Seek my face

John Updike's new novel is an audacious and compelling look at postwar American art - and the relations between men and women, and women and women.

SEEK MY FACE takes place on one day in Vermont in spring 2001. The 79-year-old painter Hope Cafetz, who has been in her eventful life Hope Ouderkirk, Hope McCoy and Hope Holloway, answers questions put to her by a young New York interviewer, Kathryn, and recapitulates, through the story of her own times, the triumphant saga of post-war American art.

In the evolving relationship 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.