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Seek My Face

A Novel

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Seek My Face

By: John Updike
Narrated by: Kathryn Walker
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About this listen

 A riveting novel that takes place in one day about an elderly painter and the New Yorker interviewing her—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. • “A brief novel of deep feeling.”—Time

On a day that contains much conversation and some rain, the seventy-eight-year-old painter Hope Chafetz, who in the course of her eventful life has been Hope Ouderkirk, Hope McCoy, and Hope Holloway, answers questions put to her by a New York interviewer named Kathryn, and recapitulates, through the story of her own career, the triumphant, poignant saga of postwar American art. In the evolving relation between the two women, the interviewer and interviewee move in and out of the roles of daughter and mother, therapist and patient, predator and prey, supplicant and idol. The scene is central Vermont; the time is the early spring of 2001. Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Women's Fiction World Literature New York

Critic reviews

“A brief novel of deep feeling . . . What you recall is that reading Updike has always provided the pleasures you hoped were in store when you went through the trouble of learning to read.”—Time

“The premise of Seek My Face is clean and powerful, like a canvas by Barnett Newman. . . . Swirled over [it] is John Updike’s superabundant prose, dazzling strings of looping sentences that wrap these two women in glittering constellations of words.”—The New York Observer

“A rewarding new novel from our reigning master of surprise, the last sequence of which is surpassing in its beauty.”—San Francisco Chronicle
All stars
Most relevant
Having produced so much that is so wonderful, now in his late 70's you begin to wonder whether John Updike still has it in him. His regular short story contributions to The New Yorker are a pleasing palliative, but it is a major work like Seek My Face that completely blows away any unnecessary concerns. John Updike is the best living author, this is one of his best works.
A simple story structure which effortlessly focuses on the New York school, drawing, sketching, fixing, painting and snapping away until we have unfolded a huge detailed canvas on which he has made the whole of the late part of last century for us - from the 9th Street exhibition through Willem de Kooning to the campy excesses of Andy Warhol. No tricks, but beautiful heart-warming prose and an ocean of emotions and experience.
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

Updike's Warhol and Pollock - masterful

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The regular mentions of time passing brought me out of the flow of the story, but the ending left me reflecting on how life passes, which was worth the stretch.

Worth the stretch

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