The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 12 March 2015
by John Updike
John Updike's vast literary output is often noted for its powerfully autobiographical content. Updike himself acknowledged this. They do say, after all, to write what you know. By his compellingly particular style, we can see that Updike surely knew his subject. And the subject of this book was Updike's father, and the relationship that they shared. This is a novel, though, and Updike portrays an event-filled three days in a poetic and heroic manner full of metaphors for the inherent nobility of everyday life. Living in a small stone farmhouse, miles from the nearest town, teenaged Peter feels isolated from the nascent cosmopolitanism of which he dreams. Every day, his creaking father drives him to town, where the old man teaches in the same high school Peter attends. Meanwhile, George Caldwell feels the beginnings of an illness he is convinced will be the death of him. His dread is tinged with hope, a dream of escape from the mundane details of his life. The car breaks down, the weather turns cold and snowy, dad needs to see a doctor, and young Peter feels powerfully protective of his old man. Indeed, he knows he yet needs his father, while at the same time feeling pity for him in his own isolation. Both of them are yearning for some escape. Both of them feel indelibly attached to one another. Updike couches some of the tale in the metaphors of mythology. George is Chiron, the centaur, doomed to walk forever wounded on this Earth. Peter is Prometheus, his skin torn open and his liver devoured forever for the sin of bringing fire to man. The crux of the myth is that the two trade Prometheus's mortality for Chiron's immortality. Chiron is freed to inhabit the heavens while Prometheus lives on to encounter his own dark fate. And Updike captures that back-and-forth engagement between father and son. Along the way, he paints a gorgeously nostalgic portrait of small-city American life in 1947. (He did, of course, write this a lot closer to that time and thus it is, at least partially, the passage of another fifty years that tints the story in that nostalgia.) Olinger, Pennsylvania is a vivid and living place, based, of course, on Updike's own home town of Shillington. Father and son rattle within and against the cultural architecture of the town, one to which Updike returned repeatedly over his long career. The book jumps back and forth in viewpoint, from the son in first person, both in the moment and in retrospect, to the father in third, to the mythological notes interweaved in their story. It is a virtuoso piece, a compelling vignette of father-son dreams and small town expectations.
(For this novel, Updike was awarded the 1964 National Book Award for fiction.)
Also by Updike:
[Rabbit, Run]
[Rabbit Redux]
[Rabbit is Rich]
[Rabbit at Rest]
[Licks of Love]
[S.]
[The Poorhouse Fair]
[Toward the End of Time]
[The Witches of Eastwick]
[Of the Farm]
[Just Looking]
[Still Looking]
See also: [Updike, by Adam Begley]