description: John Updike's 21st novel is a bildungsroman describing the education, romantic and otherwise, of Owen Mackenzie. Owen's education (at M.I.T.) and his successful software company take him from the village of his birth, Willow, in eastern Pennsylvania, to Haskell's Crossing, in eastern Massachusetts, where he expects to end his days. In the course of this modest life's 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. The time stretches from the hero's childhood in the 1930s to his retirement in the present century.
language: English
title: Villages
titlecomplete: Villages
genres: Fiction, Adult Fiction, Contemporary, 21st Century, Audiobook, American, Literary Fiction, Romance, Literature, Novels
ratings_count: 1234
publisher: Books on Tape