I read The Centaur by John Updike out of funereal obligation, and had given up on it twice before, but this time put my misgivings to rest and plowed through what is surely the most tender evocation of father-son affection I’ve encountered: the story of two frustrated males, one a teenager, the other a schoolteacher, making it together through a snowstorn in Alton, PA. Let’s not talk about the prose here, which is as stunning and blanketing as snow, but let’s remark on the casual riskiness of the book itself: occasionally a grotesque fairytale, at other times a long-distance New Yorker short story, sometimes a flash-forward into a life past the suburbs. Updike may make his trademark lapses in describing women, but the book is relatively unsexed, and so all the more sympathetic when it dramatizes the self-pity, both hilarious and sad, that keeps the schoolteacher father going year after year, storm after storm. I’d read it again.

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