Country: USA
Genre: Literary
Pages: 299
Synopsis:
George Caldwell is a severely depressed school teacher who has one beloved son named Peter. George is hanging on to this relationship really hard to try and give meaning to his life. Peter is young, full of life, but also very anxious for his age. He's a loner and has preoccupations way above his age. For example, he idolizes Vermeer and wants to be a painter. Their story is reflected in the story of Chiron, and old and noble centaur, and Prometheus, who have a similar relationship.
"Now George: hold thight," Hummel said. The arrow slid out backwards with a slick spurt of pain. Hummel stood up, his face pink, scorched by fire or flushed in satisfaction. His three moronic helpers clustered around jostling to see the silver shaft, painted at its unfeathered end with blood. Caldwell's ankle, at last free, felt soft, unbraced; his shoes seemed to be fillip with warm slow liquid. The pain had changed color, had shifted into the healing spectrum. The body knew. The aches came now to his heart rhythmically: Nature's breathing.
The cultural heritage left by John Updike is both controversial and bizarre. He's one of these writers you have to have an opinion about. His persona alone steered readers towards his work or turned them away. David Foster Wallace classified him as one of the Great Male Narcissists alongside Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, which is exactly where he belongs. Beyond the hype he created around himself, Updike is a terrific writer. He's a pure stylist, who cares about narrative aesthetic and little else. Plot in an Updike novel is a very loose term. Character development means nothing if it doesn't contribute to the overall beauty of the book. But Updike is really, really good at what he does, so he rarely fumbles those variables. THE CENTAUR is considered one of his best novels and rightfully so. It's both awesome and very "Updik-y".
What the hell does that mean?
Well, first, it doesn't really have a plot. It's about the relationship in-between George and Peter, reflected through the relationship between Chiron and Prometheus. And that's really cool. Updike was a groundbreaking author as he was one of the first to point the day-to-day grind as a form of alienation. George belittles everything he does as he suffers from never having accomplished anything great. Peter, on the other hand, has dreams of greatness and beauty, but his anxiety in social situations give him poor tools to accomplish what he wants. George and Peter only have each other and Updike (who's about the greatest intrusive writer there ever was), reflects their situation through the mirror of myth. Sometimes even, the mirror becomes transparent and myth and reality interweaves. In the beginning for example, when George receives an arrow in the heel, from a student. The myth segments are pure will from Updike to show the beauty in George and Peter and it has to be the most agreeable form of author intrusion I've had the pleasure to read. They are not necessary to the story, but they are really cool. It sets the novel apart from the traditional grinding reality he always uses for setting.
But in order to read Updike and enjoy it, you have to make peace with a few things. First, that whiny, suburban men can do no wrong. In his world, they have the right to whine, cry a river, be 500% depressed and share it with everybody. Secondly, everybody else around them is responsible for their state, or almost. Once you made peace with that, you can appreciate the tremendous pen Updike has. THE CENTAUR is rather problematic in that regards, because even when it's set in Pennsylvanian reality, it has elements of myth. There's the mechanic Hummel, the school principal, the doctor, who are all strong mythical figures that set the novel in this foggy reality, for lack of better term. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of whining done, but reality in THE CENTAUR gets gradually more abstract and it gets harder to judge the characters and take distance from them. There are present day parts where George and Peter are stranded in a hotel during a snowstorm, flashback parts, Chiron parts. It's very well-made. Updike was very aware and in control of what he wanted to create.
"The Founding Fathers," he explained, "in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you. I am a paid keeper of Society's unusables - the lame, the halt, the insane and the ignorant. The only incentive I can give you, kid, to behave yourself is this: if you don't buckle down and learn something, you'll be as dumb as I am, and you'll have to teach school to earn a living."
An Updike review wouldn't be an Updike review without a beautifully worded statement on the depressive condition of modern man, right? There were times where I wanted to slap George Caldwell. Once, he was at the doctor and he asked Peter to get in the room during the exam. When the doctor questions the idea, he says: "Everything that happens to me, happens to him". What kind of parenting is that? Isn't it usually the opposite? For very pragmatic reasons, I can't be awed by a John Updike novel. The prose is always gorgeous, but my disagreement with the man's ideas is profound. THE CENTAUR is really cool and groundbreaking, though and anybody in opposition with Updike's ideas will find things to enjoy about it. The prose alone is a joy, but the structure and the statement Updike makes about alienation using myth as an argument works beautifully. If you have one Updike to read, choose this one.
FOUR STARS