Seek My Face - Hardcover

Updike, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241141982 ISBN 13: 9780241141984

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2003

Synopsis

John Updike's new novel is an audacious and compelling look at postwar American art - and the relations between men and women, and women and women.

SEEK MY FACE takes place on one day in Vermont in spring 2001. The 79-year-old painter Hope Cafetz, who has been in her eventful life Hope Ouderkirk, Hope McCoy and Hope Holloway, answers questions put to her by a young New York interviewer, Kathryn, and recapitulates, through the story of her own times, the triumphant saga of post-war American art.

In the evolving relationship 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, annunciatory angel and startled receptacle of grace.

About this title

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 Updike s 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"

"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 Updike's 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

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: Hamish Hamilton
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0241141982
• ISBN 13: 9780241141984
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288