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Villages
by John Updike
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.
Knopf, 336 pages
10/19/2004
$25.00
ISBN: 1400042909
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Boston Globe Warner Berthoff
Writing so richly immersed in some birthright environment that it marries emotional conviction to the solidity of a detailed sociological treatise, whether or not the latter quality is any part of the author's purposes.
Chicago Tribune William Pritchard
[A]long with the satire and allusion to earlier work, "Villages," in its final two chapters, takes on a dimension of seriousness and depth that--culminating in the book's fine concluding paragraph--is as powerful as anything to be found in Updike. [17 Oct. 2004, C1]
Houston Chronicle Jim Barloon
A very good novel, Villages represents an old man's paean to the joy, the jouissance, of sex, a Yeatsian song celebrating Priapus and his dominion.
Library Journal Misha Stone
Updike again proves that he is a pre-eminent writer with a sharp eye for human nature. [1 Oct. 2004, p. 74]
New York Review Of Books John Banville
No one else I know of, simply no one, writes this well.
Washington Post Fay Weldon
This book gives great pleasure. Some writers get more boring with age, but John Updike just gets more perspicacious.
The Guardian Blake Morrison
The young Updike had wit, the old has wisdom, and in between came the Rabbit sequence - however modest the scope of Villages, few living novelists approach him.
Daily Telegraph David Robson
Updike's 21st novel is too flimsy to be ranked among his major works; but sentence for sentence, character for character, it has a deftness that few, if any, of his contemporaries can match. Every page has the patina of craftsmanship.
Publishers Weekly
Updike still writes lovely sentences and creates a believable portrait of the American village, concealing dark secrets but providing a limited stability.
Los Angeles Times Anthony Day
In "Villages," Updike dips once more into the past, once more trying to puzzle out how a boy so utterly open to indelible sensory impressions becomes the man who vividly recalls them as he makes his awkward way through life. [22 Oct. 2004, E1]
The Independent Geoff Dyer
To claim that this is misogynistic is to miss the point. Updike invites the accusation by what happens, eventually, to Phyllis, but by doing so he complicates his novel and enhances its value as a work of art.
The Independent Justin Cartwright
The true story is a shockingly stark meditation on his sexual and inner lives. Not since Couples... has he been so frank, indeed gynaecological, about sex.
Sydney Morning Herald Peter Wolfe
[A] stunning, morally challenging novel.
London Review Of Books Thomas Karshan
The search for significance of Updikeâs earlier fiction is absent, as are the tens of thousands of magical sentences that mirrored the successes and failures and tentativeness of that search.
The Spectator Stephen Abell
Updike offers evidence of his undoubted talent. He remains our foremost chronicler of life’s metonymies; his mind’s eye has the quality of compound vision, separating the world into essential parts that make up the whole.
Kirkus Reviews
Prototypical Updike: made new here and there by his ever-enviable novelistic skills, but marred by its more than passing resemblance to books that he's written too many times already.
Daily Telegraph Theo Tait
David Foster Wallace's joke – that Updike is "just a penis with a thesaurus" – comes irresistibly to mind.
The Nation Mark Lotto
There is less here than you might think, which becomes apparent if you look past a prose as professional and rich as the frosting on a wedding cake.
Booklist Brad Hooper
As is usual for Updike, this novel is elegantly styled; however, it builds to a less than impressive whole. His lovely sentences are like intricate brickwork, but they ultimately do not add up to a real structure. [1 Sept. 2004, p. 7]
The New York Times Book Review Walter Kirn
Updike forces Owen to write software chiefly because the rise of the computer industry traces much the same historical arc as the sexual revolution... Having done himself this convenience, Updike seeks to portray it as somehow essential and profound... Reading these sections, one senses -- quite correctly -- that it's unnecessary to read them... Not so for the good parts, which are brave and excellent, even when they're vaguely nauseating.
The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
In the end, this all makes for a narrow, claustrophobic novel - a novel that amounts to little more than a weary exercise in the recycling of frayed and shop-worn material.
The Economist
Although it contains many distinguished passages, his latest novel, which comes out in Britain this month, is conceptually generic. And it is hard to say whether the world of letters has been changed in the slightest by its publication.
New York Observer Adam Begley
Villages slots easily--too easily--into the long shelf of his collected works. It's Rabbit Redux all over again, or, more precisely, Couples recoupled (and resundered). Nothing happens that hasn't happened elsewhere in the vast oeuvre; no new kind of character is introduced, no new landscape limned.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Janice Kulyk Keefer
'Progress is sad, change is sad, natural selection is very sad,' Owen concludes. How sad, too, that prolific John Updike has served up this unappetizing dish of deja-vu. [23 Oct. 2004, D18]
 The average user rating for this book is 5.8 (out of 10) based on 5 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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