The Centaur

Summary

In a snowbound Pennsylvania town in the 1940s, a high school science teacher and his teenage son spend three difficult days together, while the narrative threads their ordinary trials with the myth of the centaur Chiron. Updike alternates lush realist scene-making with passages that rewrite the same events in mythic key, producing a double-exposed portrait of fatherhood. The book is among his most formally adventurous and tender works.