Book Report: The Centaur

Just read Updike's 1963 The Centaur, about a boy and his dad. Here's the link to Wikipedia, which gives a decent rundown:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Centaur

Can't help but thinking of this one Death Cab for Cutie song:

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=face+that+launched+1000+shits&hl=en&client=firefox-a&emb=0&aq=-1&oq=face+that+launched+1000+shit#


The idea between the song and The Centaur is that both use a comparison of contemporary times to give extra meaning. By making these times symbolic of some mythology these themes hitch their stories to some greater thing.

The book takes on three or four different modes of presentation, which sometimes confuse the reader and other times make for interesting reading. One of these is a changing viewpoint between 3rd person omniscient narrative and 1st person narrative. Another mode was the way Updike interspersed mythology into scenes, sometimes wildly going off of the scene (wait, they're a bunch of talking Gods on Olympus, but they were two students eating lunch). I struggled for a time with whether or not George Caldwell would die or not.

Therefore, one problem is certainly the ambiguity, which Updike uses purposefully enough. Explaining this, I feel like I've already told you how this can get boring. There were a couple of times where I would put down the book just for the sake of putting down the book. It sometimes reads like a short story that Updike just kept on writing. Likewise, all of the classic Updike overly-sentimental metaphoric scenes are here.

The one chapter that affected me the most was the emotional climax of the book. This was directly after there was an obituary talking about Caldwell's death. The book is obscure enough that when I read it, I didn't have to believe it, but when the scenes blur and Updike talks the slightest bit about Caldwell walking the slightest bit ahead of the son, I felt as if the whole world were ending. In short, the gimmicks worked.