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    Villages
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    Villages
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    Villages
    Audiobook9 hours

    Villages

    Written by John Updike

    Narrated by Edward Herrmann

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    John Updike's twenty-first novel, a bildungsroman, follows its hero, Owen Mackenzie, from his birth in the semi-rural Pennsylvania town of Willow to his retirement in the rather geriatric community of Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts. In between these two settlements comes Middle Falls, Connecticut, where Owen, an early computer programmer, founds with a partner, Ed Mervine, the successful firm of E-O Data, which is housed in an old gun factory on the Chunkaunkabaug River. Owen's education (Bildung) is not merely technical but liberal, as the humanity of his three villages, especially that of their female citizens, works to disengage him from his youthful innocence. As a child he early felt an abyss of calamity beneath the sunny surface quotidian, yet also had a dreamlike sense of leading a charmed existence. The women of his life, including his wives, Phyllis and Julia, shed what light they can. At one juncture he reflects, "How lovely she is, naked in the dark! How little men deserve the beauty and mercy of women!" His life as a sexual being merges with the communal shelter of villages: "A village is woven of secrets, of truths better left unstated, of houses with less window than opaque wall."

    This delightful, witty, passionate novel runs from the Depression era to the early twenty-first century.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateOct 19, 2004
    ISBN9780739315439
    Unavailable
    Villages
    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 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

    3/5

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    • 4/5
      Villages 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.
    • 3/5
      John 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.
    • 4/5
      This 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.