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.
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"'Villages' traces the life of a Computer Engineer from his childhood in rural Pennsylvania, college at MIT, entrepreneurship at Connecticut and finally retirement - all along analysing his sexual trysts with the various women he encounters. Being my first novel of Updike, the book was a revelation. His sharp analysis and the boyish wonder with which he treats the whole idea and act of sex, made this book worthwhile. At a deeper level, the book is also a mirror to the transitions that the American society underwent from the end of the Depression and through the turbulent decades of the 60's and the 70's."
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Manish (4 out of 5 stars)