num_pages: 144
description: “A small masterpiece . . . With Of the Farm , John Updike has achieved a sureness of touch, a suppleness of style, and a subtlety of vision that is gained by few writers of fi ction.”— The New York TimesIn this short novel, Joey Robinson, a thirty-five-year-old New Yorker, describes a visit he makes, with his second wife and eleven-year-old stepson, to the Pennsylvania farm where he grew up and where his aging mother now lives alone. For three days, a quartet of voices explores the air, making confessions, seeking alignments, quarreling, pleading, and pardoning. They are not entirely alone: ghosts (fathers, lovers, children) press upon them, as do phantoms from the near future (nurses, lawyers, land developers). Of the Farm concerns the places people choose to live their lives, and the strategies they use to stand their ground.
language: English
title: Of the Farm
titlecomplete: Of the Farm
characters: Peggy, Mother, Richard Papen, Joey
genres: Classics, Adult, Fiction, The United States Of America, Novels, American Fiction, 20th Century, Literature, Literary Fiction, American
ratings_count: 1355
publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks