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Seek My Face
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780375414909
Edition: 1st
ISBN: 0375414908
Label: Alfred A. Knopf
Manufacturer: Alfred A. Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 276
Publication Date: November 12, 2002
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Release Date: November 12, 2002
Studio: Alfred A. Knopf
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Editorial Review:
A meditation on art, aging, and memory, John Updike's Seek My Face is the fictional equivalent of a PBS documentary on postwar American art. Seventy-nine-year-old Hope Chafetz, a painter of merit but, most importantly, wife to two major American artists, allows a young journalist named Kathryn to interview her for an online magazine. Having expected perhaps a two-hour talk over coffee, Hope is dismayed to find that her guest has brought sheaves of questions, a tape recorder, and the kind of scrupulous attention to detail--even sexual detail--that Hope would rather avoid. She gives an entire day to Kathryn, who, like memory itself, seems oblivious to Hope's need to eat, rest, or breathe fresh air.
Seek My Face draws on the story of Lee Miller and Jackson Pollock, the model for Hope's first husband. These are the best parts of a slow, sumptuous, and intricately detailed novel that lacks any significant action except in retrospect. Hope's second husband is depicted as an amalgam of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Wayne Thiebaud--a useful survey of the period, but not compelling characterization. One can sense the author folding in important art-historical points and details toward the end, like last-minute ingredients in a cake that may be too heavy to rise. Readers who stay with Hope and Kathryn through the day, however, will be rewarded with a gorgeous, resonant, and almost antimodern ending. --Regina Marler
John Updike’s twentieth novel, like his first, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), takes place in one day, a day that contains much conversation and some rain. The seventy-eight-year-old painter Hope Chafetz, who in the course of her eventful life has been Hope Ouderkirk, Hope McCoy, and Hope Holloway, answers questions put to her by a New York interviewer named Kathryn, and recapitulates, through the story of her own career, the triumphant, poignant saga of postwar American art. In the evolving relation between the two women, the interviewer and interviewee move in and out of the roles of daughter and mother, therapist and patient, predator and prey, supplicant and idol. The scene is central Vermont; the time is the early spring of 2001.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - One of Updike's most extraordinary novels
SEEK MY FACE, an extraordinary novel that takes place on one long rainy afternoon in New England, ranks (for me, at least) with the greatest novels taking place on a single day: Virginia Woolf's MRS. DALLOWAY, Nadine Gordimer's THE LATE BOURGEOIS WORLD, Saul Bellow's SEIZE THE DAY, and Philip Roth's brilliant evocation of a snowy afternoon, evening, night and its following bright winter morning--including breakfast--in THE GHOST WRITER.
After breakfast in THE GHOST WRITER, Hope Lonoff, ... Read More
Rating:  - WTF?
This is the first book in my 50+ years of life that I have not been able to finish. It just rambles on. Maybe if I knew more about Jakson Pollack it would have been more interesting, but I doubt it.
Rating: - The Master Describer at Work Again!
Updike is master writer of vast intelligence and fantastic insight into human relationships.
Here are some of my favorite quotes I pulled out of "Seek My Face,"
"She and Zack came to the sunstruck, wind-raked flats and filled the forsaken old farmhouse with the sound of their voices, augmenting the warmth of their bodies with that the woodstove, whose heat parched their skins and hair in its close vicinity but died halfway upstairs to the cold bedroom."
"As ... Read More
Rating: - New York School
Things trail us from place to place. Hope wanted to have an old chair of her grandmother's. She was raised as a Quaker in Ardmore. Now she is seventy nine and is wearing soft Birkenstocks. The sixties had been a great release.
Zack's pictures became famous and his drinking terrible. Zack had been a westerner. Zack McCoy had not liked to be interviewed. He had been coached on what to say. He had been self-indulgent and, even, self-educated. Clem used Zack to make a name in art criticism. ... Read More
Rating:  - Loved, loved, loved the ending!!!!!
In tone, in subject-matter and in meaning, the last ten pages of Seek My Face stand apart from the novel that came before them. It was almost as if the ever-reliable Mr. Updike took the main character from the novel, wrote her into a short story that concerned her childhood, and then placed the short piece into the longer prose offering, separate but unequal. The tender "memory" of the main character as a child in a long-gone America of the early twentieth-century, interacting with her endearing Quaker grandfather, ... Read More
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