Seek My Face
By John Updike
Knopf, 276 pages, $23
If John Updike were an artist–the painting kind–he would be a photorealist. In his new novel, “Seek My Face,” he brings his microscopic eye for emotional and physical detail to bear on the life of Hope Ouderkirk McCoy Holloway Chafetz:
“As a child Hope would sit in the chair trying to feel what it was like to be an adult, resting her little round elbows on the broad arms, spreading her fingers, a ring of fat between each joint, on the dowel end, which was set in the softly curved arm, a kind of wooden coin with a pale stripe in it, the butt end of the wedge that tightened the dowel.”
The book takes place on a single day, in Hope’s Vermont home, where she lives alone at age 79. She is being interviewed by a writer, Kathryn, who is at once young, beautiful, ignorant, prepared, aggressively intrusive and longing for approval. Hope is an artist herself, the painting kind, although it has been five years since her last show. She also is an artist of life, of scratch lunches, tempestuous love affairs, long friendships, of the “creaturely” qualities of existence that she abhors and cherishes.
But Kathryn didn’t drive from New York to Vermont to talk about that side of Hope. It is her marriages to famous artists–specifically Zack McCoy–that have drawn the young interviewer. She is less interested in Hope’s working methods and opinions on art than in how Zack was in the sack–as a lover and as a bedwetter.
Hope spends the day trying to hold back her interviewer’s bullying insistence on answers to questions Hope considers none of the stranger’s business. The day is also Hope’s holding action against time. The result is one last re-creation of herself, one final work of art forged from the memories of her life. A life in words, not in pictures. That Kathryn’s story will appear in an Internet magazine is emblematic of the impermanence Hope feels eroding her and the people she has known and loved. Only the art has survived.
Hope, in recounting her life, gives a pretty good summary of the American art scene in the latter half of the 20th Century. At the center of it all is Zack, a character Updike admits is based on Jackson Pollock. He is the overriding figure in Hope’s life, if not in the book.
It is an interesting choice Updike has made, basing such an important character on an actual artist. An art student in his youth, Updike has written extensively about art and artists. On page after page in “Seek My Face,” he demonstrates his understanding of that world and its techniques, as when he describes the work of Guy Holloway, another of Hope’s artist husbands, in which “little yellowing tufts of collaged newspaper stuck out from the paint, carefully buttered encaustic rather than slathered oil, with its shinier, more ridged impasto.”
Yet he builds a character using a real man’s life, rather than creating someone fresh. Perhaps he did this to give readers a body of work to reference in their imaginations, and thus save himself the challenge of creating a fictional artist’s paintings and then describing them on the page.
In truth, the descriptions of Zack’s creations–because the reader pictures Pollock’s dribbled works–are more vivid in the mind than the descriptions of the artists Updike does not base on real people. There are scattered moments when the book begins to feel like a lecture, and we are sort of relieved to return to the cozy kitchen where Hope tries to win Kathryn’s good opinion by making tea, or a modest lunch, or by revealing a secret.
Hope seduces Kathryn, in a way. Any woman with so many last names must be good with men, with people. And she hasn’t lost her touch. She woos the young woman, hoping in turn to draw a positive article from her. Kathryn begins as a cool, pushy interrogator, callow enough to tell a 79-year-old widow:
” `You must stop thinking so much of your age. I never think of mine.’ “
By the end we can feel Kathryn’s reluctance to leave Hope for the drive back to New York. Hope has become a mother figure, a confidant, a life force. She has shown Kathryn about the creaturely side of life, which she describes as “anything that was too much, too human, too worldly, too selfish and cruel. War was of the creature. Lust and intemperance of course, yet reason and excessive learning and disputation, too. The arts . . . were of the creature, howls for recognition and singularity.”
Often, the book feels like an interview of Updike by Updike. He is nine years younger than Hope, but they are both septuagenarians, and his recent works have felt valedictory, reflective, a tad crotchety. It isn’t hard to imagine Updike echoing Hope’s views on a number of topics:
“Interviewers and critics are the enemies of mystery, the indeterminacy that gives art life.” ” `Everybody [being asked about their private life] now is expected to turn inside out on command, like impatiens seeds when touched, or . . . squirting cucumber.’ “
“In old age . . . everything wears thin–the skin thins and declares its sun damage, the cartilage thins and bones grind one upon another, the membrane between what one feels and what one says thins.”
Hope is alone but still harbors “the cool white light, the tremulous shy miracle, of being herself, herself and none other.” That’s another sentiment one can imagine Updike echoing.
At the end of the day, Hope embodies a life of indulging her creaturely instincts, while Kathryn, who is a little uptight, afraid of her boyfriend, absorbs life not by living it but by recording it–at least Hope’s version of it.
She and Kathryn have grown close enough for the older woman to bestow a motherly benediction. ” `Have your life. . . . Don’t hang back,’ ” she says.
Hope has had hers. Updike too. An artist of letters, in this 54th book of an exemplary career, he dips his brush into a world he could have lived in full-time had he chosen to. The result is a novel that is wistful–if not sad–but also appreciative, wry and, well, full of hope.
