SALE ON NOW! PROMOTIONS
John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He is the author of over fifty books, including The Poorhouse Fair; the Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest); Marry Me; The Witches of Eastwick, which was made into a major feature film; Memories of the Ford Administration; Brazil; In the Beauty of the Lilies; Toward the End of Time; Gertrude and Claudius; and Seek My Face. He has written a number of collections of short stories, including The Afterlife and Other Stories and Licks of Love, which includes a final Rabbit story, Rabbit Remembered. His essays and criticism first appeared in publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and are now collected into numerous volumes. Collected Poems 1953-1993 brings together almost all of his verse, and a new edition of his Selected Poems is forthcoming from Hamish Hamilton. His novels, stories, and non-fiction collections have won have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award and the Howells Medal. Updike graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year at Oxford's Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of staff at the New Yorker, and he lived in Massachusetts from 1957 until his death in January 2009.
As in his previous books, the tension here is in the style and words as well as in the narrative, and the worlds of George Caldwell and his 15 year old son Peter are heightened and illumined by them. This threads the legend of Chiron, the noblest of all the Centaurs who begged for death as an atonement for Prometheus' theft of fire, through the cumulative frustrations of the school teacher who knows the fury of living as well as the fury of failure; it reflects the effects on Peter as his orbit, physical and spiritual, closes in and stretches away from his father whom he senses needs a defender and an avenger; it encompasses a few days in which recall of the past and a look into the future inform the present. Wounded by an arrow- as was Chiron, George is further wounded by his principal's apparent humiliations; certain that he is harboring a fatal disease, he is not comforted when X-rays prove him wrong; increasingly ridden by guilt when he and Peter are caught in a near-blizzard, he returns home to the certain freedom of death. Peter's psoriasis, his love for Penny, his alerted sentience to his father's mounting despair are in counterpoint to his father's intense response to reality and equally strong sense of fantasy in which he is the Centaur....Poorhouse and Rabbit have won Updike critical acceptance and designation as the most conspicuously talented younger writer of the decade and there is a warmth here which may well admit and attract a wider audience. The transition of the relationship between father, no longer demigod, and son, comes through with a signal tenderness and implements Updike's established virtues, the glittering and polished prose and the mature alliance of form, function and symbol. (Kirkus Reviews)
