Seek My Face

Rating:
Summary: an afternoon's read
Review: By all means read this book in one sitting, preferably a gloomy November afternoon. Updike is a master and in this novel, though it sometimes sounds as if he's dropping names of artists, besides fully realized characters one gets a short course in contemporary American art. Beyond this, however, one has to marvel at Updike's insight into the lives of artists, American life in general, and what it is like to be growing old in 2002. Added to the story are powerfully recreated scenes and settings. (Don't pay attention to reviewers who get facts wrong. Hope's third husband is not a critic.)

Rating:
Summary: Updike as Giver
Review: Seek My Face is the story of Hope, the character loosely based on the artist Lee Miller, who is being interviewed in her Vermont home during the course of one day by Kathryn, an ambitious young modern art scholar collecting information for an online magazine article she plans to write. When Kathryn's aggressive questions - at times difficult, even wounding, and which both exhilarate and exhaust Hope - seem to veer beyond the requirements any article-length piece, an inflection point occurs in the novel. You wonder if Kathryn is on another quest besides the one related to her article: searching out truths she could apply to her own unknown life, her brashness a concealing device. Hope never guesses this, and it makes even more gracious her willingness to give of herself to this girl who she couldn't like, who for most of the story discloses no personal information of her own, and who rejects most of what Hope offers for lunch or tea, who is at an age of confident brio but still without a certain empathic humanity and grace that comes with maturity. A sort of bull in the china shop of the embrittled shelter garden of another woman's life.
A recurring theme in Updike's work is the giving of oneself, sometimes to an indifferent receiver. And in fact for Updike, writing is an act of giving as much as of creating, which is why it's hard to think of another author as true and honest: DeLillo and Kundera, for example, can't come close. The inscription inside the stolen ring that Tristao gives Isabel in the novel Brazil are the initials DAR, Portuguese for "to give." In one of Updike's early stories, the last line is: "Thus the world, like a jaded coquette, spurns our attempts to give ourselves to her wholly." What Hope gives to Kathryn is an art history scholar's dream: a specific account of an era of American modern art and her role in it, including details which would have been easier for her to refuse to discuss. She gives some heartfelt advice, and withholds certain crueler truths. For example, when Kathryn explains that her boyfriend can't really have fun because so much of his life - his career - is undecided, Hope tells her don't wait, that "By the time everything is decided it will be too late. The moment is always now." But elsewhere Hope does not disclose a harsher truth, noting that the younger woman, "...has never learned how little the world needs us to give; its beauty is an impervious beauty, self-absorbed."
Whether or not Kathryn has the self-awareness to understand her own pursuit of the intimate details of Hope's life is uncertain. This could be Updike's comment on the jaded American appetite for the pedestrian suffering of our heroes, but more likely it's an observation of how Kathryn's generation has alienated itself from what it loves, redirecting its energy away from love of something for its own sake and toward the more definable and tangible successes of one's career. Again and again Kathryn rejects perfect opportunities to wrap things up and be on her way, to begin her long drive back into the city. But Kathryn, possibly bewildered by her own response to Hope's openness, having felt the gravity of a life lived well and wisely, can't seem to bring herself to leave before she's grasped something just outside her reach, as though she still hasn't quite figured out what she's missing, can't detect the source of her own alienation.

Rating:
Summary: Immediacy vs. Immortality
Review: The novel explores the contradiction implicit in artists, forced to live and act in the present, trying to create works that transcend time. This theme is returned to repeatedly. The protagonist is 'Hope,' a female painter who's first husband, Zack, pursues pure art in the passion of the present and achieves a place of permanence in the art world. Her second husband, more calculating and commercial, rolls up and down the hills of fame as his work becomes more or less relevant in the ensuing years. Her third husband, a businessman who personifies long-term planning, collects art but creates none himself; his contribution is fathering their children and nurturing her. Thus each husband makes a long-term contribution to the art world in proportion to their focus on the immediate: an irony not lost on the narrator--an artist herself.

Reflecting this dichotomy, the book's written to take place in one day yet covers subject matter from several decades. Mr. Updike writes in that conversational, New Yorker style, yet with much longer sentences than a magazine would allow. The book has no chapters, which sustains the experience of living through one, continuous day. The result is casual prose of thoughts weaving in and out of the present, dipping into past events of interest and re-examining them in today's light.

The writing sparkles with experience of finding meaning in the seeming inconsequences of daily life. Only Updike can make the description of a comfortable chair or plate-glass window breath-taking and thought-provoking. The characters are well fleshed-out, and the relationships and emotional landscape have the complex and irrational stamp of reality. The settings bring you into the art world--both urban and rural--so that you taste the energy and desperation of creative angst.

Although shocked by the unnecessarily vivid sex scenes in this novel, I strongly recommend it for those who enjoy reading literature that primarily reflects on life, relationships, our struggle with mortality and our desire to transcend it. I assume the author chose the name 'Hope' for the main character to underscore her pivotal importance is guiding these tender, unstable personalities towards greatness. Indeed she outlives all her lovers--at least mentally--and can report on which ones succeeded or failed at various turns.

She is a successful, late-career artist who's work has opened a new door for art and, as readers, we suspect that her success was assured. She's a born, true artist; and that's probably why these legendary artists needed her as a soulmate. Hope became their external compass, rewarded or thwarted them as needed, and moved on when they were spent.