Seek My Face

Seek My Face, published in 2002, was John Updike's twentieth book. Does practice make perfect? In this case I'd say yes. The title comes from Psalm 27: "You speak in my heart, and say 'Seek my face'. Your face, Lord, will I seek."

This novel is essentially the internal musings of an old woman, Hope Chafetz, who is being interviewed by a much younger, ambitious New York journalist. It unfolds over the course of an early spring day in Hope's rural Vermont home. Hope is of interest to the interviewer because of her involvement with some of the great American artists of the mid 1900s. There is a very skillful balance of the past and present. Updike's renowned attention to detail is present throughout, notably in Hope's attention to food. She wants to provide her interrogator with sustenance, however meagre and old personish.

Hope is an amalgam of Lee Krasner (Hope is short, has bangs and is married to the Pollack-like Zack), Helen Frankenthaler (Hope's paintings, as described, resemble Frankenthaler's) and their ilk. The Flats described in the novel is The Springs, in the Hamptons, where Krasner and Pollack lived. Hope is an artist whose talent was put on the back burner while she tended to the considerable needs of her artist superstar husbands (although Krasner only married once). We are given a heady blend of art history and fiction. The first husband, Zack, is based on Jackson Pollack; the second, strangely enough, on the blatantly gay Andy Warhol crossed with Roy Lichenstein. Updike takes liberties because this is fiction, after all. It is a story of the rise, post WW2, of the American abstract expressionists. It's also a bit of a game called Guess the Artist and I admit I had fun with it.

My advice: if you like Updike and art you'll like this. I did.