brazil john updike book review

• ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

by John Updike ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 1994

The indefatigable Updike only occasionally succeeds here. Tristo, a black teenager from the favela, encounters Isabel, a rich and sheltered young daughter of the elite, one afternoon on Rio's Copacabana beach—and when Isabel takes him home and gives her maidenhead to him, both kids discover a love union like that of their storied counterparts, Romeo and Juliet. With Tristo, Isabel flees Rio, ahead of her father's armed posse, and they make it as far as So Paulo. There, Isabel is wrenched away—but this is only the first of a number of forced (and false) partings, around which, together, Isabel and Tristo will turn to gold-mining, prostitution, living among jungle Indians, and finally re-civilization. Isabel will even resort to the help of magic to have Tristo returned to her, at the price of a shaman-induced change in respective skin-colors for them both—Updike's woolliest turn in a story fanciful with twists and turns, touristy aperáus, and sexual philosophy. Like a slab of abused plywood, the novel is forever coming apart into its separate laminates. Updike at times (especially when he's trying to write suspenseful scenes, or violent ones) seems to be using the exotic foreignness of his setting as an excuse for over-vividness, somewhat like Karl May's old German romances of the American Indian. Elsewhere, more cunningly, he seems to be subverting some of Latin-American magic realism's more bloated clichÇs by overturning them into a kind of realistic-magic fiction. But, again, as in the African-based The Coup, he seems to think he needs another continent to try to tell the story of a wholly other—and maybe to tell a story, period. The Updikean intelligence and draughtsmanship and sex-awe constantly obtrude, weakening the narrative big picture, studding the book with perceptions and alertness galore but never with quite the air of exotic metaphysical enchantment the novelist seems to seek. Saul Bellow's finest book, Henderson the Rain King, is still unchallenged as the only American novel of our era to do that.

Pub Date: Feb. 9, 1994

ISBN: 0-679-43071-7

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993

GENERAL FICTION

Share your opinion of this book

More by John Updike

BOOK REVIEW

by John Updike edited by Christopher Carduff

by John Updike

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2015

Kirkus Prize winner

National Book Award Finalist

A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

More by Hanya Yanagihara

by Hanya Yanagihara

More About This Book

PERSPECTIVES

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen ) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

More by J.D. Salinger

by J.D. Salinger

SEEN & HEARD

APPRECIATIONS

• Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
• News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
• Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
• Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
• Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
• More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
• About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

• Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

Advertisement

Supported by

'Brazil'

• Share full article

Review by Review by Barbara Kingsolver

• Feb. 6, 1994

TRISTAO and Isabel, the hero and heroine of John Updike's 16th novel, "Brazil," never quite realize the epic valor of their namesakes of medieval legend and Wagnerian drama. They mean well, but they just can't seem to resist silk shirts and kinky sex.

The knight-errant Tristao is strutting the Copacabana beach in his shining armor of night-black skin when he first lays eyes on pale Isabel, in her bikini and rich-girl languor. "This dolly," he declares. "I think she was made for me." With a razor blade in his pocket and the vague sense that he has outgrown a life of crime, Tristao makes his way to her, pledging his devotion with a D.A.R. ring previously snatched from an elderly North American tourist. Thus begins a new life of crime, for their love will force Tristao and Isabel to break all the rules of class, race and social convention. Even so, Tristao has a hard time giving up prostitutes and his razor blade. Isabel develops a habit of stealing family heirlooms to finance her marriage, and she shrugs off a lifetime of infidelity by reasoning that her spirit has remained true.

In an afterword, Mr. Updike cites Joseph Bedier's "Romance of Tristan and Iseult," which he says gave him his tone. But these new lovers seem to have more in common with Othello and Desdemona, Romeo and Juliet, and perhaps Sean Penn and Madonna. They are not merely doomed but also adolescent and wildly foolish. To say that they loved "not wisely but too well" is in this case a kind of comic understatement.

The author has left his favored fictional terrain, the metaphorical deserts and jungles of suburban American marriage, for the very real deserts and jungles of class-engraved Brazil. The novel recalls an earlier work, "The Coup," which was set in the mythical African nation of Kush. Because "Brazil" lacks the gentle, trenchant realism that is Mr. Updike's trademark and glory, it may at first seem slight to his seasoned fans. Some readers will also, undoubtedly, grow tired of the onslaught of rape fantasy and racist imagery. The novel is thoroughly salted with phrases to make the politically sensitive reader cringe: in their fantastic journey across the Brazilian hinterlands, the lovers encounter innumerable varieties of so-called Indians who scowl and steal children or flee "with the unembarrassed cowardice of savages." There are ubiquitous references to Tristao's "yam," the organ that arises (so to speak) as the book's central character, and whose monstrous size is explicitly linked with Tristao's African ancestry.

But a writer of Mr. Updike's accomplishment cannot be dismissed without a hearing. "Brazil," for all its political incorrectness, seems good-natured and bent on self-parody, in exactly the same way his Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom -- especially in the last of the series, "Rabbit at Rest" -- winds up personifying flawed maleness.

My own many volumes of Mr. Updike's work have their margins blotted with scrawled protests -- mainly the question, "Does he expect to get away with this?" He does, and he will. Whatever one feels about Mr. Updike's world view, it is hard to resist the depth of his mind and the seduction of his prose. Once again, in "Brazil," that prose is measured, layered, insightful, smooth, as addictive a verbal drug as exists on the modern market. For every tiresome appearance of Tristao's yam, there is also an image or observation that seems, against all odds, to mark the arrival of something new in the English language.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

David Louis Edelman

Science Fiction Author of the JUMP 225 Trilogy

John Updike’s “Brazil”

Write a score of enthusiastically received novels, break sexual and racial taboos, and successfully subvert literary conventions, and you might think you can do anything.

Only a writer with as many accolades under his belt as John Updike could write a book like Brazil , the sixteenth novel by the New England writer and certainly one of his most daring. All at once, Brazil seeks to be an interracial love story, a time-shattering fable, and a sociological treatise. Remarkably, Updike nearly succeeds in all three.

The novel chronicles the twenty-year relationship between white, upper-class beauty Isabel and black, fatherless thief Tristao, from their initial meeting on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro to their flight through South America and eventual return. It’s a novel with a strange narrative structure, one that will occasionally leapfrog several years in a single sentence without warning.

From the instant Tristao and Isabel catch sight of each other, they fall deeply and irreversibly in love, the type of instantaneous love that can only happen in novels. Although racial tension doesn’t run as deeply in Brazil as in the United States, Isabel’s bourgeois father (a government ambassador) doesn’t approve of her giving her future to a penniless thief born from a prostitute. As if the difference in races weren’t enough, Updike exaggerates the social gap to mythical proportions: Tristao’s mother literally rolls around in darkness and filth numbed to the world by drink, while Isabel bathes in showers with adjustable water nozzles and luxurious towels.

The two decide to flee the wrath of Isabel’s father and his men and construct their own future together, in a journey which involves multiple losses of innocence for them both. Isabel becomes initiated in the dark pleasures of sex as well as the toils of life in the lower classes; Tristao learns that there is more to living life than caring for one’s self.

Soon Brazil moves from the merely implausible to the highly ridiculous. Tristao and Isabel meander from the squalor of gold mining to the hunger of wandering the South American deserts to slavery at the hands of a troop of colonial fanatics. Isabel experiments with prostitution and motherhood and lesbianism, while Tristao vacillates between protector and provider and delinquent.

Updike’s most preposterous twist occurs when Tristao and Isabel switch races with the help of an old shaman’s magic. This transformation allows for a series of reflections on the nature of the races which skitters dangerously close to (and sometimes crosses over) the line of offensiveness. Updike, not content to skim along the surface of black and white love, brings out the deepest taboos between the races: master and slave relationships, differences in genitalia, social standing. He writes of the Africanized Isabel at one point as “not a social and spiritual equal but a thing of the flesh, imported from afar.”

Such statements, however, don’t really convey the racist message they might seem to at first glance. What Updike is really trying to do is capture the thought processes which lead to the tyrannical racial prejudices which enslave us all. It is Tristao and Isabel’s triumph that they can transmute the wedge that divides them into the source of pleasure which keeps their love strong and vibrant.

0 thoughts on “John Updike’s “Brazil””

This novel is a good, but not great work. The American author attempts to tell his audience things about Brazil. But by moving “from the merely implausible to the highly ridiculous” he loses some credibility. At times, it feels he bite off more than he could chew.

I thought this novel was really good. It drew you into the characters and made you feel their struggle. I’m not sure it would have the same effect on everyone, considering the the relationship i’m currently in where neither family approves. Overall though, I think its a great read.

I liked the novel so much that I translated it into my mother tongue. Why does Mr Corbett and some others demand from the late Mr Updike that he should have stuck strictly to the magical realism of the S-America in certain parts of the book, as in changing the races, or the like? Has J.U. given some oath to do it? He didn’t have to! In fact, he couldn’t do it, for the novel is, all in all, a piece of irony whereas the magical realism is not; in fact it seems he’s laughing at it. His irony in this book has more than one layer. In the final chapter, every layer is brought to its end.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

UK Edition Change

• UK Politics
• News Videos
• Paris 2024 Olympics
• Rugby Union
• Sport Videos
• John Rentoul
• Mary Dejevsky
• Andrew Grice
• Sean O’Grady
• Photography
• Theatre & Dance
• Culture Videos
• Fitness & Wellbeing
• Food & Drink
• Health & Families
• Royal Family
• Electric Vehicles
• Car Insurance Deals
• Lifestyle Videos
• Hotel Reviews
• News & Advice
• Simon Calder
• Australia & New Zealand
• South America
• C. America & Caribbean
• Middle East
• Politics Explained
• News Analysis
• Today’s Edition
• Home & Garden
• Broadband deals
• Fashion & Beauty
• Travel & Outdoors
• Sports & Fitness
• Climate 100
• Sustainable Living
• Climate Videos
• Solar Panels
• Behind The Headlines
• On The Ground
• Decomplicated
• You Ask The Questions
• Binge Watch
• Travel Smart
• Watch on your TV
• Crosswords & Puzzles
• Most Commented
• Newsletters
• Ask Me Anything
• Virtual Events
• Wine Offers
• Betting Sites

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in Please refresh your browser to be logged in

BOOK REVIEW / A wild holiday romance: 'Brazil' - John Updike: Hamish Hamilton, 15.99

Article bookmarked.

Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails

Sign up to our free breaking news emails, thanks for signing up to the breaking news email.

Great writers are entitled to their holidays like everybody else - it's just that you can't always depend on what they're going to smuggle back through duty-free. John Updike has been flying down to Rio, and Brazil is the strange fruit of his sojourn, a novel that mixes old-fashioned love story with New World parable. If this is a brave attempt to give his readers something they might not expect, then it's also perilously close to something they might not like either.

It opens on the sunstruck bustle of Copacabana beach, where Tristao Raposo, a young black street hood, meets Isabel Leme, a younger upper-class white girl. He gives her a signet ring, stolen from a gringa tourist, and she invites him back to her uncle's baronial apartment. It's safe to say they're hot for each other, and before you can say 'that's amore' a sizzling Updikean bedroom scene is underway. Tristao 'felt his cashew become a banana, and then a rippled yam', on which exotic tuber Isabel eagerly loses her virginity. Love is professed on both sides, but their wrong-side-of-the- tracks romance comes a cropper on the reef of social propriety. Isabel's uncle alerts her absent diplomat father once the lovers go on the lam, and hired goons track them down to their bolt-hole in Sao Paulo. Isabel is led back to the cossetted prison of home, but after two years at university in Brasilia she is reunited one day with Tristao, and again they escape, this time to the jungly embrace of Brazil's wild west.

It will not take the reader very long to discern in this accelerated sequence of union, separation and flight the lineaments of a fairytale. And a myth: Updike's model is the legend of Tristan and Iseult, prototype victims of doomed love. After a bright beginning the author tilts an ominous shade on his story, forcing the star-crossed lovers to struggle for their lives against the savage privations of the country, 'with its atrocious history, its sordid stupid masses, its eternal underdevelopment, its samba on the edge of chaos'. Following three years' hard labour in a gold mine for Tristao, and the same in a brothel for Isabel, they retreat into the treacherous Mato Grosso, losing various children and taking their chances with poisonous roots, teeming insects and vampire bats. As if that isn't enough, they also appear to have fetched up in an ancient time-zone, where brutish tribes and dwarfish Indians lurk at every turn; the pair eventually fall into the untender hands of throwback Portuguese bandeirantes, who throw shackles on Tristao and marry off Isabel to one of their chiefs.

That the story forages in the landscape of magic realism is appropriate to a novel set in Brazil: the genre is closely associated with the volatility and romanticism of Latin America. That it is John Updike doing the foraging is something of a mystery: a master realist aiming for the hazy fugues of magic realism seems highly perverse, like a concert pianist playing an accordion. Martin Amis once hailed Updike as 'a writer who can do more or less as he likes', a facility which can, of course, be blithely abused, as many who have read S or The Coup or even last year's Memories of the Ford Administration will testify. It is perfectly inevitable that a writer of such range will cast his net wide, yet it is arguable that the further Updike strays from his personal domain - adultery and disillusion in the somnolent suburbs of New England - the less successful he is. Whether in the Buddhist ashram in S or the African state in The Coup, one felt the slightly bored playfulness of a writer trying to entertain himself, the head brimful of research but the heart not fully engaged.

So it is with Brazil. Even Updike's stock in trade is showing marks of fatigue. What has always been a source of alarmed delight in his work is the unabashed gaze he fixes on sex and its comedy of sly second-guessing and desperate connivance. Here the eye constantly snags on bizarre descriptions of sexual organs; he is particularly fond of that 'yam' of Tristao's, and Isabel fares little better with 'her semi-seen, furry, rousing cranny' (more furry tail than fairytale); put them together and you get 'two exotic flowers so contrarily evolved'. Nor do you have to be a keen combatant in gender politics, or whatever you want to call it, to feel affronted by a phrase like 'the criminal bliss of rape'. Updike is too canny not to realise how close to the wind he's sailing, but his penchant for the idea of woman-as-sperm-receptacle is not one even his admirers are much inclined to defend.

As for the famously lush prose style, it's barely allowed an outing. At one point Isabel's remote father is described as speaking Portuguese with a 'flavourless neutrality' after his peregrinations as an ambassador: 'He knew so many other languages that his mind was always translating; his tongue had no home.' A nice observation, and pertinent to this book, which itself has the slightly stilted manner of a translation. Updike keeps trotting out gnomic locutions like 'Too much courage becomes the love of death' and 'It takes a sad childhood to make us eager to be adult', which have a flavourless, not to mention pointless, neutrality all of their own. There's also a moment of authorial intrusion, with Updike acting as a sort of benign chorus: 'Though this chapter covers the greatest stretch of time, let it be no longer than it is]' A hearty amen to that.

And what of Brazil itself? We must assume that Updike harbours some affection for this huge, harsh country, if only in the loving, meticulous detail with which he conjures the acreage of forest and swamp and scrub. Animal and vegetable life is faithfully logged too, yielding further proof of Updike's casual genius for assimilating vast tracts of knowledge. Where previously he might have unfurled a litany of different beers and made it sound like a religious incantation, here he describes jungle delicacies with a touch of Elizabeth David: 'the purplish, cherry-sized fruit of the araca, which smells of turpentine and makes the saliva in one's mouth fizz, and the pods of the inga which are stuffed with sweet-tasting down, and wild pineapples whose flesh abounds in big black seeds and tastes of raspberry, and the pears called bacuri and that even greater delicacy named the acai, which overnight curdles into a fruity cheese'.

What doesn't get much of a look-in is the human side; Updike sets his amorous pair against a squalid backdrop of bandits and crooks, whores, pimps and rapacious peasants. His take on the place reminded me of P J O'Rourke's quip about Florida: a careful reading of the novel will do more to damage the Brazilian tourist trade than anything except an actual visit to Brazil. It's a case of don't go out after dark, don't drink the water and don't talk to anyone carrying a cut-throat razor.

In the end its hope of racial harmony, even of miscegenation, seems a vain fancy. Despite much energetic coupling - and several children - Isabel never conceives by Tristao's seed. All of the old prejudices and stereotypes are left in place at the story's bitter, and beautifully orchestrated, conclusion. Brazil overall is a disappointment, but it should be put in perspective. Within the Updike oeuvre, it's just a postcard in a gallery of modern masters. Won't somebody tell him to stay at home?

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.

New to The Independent?

Or if you would prefer:

Hi {{indy.fullName}}

• My Independent Premium
• Account details
• Help centre

John Updike New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994 ISBN # 0-679-43071-7 260 pages.

• Review Policy
• Review Archive
• Small Fry Saturday Reviews
• 30 Before 35
• The Well-Read Runner

Monday, December 30, 2013

• Book Review: Brazil by John Updike

8 comments:

I never heard of this one! Interesting! I keep thinking I'll reread the Rabbit books again now that I'm older, but so far haven't done it. I remember enjoying The Witches of Eastwick, although I was more forgiving of sexism in authors back them, but I don't know what the consensus of the literary critics was on it...

See, I don't know a lot about Updike in general, but the comments in this post make me think I should do a little research...like re: sexism and such...hmmmm.

Updike and I have a rocky relationship based on an essay I read in college. But this really sounds like an interesting book! I've never heard of it before, so thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Interested what type of article it was that you read? I don't know a lot about Updike in general.

I have a copy of Gertrude and Claudius that I DNF'd about a thousand years ago. Such is the extent of my experience with Updike. I should probably give him another shot.

Hmmm never heard of that one...will be sure to avoid :)

I actually really love magical realism and am also trying to read more books set in other countries, so this might go on my TBR list. I'm not big on graphic violence and sex though, so I'll have to think about it. I don't know anything about Updike, but I'm glad you enjoyed your first experience with his work :)

Yeah definitely a lot of violence/sex...you might want another choice in this category if that's not a go for you!

Search This Blog

Grab a Button:

John Updike. Fawcett Books, $6.99 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-449-22313-0

Reviewed on: 02/27/1995

Genre: Fiction

Hardcover - 272 pages - 978-0-679-43071-1

Hardcover - 978-0-517-15837-1

Open Ebook - 159 pages - 978-0-679-64589-4

Paperback - 272 pages - 978-0-449-91163-1

Paperback - 272 pages - 978-0-14-118894-2

• Apple Books
• Barnes & Noble

More By and About this Author chevron_right

Featured Fiction Reviews

• Literature & Fiction

Sorry, there was a problem.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Brazil Paperback – December 28, 1994

• Print length 304 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Fawcett
• Publication date December 28, 1994
• Dimensions 4.25 x 1 x 7 inches
• ISBN-10 0449223132
• ISBN-13 978-0449223130
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

From publishers weekly, from the inside flap, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Fawcett (December 28, 1994)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0449223132
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0449223130
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.6 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.25 x 1 x 7 inches
• #1,746,962 in Literature & Fiction (Books)

About the author

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 lived in Massachusetts. He was the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. John Updike died on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 59% 14% 7% 12% 7% 59%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 59% 14% 7% 12% 7% 14%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 59% 14% 7% 12% 7% 7%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 59% 14% 7% 12% 7% 12%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 59% 14% 7% 12% 7% 7%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• About Amazon
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell products on Amazon
• Sell on Amazon Business
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Become an Affiliate
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Make Money with Us
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Amazon and COVID-19
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices

• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices