"THE POORHOUSE FAIR by JOHN UPDIKE"
THIS BOOK CONTAINS THE COMPLETE TEXT OF THE ORIGINAL HARDCOVER EDITION.
"At the Diamond County Home for the Aged it is the day of the annual fair, when the elderly men and women set up stands and sell such homemade products as quilts, candy, and peach-stone carvings to visitors from nearby communities. This year, the great day gets off to a bad start. Two of the home’s residents, or inmates—John Hook, a ninety-four-year-old former schoolteacher, and Billy Gregg, a seventy-year-old retired electrician—discover that the home’s porch chairs have had name tags attached, and hereafter each inmate is to occupy only the chair assigned to him or her. This latest action by Mr. Conner, the prefect of the institution, provides an opportunity for protest. Misunderstandings and misadventures add to Conner’s burden of do-gooding humanitarianism. When Gregg introduces a diseased stray cat onto the grounds, Conner orders Buddy, the prefect’s adoring assistant, to shoot the animal. Ted, a teenage truck driver, knocks down part of a stone wall while delivering cases of Pepsi-Cola for the fair. A pet parakeet belonging to Martha Lucas, the wife of George Lucas, a former real estate salesman, gets loose in the infirmary. When rain threatens to ruin the fair, the inmates take refuge in the community sitting room, where Hook and Conner argue the ideals of an older America of faith and idealism against the "The Poorhouse Fair, John Updike's first novel--a novella, really--is an exception to this rule. This young man's novel about old people, this Harvard grad's tale of the impoverished, also rather remarkably avoids social realist cliche, but it does so by indulging quite a bit of Cold War-era anti-socialist cant. Updike mocks the kitsch of Fifties America--popular culture, bureaucratic efficiency, commodified nostalgia--while seeming blind to the kitschiness of his own Christian-inflected anti-modern nostalgia. (If the novella doesn't collapse over this contradiction, it's only because there's just enough irony here to keep the cardhouse standing.) Set in a very thinly sketched near-future socialist America, The Poorhouse Fair is, politically, a kind of Updikeanly genteel Animal Farm with an all-human cast. There's even a scene--the book's most surprising--in which the poorhouse inmates revolt and literally stone their paternalistic warden. (This being an Updike novel, the stones are small, and he's not seriously hurt.)
Published by Fawcett Crest Book R1177, 1958.
This paperback has tight covers and binding. There is a tear in the front cover (see picture). No cracked hinges. No writing. Some light edge wear. There is some staining to the back cover. 127 clean pages.
An excellent addition to your collection.
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