The Centaur
by John Updike
Summary
George Caldwell teaches general science at Olinger High School in Pennsylvania, and he is dying, or believes he is, or both; with Updike the difference matters less than the fear. He is also, in alternating chapters and sometimes mid paragraph, Chiron, the wisest of the centaurs, teacher of heroes, wounded by a poisoned arrow and unable to die, and the novel opens exactly there: an arrow in the ankle during class, a limp through a school that is also a mountain full of gods.
The realistic story covers three days in the winter of 1947. George and his son Peter, fifteen, psoriatic, secretly ambitious to be a painter, are marooned together by a snowstorm and a failing car: school, a swim meet, a night in a cheap hotel, another night with strangers, the enforced intimacy of a father and son who love each other and cannot stand each other's company. Peter watches his father give himself away to everyone, students, drunks, gas station men, with a generosity indistinguishable from self destruction, and burns with the adolescent's double shame: embarrassment at the man, and the dawning knowledge of what the man is spending himself for.
The myth chapters transfigure the same material, Olinger's principal becoming Zeus, the town its Olympus, and the book ends with Chiron's bargain, the teacher's death accepted so someone younger can go free.
Around three hundred pages, the most formally daring thing Updike ever did.
Best for readers who want Updike before the suburbs, on the father he could never repay, with the machinery showing and the feeling absolutely real.
Historical Context & Significance
The Centaur won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1964, choosing Updike's strangest book over safer candidates, and the reviews split exactly as the book invites: Anthony Burgess saluted the nobility of the attempt while others found the myth apparatus an irritation fastened onto a perfect small realist novel. France disagreed with the doubters, giving it the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger.
The father is Wesley Updike, the Shillington schoolteacher whose selflessness and public humiliations his son documented across a shelf of books, and Updike always defended this one fiercely, naming it among his favourites precisely because it honoured the man at full mythological scale.
In the career it stands as the road not taken: after this experiment Updike settled into the crystalline realism of the Rabbit books, two Pulitzers, and four decades as the American novel's presiding stylist, and The Centaur remains the evidence of what his twenties wanted, transcendence, worked for openly and only once.