Seek my face

I wonder how everyone else chooses the next book they are going to read. Confronted with the remnant of reading material here, I decided that much as I had enjoyed Kevin, I didn't feel able to plunge straight into something dark and psychological, but still wanted something meaty. I looked at the covers and was attracted by a novel with shelves on the front full of arty materials. Since I am trying to clear my shelves I felt this may be an appropriate choice. Then I saw John Updike's name, and realised that I had never read anything by him, and that I really ought to have done! 

Starting into the book, I began to wonder if the reason I had never read any Updike before was because he is far too clever for me! As the elderly artist Hope is interviewed by a young twenty-something journalist, Kathryn, she reminisces about her life amongst a group of post-war, bohemian artists in New York: contemporaries of the likes of Picasso, Mondrian and Dali. This part of the novel is peppered with intellectual artistic theories about Expressionism and Abstract art, and multiple references to philosophers such as Nietzsche, Jung and Freud. I found it hard to follow, a mite pompous and rather dry and boring. Time Out may describe it as "Engrossing, intellectually thrilling", but throw me a line John, I'm drowning here, and don't possess the processing power of many of your more literate reviewers!

I purposed to bear with, and a turn of phrase here and there began to show me that this guy could write something that would engage me. The Times says that his novel "Burns it's images into the reader's mind", and here I offer you an example of Updike's beautiful prose, describing the joy of one's favourite tea mugs of all things:"Momentarily alone, Hope empties the mugs-her own, nearly empty; Kathryn's nearly full- in the sink. Then she swishes hot faucet water around in them and puts them mouth-down on the drainer to dry. The pets she and Jerry had have all died, but even these mugs, with their painted parrots and red-and-green stripes, have that quality pets do, of sharing your innermost domestic existence, so that you come gratefully home to them from a venture into human society. They give you back yourself after others have dirtied and addled it." I was beginning to get sucked into Hope's evocation of the past, to feel what her life must have been like living in a virtual artists' colony on Long Island. 

Further passages of purple prose ensued - descriptions of the Long Island landscapes, of physical human beauty, of glass panes in an old window, accomplished with light, deft touches in painterly fashion. The interview, taking place over the course of a day became like a private view into Hope's life and soul. Three relationships, three children and a life full of stories. We often look at old people and don't realise the life they have lived and what they have lost - that once they were idealistic risk-takers, grabbing life by the neck and shaking it. After reading this book, I don't think I will look at an older person so dismissively again. 

In parts Updike's novel sounds like a twentieth century art treatise, but what remains for me is the celebration of the human spirit and the appreciation of art in its many forms. That a man could write two women, one pushing eighty and one pushing thirty so convincingly is testament to the mastery of his own art.

The shelves incidentally are the ones in Jackson Pollock's studio.