Villages

Rating:
Summary: Please help
Review: I love Tom Wolfe, I love Joyce Carol Oates, I hate John Updike. This is the first novel of his I read.......and probably the last. I could not get into the book from the beginning and it didn't improve. What am I doing wrong? It seems to be his style I disliked. Very wordy..but could not find the humor like I do with Tom Wolfe. Could not appreciate the characters like I do with Oates. If you want my opinion, for whatever it is worth, find something else to read unless you are a masochist.

Rating:
Summary: Not among Updike's best
Review: I picked up the volume after reading from somewhere that Updike had as his protagonist a programmer looking back to his life. Being an engineer myself, and acquainted with Updike's masterful hand in weaving American history with the lives of his characters, I couldn't but hold high expectations for the novel. I was to be disappointed, and not only for my own, inflated expectations.

It will be little exaggeration to state that the book is a sequence of sexual conquests made by our protagonist Owen Mackenzie in various "villages" (villages refer to suburbs the north eastern suburbs -- Connecticut, Massachusetts). After receiving his degree in EE from MIT, Owen marries Phyllis, a year older classmate, math major, proud, and a tad bit tepid. Owen in one of many house parties held his neighborhood gets tempted by his hostess, and after the abrupt end of the fling, manages to transform himself into a ladies' man. A dozen or so similar instances pursue. I patiently waited for that distinctively Updikean moment of poignancy. Such moment never arrived.

Updike's ability in associating everything -- animate or inanimate -- with some sort of sentiment is nothing short from astounding. It makes one feel as if those objects have memories of their own. For this very reason I found the novel worthwhile reading. But with little wisdom or insight from Owen to impart on us, these sexual experiences of his reduce to mere elements in a long, parallel sequence. Am I asking too much in expecting more from Updike?

Rating:
Summary: Not My Favorite
Review: I read every novel by John Updike and am always bowled over by his lovely and evocative language and his brilliantly nuanced exploration of circumstance, if not character.

But "Villages" delivered less pleasure to me, since it seems to employ Updike's amazing gifts only to explore a series of increasingly debauched extramarital experiences. While these are rendered masterfully, they don't seem to convey much more than a sad and decadent progression, which, ironically, comes to an end when the protagonist, Owen Mackenzie, meets his life's true love. In his final chapter, Updike summons his genius to create a moving context for this tale. But it's a brilliant ending to what I experienced as an uninspired tale.

Updike fans may also quibble with his treatment of Owen's first wife, who communicates her point of view only in a poignant argument with Owen after they have separated. Of course, this argument reads well. But, shouldn't her point of view come across throughout the book, not just to tie things up in a late chapter?

Updike fans should read this book. But the Master can (and will, I'm sure) give us more next time, when his brilliance will focus on more than just a man who married too young.


Rating:
Summary: Updike As Good As Ever
Review: On his twenty-first novel, John Updike shows that he is as good as he ever was. Here he has created another memorable protagonist in one Owen Mackenzie. Born in 1933-- he is roughly the age of the author-- Owen when we meet him is 70 and living with his second wife Julia. He has lived in a series of villages in his 70 years-- thus the reason for the title of the novel-- and has made his money in computers. If Harry Angstrom of the Rabbit novels had lived in the same village as Owen, they would have played golf together, or at the very least, Owen would have purchased an automobile from Harry. Like Rabbit, he is promiscuous, often acts badly, has mild, generic Protestant guilt for his many adulteries but in the end doesn't get off scot-free. There are many references to current events-- the death of JFK, etc.-- as the story is set firmly in the time in which the action takes place. Updike does great catalogues of events and people and makes cogent comments about life. Almost everyone is "marriageable" because nature has left a "tremendous margin for error" in marriages. On villages: "A village is woven of secrets, of truths better left unstated, of houses with less window than opaque wall." And a village "is a hatchery, cherishing its smallest members."

There are dull paragraphs here-- at least to me-- all about computers, but you would be the loser if you didn't finish this novel. The last 50 or so pages make the effort more than worth it. Mr. Updike is a master storyteller, and nobody develops more alive characters than he. They may not always be particularly good, but they are always totally believable and all too often act like a lot of us do.

Rating:
Summary: Updike's Last Hurrah?
Review: Others have criticized Updike's excessive use of techno-speak and probably irrelevant detail in this book. They're right. However Updike still manages to write lucidly brilliant text that will resonate with fans. It's as if he had encapsulated a quartet like Rabbit into one book, and cocked a snook at readers, saying, "It's not perfect: so sue me!"

Rating:
Summary: Updike Comes Back
Review: Owen Mackenzie and his second wife Julia live in retirement in New England. Owen reflects on his declining capabilities, his quixotic relationship with his wife, and of course his personal history. Owen's memory dwells on his boyhood, his student life, his career in IT and his first marriage. Owen's history is chequered: marked by material progress, halting sexual adventures and marital infidelities.

Updike is back on the territory he knows best, unpeeling the minutiae of the personal lives of the middle classes, probing beneath the surface of "respectability". It says a lot for the perpetually unsatisfied nature of humans that there is a constant search for something better, even if that leads to the destruction of marriages. It is as if the need for career advancement is refected in sexual ambition, or both urges stem from the same source. Yet happiness is not achieved - neither in marriage, nor by adultery.

Owen (and men in general) are really the weaker vessel in "Villages": the women characters appear to be more in control, emotionally harder, even when they are cheating on their husbands.

It seems that the recent decline in Updike's work might have been arrrested by his return to his own patch: I thought "Seek My Face" was an improvement, and "Villages" is better than that. Although "Villages" is reminiscent of "Couples", on the whole it is better paced, a deeper and more satisfying work.

G Rodgers

Rating:
Summary: More Updikia
Review: This is a bit disappointing from John Updike, who writes consistently beautiful prose here as elsewhere.

I guess the thing that's increasingly putting me off his stories is his habit of learning some stuff and shoving it into his work so that we can see he learned some stuff. I'm thinking particularly of a short story he did a few years ago about a banjo player touring Russia. The story is sprinkled liberally (whenever something is sprinkled, I guess it's "liberally") with supposedly insider opinions about banjo styles and other bluegrass arcana.

I'm a bluegrass banjo player, and I found it a bit tiresome to have someone appropriate superficial tidbits for gratuituous inclusion in a story; I didn't think the detail added anything, and found it distracting. I wonder if serious math people might react similarly to this novel.

Apart from that, this novel seems to be working in old, possibly depleted soil for someone of John Updike's greatness as a writer.

Rating:
Summary: ENJOYABLE READ OF TYPICAL UPDIKE
Review: This was another nice work by Updike. I would be inclined to ignore the few shots Publishers Weekly made, they are usually a bit over the top and I have noted before, that they quite often miss the mark. This was a well constructed work. Character development was excellent. I suppose I enjoyed it more, as Owen, the main character, was close to my age and I could relate quite well to his bewilderment and reactions to different situations. This is a story set to the backdrop of America, during the times of our greatest change, to the early deveopement of computers and the cluelessness with which most men display when it comes to women. Sex is handled, per usual with Updike, quite well. All in all, it is well worth the read and I very much recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: A Book about Aging, Sexuality, Life
Review: Updike has an amazing ability to explain feelings, emotions, cause and effect in a person's growth from childhood to adulthood. We watch Owen grow into adulthood through his sexual relationships with various women including his two wives. The best work in the book is his description of mental fuzziness and oncoming senility; preference of sleep over sex, wandering through the house looking for his wife to tell her about a dream, fooling with the internet and forgetting the name of the guy he played golf with yesterday. It is real, touching, and yet, there is a lack of warmth, love and human emotion throughout. We don't leave the book loving and admiring Owen. We leave feeling sad and empty: here's the story of an emotionally immature and selfish engineer who lets sex and women rule his life.

But the writing is, on its own, poetic and beautiful.

Rating:
Summary: Villages sustain and conceal (3,5 *s)
Review: Updike has frequently focused on small middle- to upper-class New England communities that he now reluctantly admits are disappearing from America's landscape - somewheres being replaced by sterile anywheres. These villages are the bases of rich, busy, and stable lives, but it is the restlessness and misfit that exists just below the façade of tranquility that interests Updike. In many ways, according to the author, villages are female-centric: the wives preserve the apparent order, but are not disinclined, and have the strength, to engage in risky, though satisfying, extra-marital behavior.

It is through the life of Owen Mackenzie that these villages are explored. Now at age 70 with his second wife Julia of twenty-five years, Owen reflects on both his childhood and his life in Middle Falls, Conn, where he enjoyed professional success in a computer business and, more importantly to him, tried to fill a void in his life by engaging in lengthy clandestine affairs with several of the women in his community. However, given Owen's naiveté and deprived childhood, it is somewhat puzzling that he managed to graduate from MIT, where he pursued Phyllis, an aloof brilliant math student, whom he married upon graduation.

The commentary on Mackenzie's world often is rambling, veering beyond informative - the reader must sift through the wordiness to find the core observations. Many may not find Owen to be a particularly compelling character; one can wonder about his ability, and even motivation, to navigate his various trysts given his perpetual detachment and clumsiness. Disappointingly, Owen's shift to a more chastened life with Julia receives little attention. The book does have its interest - there are gems of insight - yet one is left with a feeling that Mackenzie's world has long since been bypassed.