John Updikes of the Farm Novel of Mother Son Relationship

Abstract

Since John Updike is an interpreter of the spiritual hollowness of contemporary America and gives a structure to the great American chaos through his novels especially Of the Farm, one hopes that his books are the source of inspiration for generations to come. Like all the great writers of the world, Updike meditates on common place but elemental themes, and magnifies, transmutes and patterns them into a paradigm of life, and turn into enduring works of art. Updike, like Melville and Norman Mailer, began writing fiction in his midtwenties. Melville was led to withdraw into silence because of the hostile criticism meted out to his books. The same thing happened to Updike as a novelist and his works. It is not that Updike's novels have not been disparagingly dismissed and out rightly rejected. But at the same time they have also received high critical commendation that has given him impulse and encouragement to produce book after book, almost over sixty in number in fifty years. In his novel, Of the Farm (1965), Updike brings to the foreground a mother-son relationship through which the theme of freedom, not only personal freedom but also the recognition of privilege of others, is subtly explored.