I just read John Updike's 2002 novel Seek My Face, a meditation on art and life centered on a day-long interview with Hope Chafetz, widow of the Abstract Expressionist painter Zack McCoy and a painter herself, that elides effortlessly into a memoir of a woman's life and loves and a recreation of the 1950s New York art scene. The characters are based on Lee Krasner and her husband, the paint-spattered artist Jackson Pollock. Pollock's works have never conveyed anything to me except violence, egotism, and an urge to shock, but Updike's nostalgic, crystalline prose casts an almost Vermeer-like light over them in retrospect. The novel, whose title comes from the Psalms, flows like the mountain streams of Vermont, where it takes place. Memorable phrases, as always with Updike, or any writer of his caliber, abound: "Witnessing the world alongside another makes her realize how little it all is, how brief and even negligible compared with our soul's expectations and bottomless appetite. A world made to our measure would go on forever" (p. 202, Knopf hardback); or "But she has never learned how little the world needs us to give; its beauty is an impervious beauty, self-absorbed" (p. 240). Between the ecstasies of great writing and life's hard truths is great wisdom. This is literature, broad and deep, inspired equally by yearning and everydayness, a world removed from the Tonka-toy mechanics of Ken Follett and Dan Brown. Updike was our homegrown Flaubert.