Describing The Centaur as “a poor novel irritatingly marred by good features” literary critic Jonathan Miller in The New York Review of Books writes:
In [a] sense it is another A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Updike’s didactic allegory suffers by contrast with the delicacy with which Joyce uses the myth of Daedalus...the book [is] damaged by the necessity which Updike makes out of his own virtue. His sly adjectival prose creates an extraordinary surface effect…[6]
Miller continues: “I say he has made a necessity out of his own virtue, but perhaps I should say virtuosity, since it is his enslavement to his own bravura skill which finally disqualifies this novel from genuine literary consideration.”[7]
Author Anthony Burgess, noting evidence of “pedantry” in Updike’s mythological parallels, praises The Centaur as “a noble attempt at adding fresh dimensions to a contemporary story by calling on ancient myth.”[8] Burgess writes:
[T]he brilliance of the language seemed no longer to be functioning in a void, unrelated to the subject matter of the book: it was appropriate to the other all complexity of the overall image; it was the true link between the story and the myth.[9]
Burgess closes with this fulsome praise for Updike: “He is one of America’s most exciting talents, but much of the excitement is still to come.”[10]
