The Centaur
He has no friends his age, and regularly worries that his peers might detect his psoriasis, which stains his skin and flecks his clothes every season but summer.[5] Describing The Centaur as “a poor novel irritatingly marred by good features” literary critic Jonathan Miller in The New York Review of Books writes: In [a] sense it is another A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Updike’s didactic allegory suffers by contrast with the delicacy with which Joyce uses the myth of Daedalus...the book [is] damaged by the necessity which Updike makes out of his own virtue.His sly adjectival prose creates an extraordinary surface effect…[6]Miller continues: “I say he has made a necessity out of his own virtue, but perhaps I should say virtuosity, since it is his enslavement to his own bravura skill which finally disqualifies this novel from genuine literary consideration.”[7] Author Anthony Burgess, noting evidence of “pedantry” in Updike’s mythological parallels, praises The Centaur as “a noble attempt at adding fresh dimensions to a contemporary story by calling on ancient myth.”[8] Burgess writes: [T]he brilliance of the language seemed no longer to be functioning in a void, unrelated to the subject matter of the book: it was appropriate to the other all complexity of the overall image; it was the true link between the story and the myth.The novel's structure is unusual; the narrative shifts from present day (late 1940s) to prospective (early 1960s), from describing the characters as George, Vera, and the rest, to the Centaur, Venus, and so forth.“Updike’s willingness to assign tremendous significance to his childhood home reaches a crescendo in The Centaur, a powerful attempt to mythologize the artist’s early portrait by returning, as James Joyce did in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922), to ancient Greek stories.”—Author and critic Stacey Olster in The Cambridge Companion to John Updike (2006)[14] Novelist and literary critic Joyce Carol Oates reports that The Centaur represents a “balance” between “the classical-artistic-‘immoral’” aspects of Updike’s creative interests and his Calvanistic background.