John Updike

It is the 1960s in a provincial American town. The Vietnam War and profound changes—cultural, social, and sexual—serve as the backdrop to the novel, whose central thread is aptly summarized by what the protagonist says at the end of the narrative: > confusion is just a local view of things working out in general . Can one remain oneself, as if nothing were wrong, in a “terrible period, of pro

Owen, the novel’s protagonist, grew up in a small town, where > sex and religion had distinct, antique smells; families were balanced like frail nests on knobby branches of preceding history . It is a world of vague certainties, which Owen leaves behind to study computer science at university. There he marries Phyllis, a brilliant mathematics student. Owen is captivated by his wife’s intelle

The author is an American writer, but I read the book in its French translation. A young man, the son of an Irish woman and an Egyptian father who abandoned him, lives in sharp conflict with American society—a conflict that also reflects his troubled relationship with his mother, a free-spirited woman full of artistic ideas, and an idealized vision of his father’s society: the Muslim world. He d