Product Description

On a spring day in Vermont, seventy-nine-year-old painter Hope Chafetz tells the story of her life to Kathryn, a young interviewer from New York. Questions send Hope back to her youth, to the heady postwar days of American art and her relationships with the artists who defined their times. As the day wears on, Kathryn and Hope – interviewer and interviewee – try to understand one another across the gulf of age, experience and time that lies between them. And subtly, as each comes to know the other, their relationship changes …

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #185489 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

About the Author
John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. Since 1957 he has lived in Massachusetts. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Howells Medal.

Customer Reviews

Do I not like John Updike?
That is an ever more difficult question to answer. I defer to nobody in my admiration for the Rabbit books and have never understood the theory that the later volumes in the series represent a decline. On the other hand it has seemed to me that, in some of his more recent fictions, notably Gertrude and Claudius, Updike has been writing plenty about not very much. Seek My Face suffers from the same problem. Beautifully written most certainly, with a wise and kindly development of the central relationship between artist and interviewer, but with little to involve the reader who is less than enthralled by pages of text-book art criticism. And can it be that John Updike, in his 54th book, is reduced to setting himself technical challenges? I cannot imagine any other reason for writing Seek My Face in one chapter of 270-odd pages (sentence and paragraph lengths in proportion), giving the reader no way-stations to pause for rest and recuperation.

The Beauty of The Creator
John Updike's millennial book is ostensibly is a memoire conceived for the new century in the form of an interview. The subject in Hope Chafetz and her interlocutor is Kathryn Angelo. Hope is an artist now seventy eight who has been three times married, first to Zack McCoy (Jackson Pollack) then to Guy Holloway, a mix of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and others.

Her third husband was Jerry Chafetz is an art collector who I have not yet identified. The interview form allows Updike and the reader to see the events of Hope's live though her own consciousness, for not only do we have her replies but her reveries and censorings as the day progresses. "Thank you" she remarks to Kathryn as the latter leaves,"for letting me go on and on, making it real to myself again" "Had she been too frank?.....;" It is this making real that Updike seeks... "Seeks my Face"

There are probably two further strand hidden in the title. The first is spiritual, reflecting Updike Christian commitment. The words are found in Psalm 27 and provide one of the epigraphs

"You speak to my heart and say "Seek my face." "Your face Lord I will seek"

Katheryn quotes Hope as writing that "she is trying to paint holiness" and the book is framed by an invocation of Hope's Quaker upbringing. Within this frame the creativity of mid twentieth century art is admired for its expression, of being lived, in contrast to the art as a sensation that followed typified by that produced Holloway, who combined domesticity, with setting off the studio to direct his atelier to produce pop art, videos, blown up cartoons etc etc in the manner of an insurance executive. In 2001 Guy is senile with alziemers, an image of what befell the ambition to create what might in corporate speak be called a 'word class' New York School to take over from snooty Europe.

Hope's answers to Kathryn's questions are interspersed with reveries and recollections of places incidents and emotions. At the same time the hard reality of domestic life are described. Occasionally prose poetical passages invoke nature and landscape. The text is for slow reading, and re reading, to appreciate the way Updike persuades the reader to accept the single voice of Hope while bending both place and time and tone to create fictive but convincing narratives which hang together.

I found it a struggle over several train journeys, but, in the end, rewarding to complete the book