Villages

by JohnUpdike (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2004

  $16.01

• Used

  Paperback
  2006

  $3.25

  Owen Mackenzie's life story abounds with sin and seduction, domesticity and debauchery. His marriage to his college sweetheart is quickly followed by his first betrayal and he embarks upon a series of affairs. His pursuit of happiness, in a succession of small towns from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts, brings him to the edge of chaos, from which he is saved by a rescue that carries its own fatal price.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $3.25

  John Updike's 21st novel describes the life, romantic and otherwise, of Owen Mackenzie. Owen's education at M.I.T. and his successful business take him from the village of his birth, Willow, in eastern Pennsylvania, to Haskells Crossing, in eastern Massachusetts, where he expects to end his days. In the course of this modest life journey, the communal humanity of villages, chiefly embodied in their female citizens, seeks to humanize him, assuaging and chastening his childhood sense of singularity and foreboding. He knows that the quotidian surface holds an abyss of calamity beneath it, but he strives to cling to his dreamlike sense of leading a charmed life, an attempt in which he is encouraged by his two wives, Phyllis and Julia, and a number of other women.