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Villages

by John Updike

Summary

The villages of John Updike's title are towns in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts where he himself has lived-and where his hero, a wealthy software entrepreneur named Owen Mackenzie, has spent most of his life. Now retired and living in Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts, Owen is facing death. But his life has been a series of sexual adventures-both marital and adulterous (and mainly the latter)-that form the basis for the story of an arrogant but honest man in Updike's long roster of characters who try, and fail, to live up to their own moral expectations. A New York Times Notable Book for 2004.

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Media Reviews

"A graceful panoramic depiction of individuals and their communities, which simultaneously echoes Updike's 1968 novel, COUPLES, and may be as autobiographical a fiction as any he's written."

   -- Kirkus

"...Updike still writes lovely sentences and creates a believable portrait of the American village, concealing dark secrets but providing a limited stability."

   -- Publishers Weekly

"VILLAGES is yet another of [Updike's] anthropologies of Northeast seaboard mating dysfunction and existential dread....[N]obody does it better."    -- John Leonard

   -- Harper\'s

"VILLAGES...recaptures and concentrates the erotic essence of the earlier books but adds a mellow, retrospective tone....In its period, settings and cast of characters, the story also overlaps consistently with Updike's own biography, tempting one to read it as a confession. In the end, the book gratifies in every way-as an exhibition of educated prurience, an elegy for an era and an inquiry into the morals of a striving upper-middle-class white male....Though Updike has dabbled in experimental fiction in much the same way that his frisky New England husbands dabble in adultery, he's at heart a solid artistic conformist who succeeds by embracing conventions, not spurning them, and embracing them so avidly and strenuously that they yield surprising new juice."    -- Walter Kirn

   -- New York Times Book Review

"Updike is unusual among novelists today in being both unfashionably patriotic and unapologetically religious. His portrait here of middle America in the 1940s and 1950s is loving yet unclouded by sentimentality. As always, he is superb at describing sex....[I]f VILLAGES...falls somewhat short of Updike's best work, it is still, page for page, voluptuously pleasurable to read....No one else I know of, simply no one, writes this well."    -- John Banville

   -- New York Review of Books

"For a twenty-first novel-and one that includes yet more variations on John Updike's favourite themes-VILLAGES is not a lazy book. [There is not] any of the staleness or sloppiness in VILLAGES that backlist-burdened critics assume to be there. Updike's work may be at a near standstill relative to, say, that of Philip Roth, but taken in isolation, page by enjoyable page, his writing is as strong as ever."    -- Ophelia Field

   -- Literary Review

"The territory of Updike's twenty-first novel will be as familiar to loyal readers of his fiction as to future biographers, whose notebooks must already be bulging with correspondences between the life and the work....The vitality of VILLAGES is remarkable in a writer so preoccupied with the depredations of old age....[T]he exuberant prose and quick little perceptions that make almost every Updike novel a pleasure to read...show no sign of abating."    -- James Campbell

   -- Times Literary Supplement

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
Published date: 2004
Edition: 1th edition
Size: 6.25 x 8.5 inches
Weight: 1.1 pounds
Pages: 321

Publisher's Notes

John Updike’s twenty-first novel, a bildungsroman, follows its hero, Owen Mackenzie, from his birth in the semi-rural Pennsylvania town of Willow to his retirement in the rather geriatric community of Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts. In between these two settlements comes Middle Falls, Connecticut, where Owen, an early computer programmer, founds with a partner, Ed Mervine, the successful firm of E-O Data, which is housed in an old gun factory on the Chunkaunkabaug River. Owen’s education (Bildung) is not merely technical but liberal, as the humanity of his three villages, especially that of their female citizens, works to disengage him from his youthful innocence. As a child he early felt an abyss of calamity beneath the sunny surface quotidian, yet also had a dreamlike sense of leading a charmed existence. The women of his life, including his wives, Phyllis and Julia, shed what light they can. At one juncture he reflects, “How lovely she is, naked in the dark! How little men deserve the beauty and mercy of women!” His life as a sexual being merges with the communal shelter of villages: “A village is woven of secrets, of truths better left unstated, of houses with less window than opaque wall.”

This delightful, witty, passionate novel runs from the Depression era to the early twenty-first century.

Other Editions

• Hardcover - Random House Inc (2004) - from $1.00
• Paperback Reprint - Ballantine Books (2005) - from $1.00

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