Seek My Face
Book - 2002
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.
Publisher:
New York : Knopf : Distributed by Random House, c2002.
Edition:
1st ed.
ISBN:
9780375414909
0375414908
0375414908
Branch Call Number:
FIC Upd
Characteristics:
276 p. ; 21 cm.



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Add a CommentA day-long interview between 79-year-old Hope Chafetz (a well-known painter and, possibly more importantly, muse to two great artists) and a young journalist named Kathryn serves as the medium for author John Updike's treatise on American art following World War II. Hope, who has married three times and raised three children, opens up under Kathryn's probing into personal and professional topics, and her memories span decades (two husbands offer echoes of Jackson Pollack and Andy Warhol). Art historians may be interested in Updike's thoughts on these matters, while other readers will simply be absorbed by his verbal artistry.
Fiction A to Z newsletter February 2013.