John Updike's 20th novel, Seek My Face (Knopf, 288 pages, $23), takes place during a single, long day -- as did The Poorhouse Fair, his first novel, published in 1959. Though the events occur between one morning and evening in 1998, the narrative sweeps the consciousness of Hope Chafetz from when she was 5 or 6 years old until she is 78. She was brought up in Germantown, an old Philadelphia neighborhood, by a lapsing Quaker father and an Episcopalian mother: "Old stock -- Quaker, Yankee, Western pioneer, Protestant." Later, she has been married to two of the consummate painters of the second half of the century, and then to a third, husband, now dead.
She has agreed to an interview for an online arts site. The interviewer, Kathryn D'Angelo, is a slightly frightening, doctrinaire arts journalist. Hope is in a contemplative stage of life, apprehensive about getting old. She still finds life delightful, but mainly in retrospect.
Kathryn recognizes no bounds, seeking to delve into Hope's sexual experiences and attitudes, other matters acutely personal. The interview seems sometimes to be endless. At one point, Hope reflects, silently "This girl ... [is] insisting on sitting there, on digging at Hope but with no clear concept of what she wants, or when she will have enough." Hope lapses often into internal monologue, confiding to herself, and the reader, more than she reveals to her interviewer.
From the beginning, there is a vast chasm of perception between the interviewer, in her late 20s, and Hope, who was born in 1922. The gap transcends the difference in their ages -- there is incomprehension of each other's aesthetic values, with the interviewer imposing ideologies and culture theory fads that Hope finds ridiculous. The vantage point is all Hope's. The reader never does understand Kathryn, who remains an interloper, inaccessible and vaguely hostile.
Updike has fashioned this superb and moving novel with faultless craftsmanship. He writes with such grace, rhythm and sureness that there is an easy temptation simply to swim across page after page, yet there is much of challenging substance for the attentive reader. He is deeply respectful of the importance of art. He did graduate study in art in Britain immediately after graduating from Harvard and has written extensively about painting and drawing in any number of respected journals.
This is Updike's 20th novel - and his 54th book, others of which have included poetry, criticism, essays, children's books, a memoir, a play and short stories. At 70, he is unquestionably one of the great novelists of his era, often bruited for a Nobel Prize.
Updike's prose is marked by a quality of infinite attentiveness, using all of the human senses to replicate for the reader what his characters experience. Characteristically, his novels have been engaged in battles between deep grief on one hand and on the other a soaring affirmation of the sacred qualities of joy and intimacy. This new novel is a fugue, a sustained counterpoint between powerfully excited love of life and the profound sadness of mortality.
Hope's third and final marriage has been to Jerry Chafetz, a financier and knowledgeable art collector, who died after a dozen years of more supportive and loving marriage than she had had with her two artist husbands. The others, however, made history and made Hope's life important to write about -- more importantly than her own painting, which though professionally successful in her later years was not of historic greatness.
The first of those artist-mates was Zack McCoy, who is unapologetically patterned on Jackson Pollock -- down to the virtually suicidal manner of his car-crash death and to the historic fact that Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, became a consequential artist. Hope's second husband, Guy Holloway, a far more cheerful, if enigmatic, genius with whom she had two sons and a daughter, is as clearly patterned on Andy Warhol, with significant elements of Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein tacked on.
Other personages appear easily identifiable: Clement Greenberg, the critic, Peggy Guggenheim, the collector and gallery impresario. Much of the action is in the Hamptons, the outer end of Long Island, where potato farmers dominated the local culture until being supplanted by rich New Yorkers, escaping the city.
Through these artists, their associates and the fabric of Hope's life with them, Updike presents a neatly focused, reasonably inclusive, grand tour of post World War II art. Her marriage to McCoy occurred as Americans and American-made paintings were seizing dominance of world art, which had long belonged to Europeans. The impact of Pollock / McCoy's brilliant work was enormous. Utterly unrepresentational abstract art -- color-field and hard-edge painting -- eclipsed abstract expressionism, at least for a while. That was followed by the historic rise of pop art -- both sardonic and polemic --brought to its apex by Warhol / Holloway.
Some critics may rebuke Updike for too closely adhering to history in a novel. I strongly disagree. The book is significantly about genius and especially about artistic motivation and conception. To have written of those important and complex phenomena by using totally fictional art forms, personalities and trends would have to have been, I believe, far more superficial than the effects Updike achieves in this book.
One of the great powers of the book is Updike's confident comprehension of the nature of the motivation toward greatness. It's precisely what Hope is trying to impart to Kathryn when she describes the drive within McCoy and others in the 1940s and 1950s. "That's why abstraction was so glamorous," she tells her, "it was all self. I know it must seem very naive to your generation, who don't believe in the self, who think the self is just a social construct, just as you don't believe there are writers, just texts that write themselves and can mean anything."
This clearly is at the core of Updike's own sense of art and artistry. In an interview two years ago, he insisted to me that "writing is not just a craft. ... It is a religious event that demands full intensity." In Seek My Face -- this title is an imperative that Psalm 27 attributes to God --Updike movingly grasps greatness and its drive, as manifest in Pollock, Warhol and other painters, but in his own accomplishments as well.