative, held by the hand, so to speak. Updike, however, feels no such duty.

This is not to say that the book is not a great read. Once I got into his rhythms (and his books do often take that original effort), I was sped along by the flitting nature of the conversation. It feels almost voyeuristic to be let in on Hope's thoughts in this way. And, just in case she doesn't feel like telling Kathryn something private, Updike lets us in on it in the form of a memory, thus allowing us to experience this woman's life fully. Such a move requires an inordinately compelling character and Hope is such, as is Kathryn in her own way (we are allowed to a lesser extent into Kathryn's mind), a character that we want to know more about and therefore keep turning the pages.

Of the modern novelists I have read, Updike would be the only one whom I would trust with writing about art. He has published a book of art criticism (Just Looking: Essays on Art) and is well known for his vast knowledge of the subject. This is very important as Hope is not only an artist in her own right, but her life in some ways represents the entire period of post-WWII art's evolution. Husbands Zack and Guy were both artists and third husband Jerry was a gallery owner, so Hope has been in touch with every aspect of art throughout this period of her life and Updike is familiar enough with the history and language to let us know this in subtle, intriguing ways.

On the whole I found Seek My Face an immensely satisfying read. It suffers from what some have come to call "the New Yorker ending"--meaning that the story doesn't end but merely fades out. But how can you end the story of a life that doesn't end with a death. And it's really only one day in that continuing life. Interestingly enough, Updike chooses to end his story with a memory that precedes anything that came before it narratively, as I visualize cinematically a camera pulling out slowly to leave Hope to her discoveries.

Seek My Face is a moving portrait of a woman and her place in history (or lack of it) and an educational look into the history of recent art. It's also one of his better books (certainly better than The Centaur) and it makes me want to read another one soon.

This book is the brilliant reminiscing of an elderly woman-Hope-who has lived her life at the epicenter of modern art. In response to questions from a young journalist, Hope remembers her three husbands, two of them leading artists in the Fifties and Sixties. As this interview progresses, the depth and texture of Hope's reminisces-most of which are complex ruminations she does not share with the journalist-transform what is a well documented period of artistic breakthrough into an art scene alive with people and their complex dependencies. This is a narrative that imagines a person's experience in artistic history, not a thinly veiled history of art told through the eyes of an imagined minor artist (as certain critics have asserted). "Seek My Face" is another great work from one of our greatest novelists.

Updike writes superbly about art -- not only the experience of seeing art but the business of art and, most interesting to me, the creative process. I was not surprised to read that he had spent a stint as an art student. This is truly a book about art, artists, and the role they play in society. He tackles this difficult topic without resorting to critics' jargon or dry exposition. The character of Hope is rendered in beautiful detail which is all the more astonishing for its insights into the female psyche. While I agree with the other reviewers that the character of Hope's second husband was too much of an amalgam to be credible, that was the only off note in an otherwise prodigious work, and the device did serve to flesh out the historical context. The ending offers an exquisite little vignette which, not wanting to spoil, I will just say was one of the most memorable literary passages I have encountered in decades of reading popular fiction.

Seek My Face is the story of Hope, the character loosely based on the artist Lee Miller, who is being interviewed in her Vermont home during the course of one day by Kathryn, an ambitious young modern art scholar collecting information for an online magazine article she plans to write. When Kathryn's aggressive questions - at times difficult, even wounding, and which both exhilarate and exhaust Hope - seem to veer beyond the requirements any article-length piece, an inflection point occurs in the novel. You wonder if Kathryn is on another quest besides the one related to her article: searching out truths she could apply to her own unknown life, her brashness a concealing device. Hope never guesses this, and it makes even more gracious her willingness to give of herself to this girl who she couldn't like, who for most of the story discloses no personal information of her own, and who rejects most of what Hope offers for lunch or tea, who is at an age of confident brio but still without a certain empathic humanity and grace that comes with maturity. A sort of bull in the china shop of the embrittled shelter garden of another woman's life.
A recurring theme in Updike's work is the giving of oneself, sometimes to an indifferent receiver. And in fact for Updike, writing is an act of giving as much as of creating, which is why it's hard to think of another author as true and honest: DeLillo and Kundera, for example, can't come close. The inscription inside the stolen ring that Tristao gives Isabel in the novel Brazil are the initials DAR, Portuguese for "to give." In one of Updike's early stories, the last line is: "Thus the world, like a jaded coquette, spurns our attempts to give ourselves to her wholly." What Hope gives to Kathryn is an art history scholar's dream: a specific account of an era of American modern art and her role in it, including details which would have been easier for her to refuse to discuss. She gives some heartfelt advice, and withholds certain crueler truths. For example, when Kathryn explains that her boyfriend can't really have fun because so much of his life - his career - is undecided, Hope tells her don't wait, that "By the time everything is decided it will be too late. The moment is always now." But elsewhere Hope does not disclose a harsher truth, noting that the younger woman, "...has never learned how little the world needs us to give; its beauty is an impervious beauty, self-absorbed."
Whether or not Kathryn has the self-awareness to understand her own pursuit of the intimate details of Hope's life is uncertain. This could be Updike's comment on the jaded American appetite for the pedestrian suffering of our heroes, but more likely it's an observation of how Kathryn's generation has alienated itself from what it loves, redirecting its energy away from love of something for its own sake and toward the more definable and tangible successes of one's career. Again and again Kathryn rejects perfect opportunities to wrap things up and be on her way, to begin her long drive back into the city. But Kathryn, possibly bewildered by her own response to Hope's openness, having felt the gravity of a life lived well and wisely, can't seem to bring herself to leave before she's grasped something just outside her reach, as though she still hasn't quite figured out what she's missing, can't detect the source of her own alienation.

The novel explores the contradiction implicit in artists, forced to live and act in the present, trying to create works that transcend time. This theme is returned to repeatedly. The protagonist is 'Hope,' a female painter who's first husband, Zack, pursues pure art in the passion of the present and achieves a place of permanence in the art world. Her second husband, more calculating and commercial, rolls up and down the hills of fame as his work becomes more or less relevant in the ensuing years. Her third husband, a businessman who personifies long-term planning, collects art but creates none himself; his contribution is fathering their children and nurturing her. Thus each husband makes a long-term contribution to the art world in proportion to their focus on the immediate: an irony not lost on the narrator--an artist herself.

Reflecting this dichotomy, the book's written to take place in one day yet covers subject matter from several decades. Mr. Updike writes in that conversational, New Yorker style, yet with much longer sentences than a magazine would allow. The book has no chapters, which sustains the experience of living through one, continuous day. The result is casual prose of thoughts weaving in and out of the present, dipping into past events of interest and re-examining them in today's light.

The writing sparkles with experience of finding meaning in the seeming inconsequences of daily life. Only Updike can make the description of a comfortable chair or plate-glass window breath-taking and thought-provoking. The characters are well fleshed-out, and the relationships and emotional landscape have the complex and irrational stamp of reality. The settings bring you into the art world--both urban and rural--so that you taste the energy and desperation of creative angst.

Although shocked by the unnecessarily vivid sex scenes in this novel, I strongly recommend it for those who enjoy reading literature that primarily reflects on life, relationships, our struggle with mortality and our desire to transcend it. I assume the author chose the name 'Hope' for the main character to underscore her pivotal importance is guiding these tender, unstable personalities towards greatness. Indeed she outlives all her lovers--at least mentally--and can report on which ones succeeded or failed at various turns.

She is a successful, late-career artist who's work has opened a new door for art and, as readers, we suspect that her success was assured. She's a born, true artist; and that's probably why these legendary artists needed her as a soulmate. Hope became their external compass, rewarded or thwarted them as needed, and moved on when they were spent.

Updike creates a mock interview in an old Vermont house/artist's studio. The interviewer is a contemporary Manhattanite new journalism styled reporter; the artist, a 79-year-old woman who was married to a thinly disguised Jackson Pollack (here named Zack). There is a coherence in the artist's reminiscences--a coalescence between nostalgia for an important and radical age in contemporary art, a quasi-memoir of intense life and living among the Abstract Expressionists and their contemporaries; and a meditation on aging. The title of the book is Biblical, and One gets the feeling from the artist that the age of art in the 40' through 60's was in a way antedulvian, that is of a time before the flood of media that have made images overwhelming and prepackaged, and has squeezed celebrity out of the most unimpressive, dispassionate "personalities." Updike's tenor--using his interviewee as an alter ego--reminds me of the tone of sport's books that mourn for the times when "the game really "mattered." Updike does know his art and the descriptions and analyses of various artists and paintings and milieu in the book are more prescient and enjoyable than the vacuous stuff you will find in most art magazines. If you are not familiar with the world of the book, however, i.e., Barnet Newman, Robert Motherwell, Hans Hoffman, Clement Greenberg, Frank O'hara, Franz Kline, etc., you will not be able to literally picture much of the subject matter. The writing is very competent as is usual for John Updike, and I certainly enjoyed this more than the bloated Rabbit at Rest, which should have been lain to rest in the previous installment of the Rabbit series. I'm not quite sure why some people put down Updike, but for my money, he's better than most fiction writers of his generation or the 30/40 something crowd. And if you are going to pick between reading this book, and the movie "Pollack," despite the film's valiant attempt, it's not even close in merit. Additionally, one person here was surprised that a 79 year old woman would be so open about sexuality, but the art world during the 40's and 50's was not exactly inhabited by feminine prudes.

Updike is a writer of vast intelligence and insight. In this work he uses the device of allowing the widow of two -major artists to in retelling her life story present a picture of post-war American art - history. There is much precise description of mind and art. It is possible thus to learn a great deal about the art- world from this work. It is also possible to learn a great deal about certain kinds of lives , about human relationships in these worlds. However the feeling that the work gives me is a somewhat distressing and difficult one. I do not feel any real sympathy for the major character or for those she tells her story about. Perhaps the reason for this is the richness of detail and analysis. But I think it goes deeper than that , and has something to do with Updike's fundamental way of feeling the world. And here I admit I have had this same reaction to other works of his, a tremendous admiration for the skill of the writing, and a reservation about his capacity to create a central character one can feel deep sympathy for.