Seek My Face, John Updike
Seek My Face, John Updike
1 Rating(s)
List: $19.95 | Sale: $13.97
Club: $9.97

Seek My Face

Author: John Updike

Narrator: Kathryn Walker

Unabridged: 9 hr 22 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/12/2002

Synopsis

A riveting novel that takes place in one day about an elderly painter and the New Yorker interviewing her—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. • “A brief novel of deep feeling.”—Time

On a day that contains much conversation and some rain, the seventy-eight-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 the story of her own career, the triumphant, poignant saga of postwar American art. In the evolving relation 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, supplicant and idol. The scene is central Vermont; the time is the early spring of 2001.

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 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the father of four children and the author of fifty-odd previous books, including collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Bandit

This was my first experience with John Updike and far from my traditional audio boom fare of fairly mindless. What a talent, no wonder he is so well regarded. The quality of writing is absolutely superb, on par with some of the finest that I've read. There is such emotional intelligence, such marvel......more

Goodreads review by Robert

Seek My Face was one of the last novels John Updike wrote. Its premise is this: a thirties-something, serious freelance journalist from New York City comes to New England to interview a seventies-something artist who also was married to two famous artists, had affairs with others, and eventually marr......more

Goodreads review by Becca

I've got news for you, John Updike. Women just don't think like that.......more

Goodreads review by Edward

I know it's not a good idea to read biographical information into a work of fiction, but I couldn't help but feel that in this novel, John Updike, who died two years ago at the age of 77, was reflecting on his his own career and what it all meant. True, if he was, his reflection is well-disguised. T......more

Goodreads review by Ron

Two years ago, the British novelist A.S. Byatt wrote what the publisher called "a novel" about a man collecting notes for a biography on a famous biographer. "The Biographer's Tale" was one of those stultifyingly complex productions you're proud to have endured because you don't want to admit you've......more

Quotes

“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

Add to Cart
Add to Wish List