The Centaur (Magill Book Reviews)

Peter Caldwell, a second-rate painter living in Greenwich Village, remembers three days during his adolescence in 1947 and infuses the experience with mythological significance. Updike uses a mixture of realistic narration and mythological figures, Peter as Prometheus, his father, George, as the centaur Chiron, to structure a novel which opens with a invocation of the father’s godlike presence and concludes with the son’s perception of his father’s human mortality, his loss of deification. Peter’s artistic vision collapses in the face of his father’s spiritual resignation to...

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