onegoodmove

Villages is not Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, though it certainly does share the humanity of a small town. Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts is the site of John Updike's latest where the story begins with Phyllis and ends with Julia. I can't help thinking that this and many of Updike's novels are autobiographical. We have our memories and he has his, but he shares. Like I said it begins with Phyllis and then John shares a tour of Owen's one night stands, his desire and his cock in hand. I read Updike not so much for the story as for the beautiful sentences he writes and once again he delivers. Like this, what a beautiful description.

She tugs at him; she twists his head in order to kiss his mouth. But his lips are puffy and numb with sleep, and in his anesthetized state, his nerves misaligned, it feels like an attempt to suffocate him; it rubs him, as people used to say, the wrong way. After a few minutes more of lovestricken fidgeting, white he stubbornly fails to respond, protecting the possibility of returning to his precious dreams, Julia relents and rises from the bed, and Owen gratefully stretching himself into her vacated side, falls asleep for another hour or two.

Or this description of Owen in the fast and lane on the receiving end of a blowjob

One-night stands had their underside of sorrow, but had he ever been more crazily happy, more triumphantly himself, that when Mirabella was blowing him while he sped at ninety miles an hour into the flat nvada desert, straight into the rising morning sun? There was just space, in the rented tangerine Camaro, for her head to fit between the steering wheel and his sucked-in abdomen. The honeyed sensations in his prick, hard-used the night before, were mixed up with what he imagined her sensations were in that confined space, as the westward-bound cars materialized in the morning glare and flashed past at a combined speed that made the Camaro shudder and suck toward the middle of the highway. The highway was a thin ribbon beginning to show trembling puddles of mirage as the sun settled to baking the miles of lilac-gray vegetation on either side; distand cattle lowered their head to graze. he knw a twitch of the wheel would annihilate them both and Mirabella knew it too but kept giving him exceedingly welcom sensations, including, with a twist of her head of bleached and teased hair, warm kisses on his naked abdomen, his button-down shirt rumpled and pulled up. Under his caressing fingers her shell of curls felt stiff and sticky, from too much spray. when he glanced down, he saw slant sunlight piercing her hair so the chalky pin of her skull shoed through, the defenseless epidermis of it, skin on bone, and he had to fight losing his erection in the suppressed shock of the sight.

And his metaphors are always fresh like ...

god killed Phyllis, as a favor to him: from this blasphemous thought he seeks to shield himself with the fancy that Phyllis, the beautiful math major, had crossed herself out the way a redundant term is dropped from the denominator and the numerator of a complex fraction.

Recommended.

Villages by John Updike