Of the Farm
Of the Farm is a 1965 novel by the American author John Updike. Of the Farm was his fourth novel.  The story concerns Joey Robinson, a divorced, thirty-five-year-old Manhattan advertising executive who visits his mother on her unfarmed farm in rural Pennsylvania.  He has come with his new wife, Peggy and her son, Richard, a precocious eleven-year-old.  The novel explores both Joey's relationship to his widowed mother, a flinty woman who reveres her farm, and to Peggy, a kind, sensual woman.  Joey feels guilt for leaving his mother, and anger at her stubborn refusal to leave the farm, and anger at her from having uprooted his late father from the suburbs to move to the farm decades ago.  Joey is buffeted by doubt, angst, and anger, and is pinballed between his dueling mother and Peggy.

Critical Assessment

Writing in 1971, literary critic Larry E. Taylor locates the significance of Of the Farm within Updike’s oeuvre:

Theme

Author and critic Stacey Olster considers Of the Farm “one of Updike’s most contentious and angry narratives” signaling Updike’s literary departure from the settings of the fictional  Olinger. Olster writes:

Footnotes

Sources 
Burgess, Anthony. 1966. “Language, Myth and Mr. Updike” from Commonweal, 83, February 11, 1966 in Critical Essays on John Updike G. K. Hall & Co., Boston Massachusetts. William R. MacNaughton, editor.  pp. 55-58. 
Taylor, Larry E. 1971. The Wide-Hipped Wife and the Painted Landscape: Pastoral Ideals in Of the Farm from Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971 (pp. 102-111) in Critical Essays on John Updike G. K. Hall & Co., Boston Massachusetts. William R. MacNaughton, editor.  pp. 140-147. 
Olster, Stacey. 2006. The Cambridge Companion to John Updike. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.  (paperback)

1965 American novels
Novels by John Updike
Alfred A. Knopf books
Novels set in Pennsylvania