VILLAGES(ISBN=) 英文原版

In this 21st novel by one of the premier chroniclers of American
life, a man recalls a lifetime spent in New England communities of
women. Owen Mackenzie, now in his 70s and living in the small
village of Haskell’s Crossing, Conn., with his second wife, Julia,
spends his days immersed in the daily routines of retirement while
reminiscing about his childhood town of Willow, Pa., and the
village where he spent his adulthood, Middle Falls, Conn. Though
Owen studied at MIT and founded an early computer startup that made
him moderately rich, his story is primarily defined by his romantic
relationships. He marries his first wife, Phyllis, a classmate at
MIT, for her cool beauty, but later decides that he needs a broader
range of sexual experience. After a fraught first affair, he learns
caution and is able to clandestinely indulge his love of women,
until Julia, a minister’s wife, comes along and convinces him to
embark on a messy divorce and remarriage that indirectly results in
Phyllis’s accidental death. Owen’s obsession with women’s bodies
and blithe ignorance of their inner lives can sometimes read like a
tedious parody of Updike’s earlier work, without a sense of humor
to imply the author is in on the joke. Yet Updike still writes
lovely sentences and creates a believable portrait of the American
village, concealing dark secrets but providing a limited
stability.