Word: centaur
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...Centaur, by John Updike. A Greek myth in imaginative modern dress, with a woebegone high school teacher cast in the role of the tragic centaur Chiron...
...Here to Stay "not stimulant, but barbiturate"; Dwight Macdonald wished aloud that Arthur Schlesinger "had never gotten involved with high politics." The Review ignored only what it considered trivial "except occasionally to reduce a temporarily inflated reputation." Among the reputations it sought to deflate: John Updike's The Centaur ("a poor novel irritatingly marred by good features"); J. D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (he "deals with the emotions and problems of adolescence, and it is no great slight to him to say that he has not yet advanced beyond them"); Edward Albee...
...Centaur, which takes place at once in Olinger, Pennsylvania,--and on Mount Olympus, tells the story of George W. Caldwell, teacher of science at Olinger High. Peter, his son, narrates. Metaphorically, Caldwell appears as the centaur Chiron, a tutor of heroes, who in mythology was distinguished from other rapacious, lecherous Centaurs by his kindness and wisdom. Chiron was erroneously wounded by a poisoned arrow, and, unable to bear the pain, he longed for death. He prayed that he might pass on his immortality to Prometheus, and that his death would be accepted in atonement for Prometheus's sin, the presentation...
During the three days which The Centaur spans, Caldwell lives with heightened awareness of the possibility that he might die. He feels, he tells his wife half-jokingly, "a poison snake wrapped around my bowels;" he continuously fears cancer. Hardly a speech goes by in which he does not allude, in some form, to dying...
...Centaur were a terribly serious attempt to explain the nature of man or to elucidate the father-son relationship by means of a classic myth, it would be a silly book. Fortunately, the book is not so serious. Updike treats the myth lightheartedly, operating on three levels: First, the corresponding characters of Chiron and Caldwell; next, parallel nomenclature (for those who like to play such games, it has been suggested that Olinger is Olympus; Zimmerman, principal of Olinger High, is Zeus; and third, the subtle penetration of mythical allusions into what appears the most straightforward Pennsylvania prose...