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Updike writes superbly about art -- not only the experience of seeing art but the business of art and, most interesting to me, the creative process. I was not surprised to read that he had spent a stint as an art student. This is truly a book about art, artists, and the role they play in society. He tackles this difficult topic without resorting to critics' jargon or dry exposition. The character of Hope is rendered in beautiful detail which is all the more astonishing for its insights into the female psyche. While I agree with the other reviewers that the character of Hope's second husband was too much of an amalgam to be credible, that was the only off note in an otherwise prodigious work, and the device did serve to flesh out the historical context. The ending offers an exquisite little vignette which, not wanting to spoil, I will just say was one of the most memorable literary passages I have encountered in decades of reading popular fiction.

Seek My Face is the story of Hope, the character loosely based on the artist Lee Miller, who is being interviewed in her Vermont home during the course of one day by Kathryn, an ambitious young modern art scholar collecting information for an online magazine article she plans to write. When Kathryn's aggressive questions - at times difficult, even wounding, and which both exhilarate and exhaust Hope - seem to veer beyond the requirements any article-length piece, an inflection point occurs in the novel. You wonder if Kathryn is on another quest besides the one related to her article: searching out truths she could apply to her own unknown life, her brashness a concealing device. Hope never guesses this, and it makes even more gracious her willingness to give of herself to this girl who she couldn't like, who for most of the story discloses no personal information of her own, and who rejects most of what Hope offers for lunch or tea, who is at an age of confident brio but still without a certain empathic humanity and grace that comes with maturity. A sort of bull in the china shop of the embrittled shelter garden of another woman's life.
A recurring theme in Updike's work is the giving of oneself, sometimes to an indifferent receiver. And in fact for Updike, writing is an act of giving as much as of creating, which is why it's hard to think of another author as true and honest: DeLillo and Kundera, for example, can't come close. The inscription inside the stolen ring that Tristao gives Isabel in the novel Brazil are the initials DAR, Portuguese for "to give." In one of Updike's early stories, the last line is: "Thus the world, like a jaded coquette, spurns our attempts to give ourselves to her wholly." What Hope gives to Kathryn is an art history scholar's dream: a specific account of an era of American modern art and her role in it, including details which would have been easier for her to refuse to discuss. She gives some heartfelt advice, and withholds certain crueler truths. For example, when Kathryn explains that her boyfriend can't really have fun because so much of his life - his career - is undecided, Hope tells her don't wait, that "By the time everything is decided it will be too late. The moment is always now." But elsewhere Hope does not disclose a harsher truth, noting that the younger woman, "...has never learned how little the world needs us to give; its beauty is an impervious beauty, self-absorbed."
Whether or not Kathryn has the self-awareness to understand her own pursuit of the intimate details of Hope's life is uncertain. This could be Updike's comment on the jaded American appetite for the pedestrian suffering of our heroes, but more likely it's an observation of how Kathryn's generation has alienated itself from what it loves, redirecting its energy away from love of something for its own sake and toward the more definable and tangible successes of one's career. Again and again Kathryn rejects perfect opportunities to wrap things up and be on her way, to begin her long drive back into the city. But Kathryn, possibly bewildered by her own response to Hope's openness, having felt the gravity of a life lived well and wisely, can't seem to bring herself to leave before she's grasped something just outside her reach, as though she still hasn't quite figured out what she's missing, can't detect the source of her own alienation.

This book is the brilliant reminiscing of an elderly woman-Hope-who has lived her life at the epicenter of modern art. In response to questions from a young journalist, Hope remembers her three husbands, two of them leading artists in the Fifties and Sixties. As this interview progresses, the depth and texture of Hope's reminisces-most of which are complex ruminations she does not share with the journalist-transform what is a well documented period of artistic breakthrough into an art scene alive with people and their complex dependencies. This is a narrative that imagines a person's experience in artistic history, not a thinly veiled history of art told through the eyes of an imagined minor artist (as certain critics have asserted). "Seek My Face" is another great work from one of our greatest novelists.

This book seemed to have a lot of potential and I was excited to read it. However, Updike's incessant name dropping of varying 20th Century abstract expressionist painters (that had little relevance to the story except as background participants), his lofty prose and seemingly implanted facts about the cultural significance of the art of this movement became tedious and downright boring at times. I wasn't reading this book as a substitute for an Art History class I was reading this book to be told an engaging and insightful story. I feel like I got neither. The characters of Hope and Kathryn, to me, were blanks. Forward moving action in the story was nil, and Updike chose to use flashbacks in lieu of any kind of plot construction. The next time I feel like reading a book about art and its constituents I'll make sure to go to the reference section and NOT the fiction section.

In the beginning the sentence construction poses a challenge...after a while one gets into the different rhythm of writing. Interesting way of getting to know about the lives of well known artists.

Very disappointed. His earlier novels were far better.
Would not recommend to anyone who already knows and likes his work!!

The ridiculous run - on sentences aren't nearly the worst part of this book.
It's all plot. No climax, no resolution. And, I say this as someone who studied art history: it was so dry I had a very hard time slogging through it.
Ive never felt compelled to give a bad review before, but this one really left me wishing I had back the time I spent reading it.
Unless you're a die - hard Updike or Pollock fan, don't bother.