The Siege of Trencher's Farm complex examination of modern-day masculinity and liberal values." "Slant Magazine" found that "Much of the novel's prose reads like a screenplay, with tedious descriptions of props, settings, and physical actions ... tension only really matters if you identify with the characters and care about their predicament, which I found too implausible, fantastic, and crudely sketched to do so." Legal scholar Melanie Williams wrote of how the 1971 film had coloured reception of the book: "The book is now republished by Bloomsbury (2003), with the title "Straw Dogs". This seems particularly sad given that past critical commentary on the book has
Of the Farm 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