NOWHERE IS THE POWER OF THE parental imagination clearer in Updike's work than in his farewell to Olinger, the 1965 novel Of the Farm. It covers some of the same ground as The Centaur, but whereas the earlier novel was expansive and grandiose, Of the Farm is modest almost to the point of claustrophobia. Updike wrote it after a period of writing short stories, and in an introduction to the Czech edition of the novel, he says that, like a short story, “it has continuous action, a narrow setting, a small cast. I thought of it as chamber music, containing only four voices—the various ghosts in it do not speak, and the minister's sermon, you will notice, is delivered in close paraphrase, without the benefit of quotation marks. The voices, like musical instruments, echo each other's phrases and themes, take turns dominating, embark on brief narrative solos, and recombine in argument or harmony.” The novel is unusual in Updike's fiction in its isolation from the outside world: We get no popular culture, no time markers, not even the name of the president. This aesthetic decision allows the reader to observe all the more closely the effects of the parental imagination. The four voices of the novel are Joey Robinson, a businessman in his midthirties; his mother, whose farm he is visiting for the weekend in order to mow the fields, a task she cannot do herself after the death of her husband; Peggy, his new second wife; and Richard, her preteen son. The novel carries over many of the themes and settings from The Centaur. Updike himself says that “this novella is The Centaur after the centaur has died; the mythical has fled the ethical, and a quartet of scattered survivors grope with their voices toward cohesion.” George W. Hunt rightly corrects Updike on this point, however, suggesting that “the farm is already a mythic place when [Joey] arrives because of his conscious recognition of his mother's genius for mythologizing everything connected with it.” In fact, in some ways, Of the Farm may be even more mythologized an environment than The Centaur, for Joey Robinson, unlike Peter Caldwell, does not have his father to stand between him and the imaginative force of his mother.