Seek My Face Book

In this latest novel by a master of American fiction, Pulitzer Prize winner John Updike lays out the triumphant story of postwar American art. Through a dialogue between Hope Chafetz, a 79-year-old painter who has seen artistic times and trends evolve and change, and an interviewer named Kathryn, we learn of Hope's history and the history of modern art at the same time. But this book is not a thinly-veiled treatise. What is important is the relationship between Hope and Kathryn. Their roles shift from interviewer and interviewee to mother and daughter, therapist and patient, predator and prey, annunciatory angel and startled receptacle of grace. Updike makes us feel for these characters with his deft novelistic touches, acquired over years of honing his craft.

Book Magazine

Two women talking for nearly 300 pages not many novelists could make such an apparently spare exercise rich and engaging. But John Updike does, in a subtle work that's beautiful and profound, witty and trenchant. It's what we've come to expect from this prestigious figure of American letters effortless, fully human fiction whose ambitiousness is all the more impressive in that its tone is often conversational, off-handedly Olympian. T.S. Eliot said that poetry is the way we'd all speak if we could: Updike's prose is that kind of poetry.

Here it's visited on the story of one woman seventy-nine-year-old painter Hope Chafetz and the titans she wed: Zack McCoy, a dead ringer for Abstract Expressionist god Jackson Pollock (down to the slapdash masterworks, the iconic black T-shirt, the wounded macho swagger, the fatal car crash), and Guy Holloway, a composite Pop Art star whose characteristics echo Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg. Hope's final husband, Jerry Chafetz, factors in as well. Jerry, a businessman, is the only nongenius in the pack and the only lover who offered Hope comfort instead of angst.

Seek My Face also spotlights Kathryn D'Angelo, an online art critic who has traveled from New York City to Hope's haven in Vermont in order to interview her. There, as her tape recorder spins, Kathryn will have one day to chronicle Hope's near-century of life. The younger Kathryn represents the New Art World, drawn to Hope's memories of a shining hour when painters aimed unabashedly at being Faustian colossi, grew drunk on existentialism and filled their canvases with visual jazz. The art of Kathryn's contemporaries is puny by comparison: performance art,video art, endless turns on irony and sour celebrity worship and moneygrubbing, winking, bold-faced "selling out."

Kathryn senses in her bones how drastically art has become diminished, and she envies the older woman and her brushes with greatness. Updike makes clear that Hope is the real thing. Like Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, Hope is a trailblazing artist in her own right, however overshadowed by the all-male, mid-twentieth-century bohemian scene. She's also a woman wise, vulnerable, regretful, prevailing who has lived. Next to her, Kathryn has only health, an unearned cynicism, generic sex appeal and a limited wardrobe ("her doctrinairely black outfit"), the mandatory uniform of packaged rebellion.

Vividly rendered, Hope and Kathryn aren't only individuals, but types they signify moral stances. "I am trying, it may be, to paint holiness," Hope defiantly avers. She's trying to make honest, undecorative, intelligent art that's wrenched from a deeply personal core. She turns on Kathryn: "That was why abstraction was so glamorous, it was all self . I know it must all seem very naive to your generation, who don't believe in the self, who think the self is just a social construct, just as you don't believe there are writers, just texts that write themselves and can mean anything." Both Hope and Updike aren't above damning Kathryn and her world, a world that's "miracle-proof, pre-processed, all emotions and impulses analyzed and denigrated before they can blossom, chopped up into how-to books and television, everything reduced to electronic impulses, bits, information, information increasingly meaningless...."

Yet it's not all combat between the two. Charmingly, tentatively, Hope reaches out to the girl, offering her sandwiches and hard-won advice. "Don't hang back," she says. Dare. Live your life: Don't let "any man take it from you." Endearingly, even as she jousts with her inquisitor ("Interviewers and critics are the enemies of mystery, the indeterminacy that gives art life," the book's narrator comments), she also flirts, performs, cajoles an old lonely lady who can't stop herself chattering on. And Kathryn, for all her cool, sometimes melts, sometimes shows mercy, sometimes jettisons her invasive questioning and lets her elder just talk.

With Seek My Face , Updike has given us not only the record of the rise and fall of American art, from poetry to product, he's also rendered, carefully and lovingly, the dynamics of an essential conversation/struggle that between battered, knowing experience and crass innocence. All great fiction aims at this sort of instruction, a kind of conversation between a single, fallible, representative human being and the voice of history. With Hope's story, Updike is doing in miniature what he did with his trademark Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom tetralogy telling the tale of America's maturation, from exuberance to exhaustion, in the story of a very real character.

This is Updike's twentieth novel, and it testifies not only to his astonishing productivity, but also to his continuing vitality. The art criticism is dead-on and provocative (much like his writing on art for The New York Review of Books ); more excitingly, his critique of the human condition is as sharp as ever, never lacking acuity or panache. Here, taking Hope's side against Kathryn's, Updike risks coming off as Captain of the Old Guard. Instead, like his protagonist, he's a winning militant generous, convincing, celebratory and unbowed. Paul Evans