Seek My Face

John Updike's provocative and absorbing 20th novel, like his first, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), takes place in one day, a day that contains much discussion and some rain. The 79-year-old painter Hope Chafetz, who has been in her eventful life Hope Ouderkirk, Hope McCoy, and Hope Holloway, answers questions put to her by a New York interviewer named Kathryn, and recapitulates, through the story of her own times, the triumphant saga of postwar American art. In the evolving relation between the two women, the interviewer and interviewee move in and out of the roles of daughter and mother, therapist and patient, predator and prey, annunciatory angel and startled receptacle of grace. The scene is Vermont; the time is the early spring of 2001.