Villages: A novel

By John Updike

Book Overview

A delightful, witty, passionate novel that follows its hero from the Depression era to the early twenty-first century--from a master of American letters and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400042909
• ISBN13: 9781400042906
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: Knopf
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.24 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.2" x 1.3" x 5.6"

Customer Reviews

Updike at the height of his powers

This novel is a true masterpiece, full gorgeous phrasings and extraordinarily keen observations. No writer is a greater virtuoso of the English language than Updike, but many of his books are plagued by scenes and storylines that dawdle and beat around the bush. Not this one. This book has a strong and well paced storyline, so you not only get Updike's immaculate writing skills but also the kind of forward momentum that keeps readers feeling a genuine sense of destination. It's also has a flamboyant cast of characters, lead by Owen Mackenzie, who Updike takes from boyhood to the grave in a whirlwind expedition through childhood hi-jinx, courtship, marriage, fatherhood, numerous extra-marital affairs, business relationships and a career as a computer engineer and entrepreneur. You get a surprisingly well-informed and entertaining history of the computer industry's evolution. Updike makes extraordinary observations about digital devices and their analogies to the humanity. It's also a very sexy book, built around male/female relationships, some sanctioned, some illicit. Nobody writes sex and love scenes like Updike, and this book is loaded with them. They're not so much descriptions of the act as they are beautifully and incisively crafted explorations of human geography and emotion. Some of these scenes are so literary even Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson would have difficulty quibbling with them. What a treat that John Updike, though advanced in years, is still turning out such powerhouse novels.

Updike As Good As Ever

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.

ENJOYABLE READ OF TYPICAL UPDIKE

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.

Computers and the Man-Woman Relationship.

A tale of computers and the sexes. Owen Mackenzie is retired from founding a successful computer company, and is living the past, reflecting on the women of his life and on women in general. Somewhat perplexed by the whole thing, he reflects that "perhaps it was a simple question of electrical engineering: in a world full of plugs, nature must provide sockets." As a computer type, I would have thought he would have seen it as programming. Giving two completely different programs, putting in the same data on a spreadsheet and a word processor yields entirely different results. If you are familiar with John Updike's work, some fifty books that have won just about every award there is, you'll find that he hasn't lost his touch. If you are not familiar with him, this is a book of our time, and it's a good place to get hooked.

The Life of Owen Mackenzie as an American History

John Updike has since the 1950s been the chronicler of the American mind. His twenty-one novels, poems, short stories, and essays have examined the American Dream and its vagaries, the inner and outer lives of the men and women living through the 20th century, the dichotomy between classes, ethics, sexual maturation, big business, politics as seen from both sides of the fence - name it and Updike has explored it. But John Updike also happens to be a gifted, eloquent wordsmith who can make small observations in a few words that become instantly branded on the brain as epiphanies. Reading Updike is a complete pleasure. For those questioning whether this first man of letters has anything new to say, then VILLAGES is a must read. By the literary means of separating chronological 'biography' with evenly interspersed chapters that pause to explore the sexuality of the main character ("Village Sex I - VI") Updike's writing is refreshing and affords a better scrutiny of the life of a man as influenced by his gradual sexual awakening, underlining how those basic needs alter his movement through the stages from childhood through adolescence through adulthood to old age. Owen Mackenzie was born during the Depression in Willow, Pennsylvania, (the first Village) a child of minimal means whose every discovery becomes a preparation for the Rake's Progress ahead. His introduction to the glories of the female body are bumpily naive and it is this 'frozen adolescence' the propels him through a marriage to a fellow student Phyllis) at MIT whom he marries and has four children, and upon graduation moves to Middle Falls, Connecticut where he slowly becomes a guru in the nascent computer industry. His various acts of adultery/affairs include a cornucopia of women of different types and values, and as his age and company and life in this village progress, he eventually must face his choices. He finally divorces Phyllis and marries another odd type (Julia, recently divorced from the town minister) only to end up in a retirement 'village' of Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts. A fairly simple story, and much in line with Updike's previous works. The joy of this book is in the asides addressing issues few authors face head-on. "Capitalism...asks only one thing of us: that we consume. The stupider we are, the better consumers we are...You don't need to understand anything to watch television; they want you so stupid you keep staring at the commercials." "A village is woven of secrets, of truths better left unstated, of houses with less window than opaque wall." "Not for the rich the scattered wandering, the flight from ill-equipped nuclear family into America's wasteland of tawdry entertainments, of shopping-mall parking lots as large as lakes and seedy roadside bars advertising karaoke on Wednesday nights, of deserted downtowns and razed forests, of roving from job to job and mate to mate, amid such meagre electronic distractions as heist movies featuring ca