Villages [Hardcover]

John Updike (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 19, 2004

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this 21st novel by one of the premier chroniclers of American life, a man recalls a lifetime spent in New England communities of women. Owen Mackenzie, now in his 70s and living in the small village of Haskell's Crossing, Conn., with his second wife, Julia, spends his days immersed in the daily routines of retirement while reminiscing about his childhood town of Willow, Pa., and the village where he spent his adulthood, Middle Falls, Conn. Though Owen studied at MIT and founded an early computer startup that made him moderately rich, his story is primarily defined by his romantic relationships. He marries his first wife, Phyllis, a classmate at MIT, for her cool beauty, but later decides that he needs a broader range of sexual experience. After a fraught first affair, he learns caution and is able to clandestinely indulge his love of women, until Julia, a minister's wife, comes along and convinces him to embark on a messy divorce and remarriage that indirectly results in Phyllis's accidental death. Owen's obsession with women's bodies and blithe ignorance of their inner lives can sometimes read like a tedious parody of Updike's earlier work, without a sense of humor to imply the author is in on the joke. Yet Updike still writes lovely sentences and creates a believable portrait of the American village, concealing dark secrets but providing a limited stability.
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From Bookmarks Magazine

Updike treads over familiar territory with Villages, his 21st novel. For those who crave more of his famed investigations into suburban sex and the male mind, this novel will prove a welcome addition to the canon. To some critics, however, Villages seemed a rehash of old material, with little to recommend it to modern audiences. Detractors found Owen’s sexual antics empty, his life devoid of emotional growth. Still, Updike remains one of the premier stylists of the English language, and he handles his subject with the assurance that comes from a lifetime of practice. Also, don’t forget the recently published collection by Updike: The Early Stories 1953-1975 **** Selection Mar/Apr 2004.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1St Edition edition (October 19, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400042909
• ISBN-13: 978-1400042906
• Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 1.2 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #749,426 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

53 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Life of Owen Mackenzie as an American History, November 4, 2004

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Villages (Hardcover)

John Updike has since the 1950s been the chronicler of the American mind. His twenty-one novels, poems, short stories, and essays have examined the American Dream and its vagaries, the inner and outer lives of the men and women living through the 20th century, the dichotomy between classes, ethics, sexual maturation, big business, politics as seen from both sides of the fence - name it and Updike has explored it. But John Updike also happens to be a gifted, eloquent wordsmith who can make small observations in a few words that become instantly branded on the brain as epiphanies. Reading Updike is a complete pleasure.

For those questioning whether this first man of letters has anything new to say, then VILLAGES is a must read. By the literary means of separating chronological 'biography' with evenly interspersed chapters that pause to explore the sexuality of the main character ("Village Sex I - VI") Updike's writing is refreshing and affords a better scrutiny of the life of a man as influenced by his gradual sexual awakening, underlining how those basic needs alter his movement through the stages from childhood through adolescence through adulthood to old age.

Owen Mackenzie was born during the Depression in Willow, Pennsylvania, (the first Village) a child of minimal means whose every discovery becomes a preparation for the Rake's Progress ahead. His introduction to the glories of the female body are bumpily naive and it is this 'frozen adolescence' the propels him through a marriage to a fellow student Phyllis) at MIT whom he marries and has four children, and upon graduation moves to Middle Falls, Connecticut where he slowly becomes a guru in the nascent computer industry. His various acts of adultery/affairs include a cornucopia of women of different types and values, and as his age and company and life in this village progress, he eventually must face his choices. He finally divorces Phyllis and marries another odd type (Julia, recently divorced from the town minister) only to end up in a retirement 'village' of Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts. A fairly simple story, and much in line with Updike's previous works.

The joy of this book is in the asides addressing issues few authors face head-on. "Capitalism...asks only one thing of us: that we consume. The stupider we are, the better consumers we are...You don't need to understand anything to watch television; they want you so stupid you keep staring at the commercials."

"A village is woven of secrets, of truths better left unstated, of houses with less window than opaque wall."

"Not for the rich the scattered wandering, the flight from ill-equipped nuclear family into America's wasteland of tawdry entertainments, of shopping-mall parking lots as large as lakes and seedy roadside bars advertising karaoke on Wednesday nights, of deserted downtowns and razed forests, of roving from job to job and mate to mate, amid such meagre electronic distractions as heist movies featuring car wrecks and fireballs and television comedies that reflect as in a fuzzy, fizzing mirror the awkward comedy of our desperate daily improvisations beyond the ordering principals of church, village, and family hierarchy...Only the rich - and not all of them, for some turn rebellious and others topple through self-neglect into lower castes - can afford the old structures that carry us from cradle to grave, well-fed, well-clothed, and well-respected."

"There are fewer and fewer somewheres in America, and more and more anywheres, strung out along the highways."

"It is a mad thing, to be alive. Villages exist to moderate this madness - to hide it from children, to bottle it for private use, to smooth its imperative into habits, to protect us from the darkness without and the darkness within."

The only summation of this book worthy of the writer is simply to encourage everyone to read it. An extraordinary journey is between these covers. Grady Harp, November 2004

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not among Updike's best, December 9, 2004

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S. Park (Bay Area, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Villages (Hardcover)

I picked up the volume after reading from somewhere that Updike had as his protagonist a programmer looking back to his life. Being an engineer myself, and acquainted with Updike's masterful hand in weaving American history with the lives of his characters, I couldn't but hold high expectations for the novel. I was to be disappointed, and not only for my own, inflated expectations.

It will be little exaggeration to state that the book is a sequence of sexual conquests made by our protagonist Owen Mackenzie in various "villages" (villages refer to suburbs the north eastern suburbs -- Connecticut, Massachusetts). After receiving his degree in EE from MIT, Owen marries Phyllis, a year older classmate, math major, proud, and a tad bit tepid. Owen in one of many house parties held his neighborhood gets tempted by his hostess, and after the abrupt end of the fling, manages to transform himself into a ladies' man. A dozen or so similar instances pursue. I patiently waited for that distinctively Updikean moment of poignancy. Such moment never arrived.

Updike's ability in associating everything -- animate or inanimate -- with some sort of sentiment is nothing short from astounding. It makes one feel as if those objects have memories of their own. For this very reason I found the novel worthwhile reading. But with little wisdom or insight from Owen to impart on us, these sexual experiences of his reduce to mere elements in a long, parallel sequence. Am I asking too much in expecting more from Updike?

27 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ENJOYABLE READ OF TYPICAL UPDIKE, November 11, 2004

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D. Blankenship (The Ozarks) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Villages (Hardcover)

This was another nice work by Updike. I would be inclined to ignore the few shots Publishers Weekly made, they are usually a bit over the top and I have noted before, that they quite often miss the mark. This was a well constructed work. Character development was excellent. I suppose I enjoyed it more, as Owen, the main character, was close to my age and I could relate quite well to his bewilderment and reactions to different situations. This is a story set to the backdrop of America, during the times of our greatest change, to the early deveopement of computers and the cluelessness with which most men display when it comes to women. Sex is handled, per usual with Updike, quite well. All in all, it is well worth the read and I very much recommend it.