Villages
Written by John Updike
Narrated by Edward Herrmann
3/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
This delightful, witty, passionate novel runs from the Depression era to the early twenty-first century.
John Updike
John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the author of fifty-odd previous books, including twenty novels and numerous collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His fiction has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal.
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Reviews for Villages
81 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Villages was one of Updike's later novels, released in 2005. Like many of his earlier novels, it's based around a story of middle class adultery in average-town America, with the main character looking back in his old age at the sex and love which has been indelibly weaved throughout his life's story. With the historical narrative set mainly in the 1950s - 1970s, the protagonist, Owen Mackenzie - an MIT graduate and early pioneer of computer technology - lives comfortably in various 'villages' around the east coast of the States. He is the kind of man who has always been enthralled by the smallest details of the women who have crossed his path, seeing beauty in all the differences of their physique and character. Not surprisingly, this appreciation leads to him being easily persuaded to loosen the moral tethers that bind his marriage, from which point there is no going back.Selfish, self-centred, amoral, most of the characters echo the stereotypes from the Rabbit Angstrom novels, with the familiar theme of middle-age boredom setting in amongst the weekend cocktail party set. That being said, this novel is much more focused on Mackenzie's emotional connections (or lack of) to his sexual affairs, and as such is probably most similar to his earlier Couples novel.The sexual reminiscing is fairly unerotic, but as usual Updike manages to make the lives of weak, morally bankrupt characters totally engaging. I'm a big Updike fan, and as always was blown away by the utter skill of his narrative. Not my favourite of his books so far, but enjoyable nonetheless.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5John Updike's novels read just like his short stories, only longer. It's the same "slice of life" approach, he just gives you a broader slice. In Villages, we are presented with Updike's version of small town life, through the life of his main character, Owen Mackenzie. We're also presented with a brief history of the early decades of computer science, which is Owen's field. (This is integrated into the story somewhat more successfully than the history of postwar American art was in Updike's previous novel, Seek My Face.)But what Villages is really about is sex. It follows Owen's sexual development from childhood to old age. Most of the book is about his many affairs with practically every woman in town. Updike has some interesting things to say about sex, some insightful things, some obvious things, some inconsistent things, and some just plain wrong things. On the whole, the attitude toward sex in this artistic portrayal of it isn't exactly healthy, but neither is it as sick as, say, Joyce's in Ulysses.Not a bad read overall, but not fantastic either.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This novel, read magnificently in its audio version by Edward Herrmann, is vintage Updike. A man in his 70s remembers & celebrates the women in his life--mother, grandmother, girlfriends, 2 wives, lovers--their beauty, their sexuality, their contributions to his developing selfhood. Typically, there's lots of vividly described sex. The central question seems to be: Why do women fuck, when it comes with such tremendous costs for them, costs that men such as the book's subject mostly ignore? He sets the question (less successfully) in the context of the villages with which this fucking (& its consequences) occur. As he concludes, he writes (in a statement probably not adequately set up by the preceding narrative): "Life is madness.Villages exist to moderate that madness." Beautifully, perceptively wrtten, as always, with Updike's usual keen insights into the vicissitudes of the cultural experiences of middle-class American males since WWII, it could have explored more thoroughly & perceptively this moderating role of villages.