Seek My Face.

UPDIKE, John.

$175.00

Item Number: 123401

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

First edition of this “brief novel of deep feeling” (Time). Octavo, original half cloth. Signed by John Updike on the title page and additionally signed three times by jacket designer Chip Kidd, on the front panel, on the title page and the rear jacket flap. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Chip Kidd.

John Updike’s twentieth novel, like his first, The Poorhouse Fair, takes place in one day, a day that contains much conversation and some rain. The seventy-nine-year-old painter Hope Chafetz, who in the course of her eventful life has been Hope Ouderkirk, Hope McCoy, and Hope Holloway, answers questions put to her by a New York interviewer named Kathryn, and recapitulates, through stories from her career and many marriages, the triumphant, poignant saga of postwar American art. In the evolving relation between the two women, interviewer and subject move in and out of the roles of daughter and mother, therapist and patient, predator and prey, supplicant and idol. “A rewarding new novel from our reigning master of surprise, the last sequence of which is surpassing in its beauty" (San Francisco Chronicle).