Word: centaur
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...also disclosed the results of the intense investigation into why the Atlas-Centaur launch vehicle had sent the U.S. Mars orbiter, Mariner 8, plunging into the Atlantic only minutes after takeoff. The failure occurred, he said, when the rocket's autopilot circuitry was damaged by a surge of voltage. NASA officials believe that a recurrence of the problem can be avoided on Mariner 9, which they hope to launch by mid-June; after that Mars will not be in a favorable position for another two years...
...hard to reconcile George Ames with the warm, patient George Caldwell of The Centaur, whom Updike modeled on his father. Seeing Belle as the bitchy mother in Of the Farm is easier. When Eric's fiancée laughs in embarrassment at one of George's most bitter comments, Belle purrs, "How nice it must be to be so lovely that hatred amuses you." Still, she knows herself: "The sensation of falling in a dream always ends with the relief of waking up, but from the sensations of a mother-in-law there would be no awakening...
...classic cliche, she is her husband's severest critic. "I can't think of one of my novels she's really liked," says Updike. "When she read The Poorhouse Fair, she said, 'Why do you want to write about all those old people? After The Centaur, she said, 'You can't understand all the mythology.' After Of the Farm, she said, 'Nothing happens.' And with Couples, she said she felt that she was being smothered in pubic hair. Actually I did take some...
...four earlier novels-The Poorhouse Fair, Rabbit, Run, The Centaur, Of the Farm-were praised, sometimes extravagantly, as the work of a man who was surely destined to write a "major" novel. The trouble was that he was too much the poet, too much the pointillistic stylist, too self-concerned with scenes, images and feelings sensed in a severely limited autobiographical world. He was justly acccused of hiding behind his family and childhood, of not daring the larger, extra-domestic themes that his technical prowess promised, or conversely, of trying to inflate his tiny genre scenes into balloons of cosmic...
...Centaur was a loving tribute to his father, an endearing old-style eccentric in whom Updike sees "the Protestant kind of goodness going down with all the guns firing-antic, frantic, comic, but goodness nonetheless." Though the novel is obscured by unnecessary buttresses of Greek mythology, the portrait of Wesley Updike, in all its wonderful mania, sparkles with life. Wesley Updike is still mentioned in hushed tones in Shillington for his unpredictable teaching methods. One winter day, he suddenly dashed out of, his classroom in the middle of a lesson on decimals. Moments later, he reappeared with a handful...