John Updike’s Of The Farm is his third novel I've read, fourth novel actually after rabbit run, poorhouse fair and the centaur. And where I really enjoyed the other ones, I found myself not really enjoying Of The Farm and I’ll tell you why.

There was kind of a family-centered plot, this city guy Joey goes back home to his childhood farm with his new second wife and her son, and he’s torn between his mother's farm and her world, the world he grew up in, and the world of his second-wife.

What drives the energy forward is that a lot of things that had happened in the past come to a head and characters have to deal with them. I mean memories, insults, etc. I guess it's a very simple Updike plot on the surface level which he always has but the images weren't frequent or strong enough to keep me focused or placated by them. You're just left with this very conventional sense of: something happens, a rift between mother and the new wife, and then Joey has to deal with them and there's tension. And that happened at least four times and I don't know, it just felt kind of corny. The book was a DFW recommendation, he wrote that this book was one of Updike’s best along with poorhouse fair and the centaur, both of which I really really enjoyed and i would rate both of them in my top 20 my God, but Of The Farm didn't do it for me, i'm not sure if it was the lack of the real rhythmic gorgeous sentences as dialogue takes center stage this time.

There was a lot of dialogue in this book which I liked as there’s a lot of devotion to spots between speech where Joey thinks of what he’s going to say or predicts how the conversation’s going… what he detects in the other person's voice or body language. Sometimes he will reject a word in favor of another which we all do in real life, and I like how it’s played out here. But on the other hand I would've liked more of the descriptions but there were some good ones let me see….

"steam rolled up the length of her arm and mixed with her hair,"

and images like that really make you stop and take note of the way he's cataloging real life. Sometimes I think that when I read, the images I visualize I’m just imagining myself visualizing and I have in fact seen them in real life, and I mean the more mundane everyday images, um steam rolling up an arm. But the way I guess he so precisely depicts the scene I’m sure the image is Updike’s own, that is, he’s implanted it into my head - I’m sure it’s not my own thought, which I like.

Just a point about the cover blurb is that it says "tragedy strikes" and tragedy doesn't really strike I mean it's just the mother gets old and she talks about getting old and as a result Joey and Ritchie and Peggy have to deal with it. I don't know, the convention of the book bored me, whereas maybe in his other works the convention has the potential to bore me but the sentences have kind of this beauty that either takes my mind off it or it makes me realize that what happens is not as important - which is also what I like about his works - that they redefined plot for me. Or maybe I’ve just been focusing on the wrong things.