Book description
'Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike
golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count
past five.'
As an earnest golfer for over forty years, John Updike wrote
frequently about the game. In Golf Dreams, Updike directs his
inimitable style, his humour and shrewd insights towards a sport that,
in turns, enthralled and infuriated him. This gathering of his
pieces covers everything from the peculiar charms of bad golf and the
satisfactions of an essentially losing struggle to the camaraderie of
good golf and its own attendant perils.
Praise for Golf Dreams:
'John Updike has anatomized the greatness of golf with an eloquence
only Wodehouse, in a lighter vein, has matched. It makes for a lyrical
book which is also thought-provoking . . . his lowest handicap was 18,
but, in this delightful book, he has not dropped a stroke' Max
Davidson, Daily Telegraph
'A stylish celebration of golf's propensity to transmogrify
perfectly normal people into gibbering wrecks; not just 28-handicap
novices but superstars, too' Jeff Randall, Sunday Times
'There's a crafty pastiche of golf coaching manuals . . . and
there's a delicious rumination on the dazzling green luxury of
televised golf. There are high, arching flights of fancy concerning
swing thoughts, the moral aspects of golf, the etiquette of the gimme
. . . It is a treat both for Updike fans and for golf nuts' Robert
Winder, Independent on Sunday
John Updike's first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, was published
in 1959. Other novels by Updike include, Marry Me, The
Witches of Eastwick, the Rabbit series and
Villages. He has also written a number of volumes of short
stories such as My Father's Tears and Other Stories and a
poetry collection entitled Endpoint and Other Poems. His
criticism, essays and other non fiction appeared in magazines such as
The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. He
died in January 2009.
John Updike's novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National
Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle
Award and the Howells Medal. This is his forty-seventh book.
He lives in Massachusetts.
