The Centaur

John Updike

The Founding Fathers, he explained, in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you. I am a paid keeper of Society's unusables--the lame, the halt, the insane, and the ignorant. The only incentive I can give you, kid, to behave yourself is this: if you don't buckle down and learn something, you'll be as dumb as I am, and you'll have to teach school to earn a living.

That some forgotten artist in an irrevocable sequence of hours had labored, doubtless with authentic craft and love, to produce this ugly, dusty, browned, and totally ignored representation seemed to contain a message for me which I did not wish to read.

Haste and improvidence had always marked our domestic details. The reason, it came to me, was that our family's central member, my father, had never rid himself o the idea that he might soon be moving on. This fear, or hope, dominated our home.

This was my first experience with Mr. Updike. It won't be my last, but I am not feeling a fire to search him out in print with any hurry. The Centaur is a good book; well-written, good for reading, good for thinking, and with just enough touch of mystery and high-handed thought to keep you searching, thinking, and feeling humble.
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of The Centaur was Updike's willingness to blend the ancient myth of Chiron into his story rather than just use it as the basis for his story. I entered this book imagining that it would be a retelling of the old myth; The Centaur was a retelling but also just a telling. Updike moves from the modern era to the mythological era in the space of sentences and blends the life of our hero with the life of Chiron--so much that the narrative often speaks as if our hero were a centaur and the characters he interacts with were indeed various pillars of Greek mythology. Updike even helpfully provides an index at the back of the book to link which characters with which myths.
\If you haven't noticed the reason I'm referring to "our hero" is because I can't remember the main character's name.\
But if you do choose to read this book, be careful for you take a heavy load upon your shoulders. The main character, our not so memorable hero, seems to be slowly dragged down throughout the pages, to be caught in the thickest of mires of deep black goo. He seems tired of life--as you might expect from the Chiron myth--but to see it brought to reality in a man, especially a school teacher is numbing.
Interesting style and interesting story combine to give a force to the emotion of the story. It's worth checking out.