The Poorhouse Fair
"On the third Wednesday of every August the inhabitants of a mansion-turned-poorhouse in central New Jersey hold their annual fair; this novel describes a fair that occurs about twenty years from now [1958], when the United States itself is heading downhill... While 'The Poorhouse Fair, ' insofar as it regrets the decline of patriotism, handcraft, and religion, carries a conservative message, its technique is unorthodox; without so much regard for fictional conventions, the author attempts to locate, in the ambiguous area between farce and melodrama, reality's own tone."
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2020–2026years
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What Hacker News says
- John Updike. Better than average prose in all of his books, but his debut The Poorhouse Fair is outstanding. It may be too much for modern readers - not many explosions or super heroics - but even if you only get a chapter in, it shows what can be done with English.
Moby Dick is unexpectedly stylish. You'd think a story about a whale would be more genre-ish, but the writing is very fun.
Then there are heavy hitters are writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Tom Wolfe, and Virginia Woolf.
James Joyce is the end level boss. Ulysses is readable, but by the time you get to Finnegan's Wake it's hard to imagine anyone getting more abstract.
- Florence King was briefer in the essay "Phallus in Wonderland": "Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors." (Poorhouse Fair) Or "Having read detailed descriptions of approximately six bushels of pubic hair, nameless forces drove me to go seeking and questing through my kitchen drawer to gather up all the Twisties I've saved and arrange them by color."
