The Centaur Book

Somehow The Centaur is my most favourite John Updike's novel - it is pristinely poetic and sparkling with the freshness of adolescence…
And John Updike was the one who with his wondrous words turned adolescence into a miraculous saga.
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
Every child, in order to be ready to reside in the vast world, must be educated and there is no better educator than the centaur Chiron:
The Arcadian sun was growing warmer. Birdsong encircling the clearing turned sluggish. Chiron felt in his blood the olive trees on the plain rejoice. In the cities, worshippers mounting the white temple steps would feel the marble hot on their unsandalled feet. He took his class for their lesson to the shade of a great chestnut tree that it was said Pelasgus himself had planted. The trunk was as thick around as a shepherd's cottage. The boys arranged themselves swaggeringly among the roots as if among the bodies of slain enemies; the girls more demurely sought postures of ease on areas of moss. Chiron inhaled; air like honey expanded the spaces of his chest; his students completed the centaur. They fleshed his wisdom with expectation. The wintry chaos of information within him, elicited into sunlight, was struck though with the young colors of optimism. Winter turned vernal.
And it isn't it great to have legendary Chiron as your father. Isn't life beautiful even if there are some clouds on the horizon?
Had the world been watching, it would have been startled, for my belly, as if pecked by a great bird, was dotted with red scabs the size of coins. Psoriasis. The very name of the allergy, so foreign, so twisty in the mouth, so apt to prompt stammering, intensified the humiliation. 'Humiliation,' 'allergy' - I never knew what to call it. It was not a disease, because I generated it out of myself. As an allergy, it was sensitive to almost everything: chocolate, potato chips, starch, sugar, frying grease, nervous excitement, dryness, darkness, pressure, enclosure, the temperate climate - allergic, in fact, to life itself.
But anyway, everything is new, everything happens the first time and the world is calling…
Adolescence is a magic season of life - it's a fountainhead of knowledge, it's a myth and it's a legend and it's a gallant quest for love.