Knopf, 1965.
One reason I'm so slow and getting slower is that I tend to actually read Allan's books now. I think I feel that when the books are gone I'll die or something -- so I must never finish. But that is mere superstition. (Or is it?) Anyway, as I think we've noted here before, back when bookselling was regional John Updike had little appeal on the West Coast. Perhaps they saw more clearly than the dealers who specialized in him? For all the celebratory reviews in the leading journals, I don't think much of Updike's work will last.
Including this book. Someone's trying to sell an unsigned copy for $49 that has the front free endpaper missing. Someone else wants $75 for a signed later printing. Good luck to them. The cheapest signed first is only $5 more. Top price: $359 for a copy with a signed bookplate. Allan was asking $100; if Joe is right about the doubling of the first number in the code, he paid $25 in 1997.
Unfortunately there's the usual secret or not-so-secret flaw of an Allan book: in this case, dark markings on the lower board edges, perhaps from an earlier jacket protector. The trouble extends to the endpaper. This is not a book a purist collector would want.
The only thing that could salvage this sale is if the tale, Updike's fourth, were an unacknowledged masterpiece. Alas, I think it's probably the opposite -- over-praised. Lots of emotions flowing around in this brief account of a man who takes his new wife and her son to visit his widowed mother on her farm. The mother is a cranky sort, but I think it's Updike who was trying to work out his own anger. One interesting point, 50 years on, is how irrelevant Joey's three young children are to his emotional life. He seems to presume he will rarely if ever see them again. In that era, children were decorative.
I also liked the mother, contemplating her mortality, saying, "The ghost in me wants to get out. I can feel it pushing."
That's not enough. Although the usual kudos to Knopf for their handsome bookmaking.
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