Country Life
Country life (original title: Villages ) is a novel by John Updike from 2004 . The German translation was published in 2006 .
content
Owen Mackenzie (69 years old) lives with his wife Julia (65) in Haskells Crossing. You have been married for 25 years. In retrospect, he tells his life.
He had a sheltered childhood in Willow, Pennsylvania . The father Floyd Mackenzie loses his job as an accountant in Alton. They move to a house in the country far away from a village, where he has his first erotic contact with Elsie. He received a scholarship in distant Massachusetts to study at MIT to become an engineer. There he met Phyllis, a fellow student. He marries her. While serving as a soldier in Korea and Germany, Phyllis gives birth to four children. They settle in New York , where Owen Mackenzie works as a computer scientist at IBM . They move to Middle Falls, where Owen and his friend Ed set up a software company together. Phyllis has a fourth child, and although he has a good marriage, he accepts the offer of the also married Faye and commits adultery. A crisis, but not a separation, occurs when Faye confesses everything to her husband and Phyllis also learns about it.
Ed gets married, and his wife, Stacey, offers Owen to have sex with her, but Owen resists because he doesn't want job problems with his partner Ed. Alissa Morrissey, who is also married, is next to have sex with. The relationship ends when Alissa has a child.
He now has one sex affair after the other, at conferences, party acquaintances, at work, almost all of them with married women, until Julia, the wife of the pastor of the Episcopalian Church in Middle Falls, is introduced to him. Julia is getting a divorce. And before Owen's divorce goes to court, Phyllis is killed in a car accident. Julia and Owen get married and move to Haskell's Crossing with their six children, where Owen leads a peaceful life. The company is sold to Apple , and he lives on the proceeds from now on.
The whole thing is embedded in the social and political circumstances since the end of the Second World War and the progress of computer technology.
