Villages, John Updike
Villages, John Updike
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Villages

Author: John Updike

Narrator: Edward Herrmann

Unabridged: 9 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/19/2004


Synopsis

A delightful, witty, passionate novel that follows its hero from the Depression era to the early twenty-first century—from a master of American letters and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the acclaimed Rabbit series.

John Updike’s twenty-first novel, a bildungsroman, follows 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.

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. He is the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Howells Medal.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Joseph

For decades there's been a "Bad Hemingway" contest. You take Papa's style - his short, monosyllabic sentences, his klunky rhythm, his simple grammar, his lack of adjectives, his self-conscious macho posing - and try to make it even worse by caricaturing it. It would be interesting to have a "Bad Upd......more

Goodreads review by Dani

It's been an interesting, as well as a good read. The book is not as rife with sex, licit and illicit, extramarital and adulterous, as it might be, and despite the focus of Owen the protagonist-narrator on his own sexual life, the book is for the most part taken up by an elaborate background of geog......more

Goodreads review by Evan

too much like updike......more

Goodreads review by Brian

When did you first use a computer? John Updike's Villages, written in 2004, follows Owen Mackenzie's career as a computer programmer, which began in the days when computers were in their infancy. My first experience with a computer was in 1975, as a freshman at the University of Missouri - Kansas Ci......more