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.

Joey is buffeted by doubt, angst, and anger, and is pinballed between his dueling mother and Peggy.

And in his most recent works, the “genuine” lyricism and pastoralism in Of the Farm have been reduced to painfully ironic norms by which spiritual distance and psychological loss are judged...[T]o this date, Updike has written nothing so eloquent, so luxurious, and so sanely beneficent as Of the Farm.

[5]“Of the Farm is very brief and unpretentious, but it is still a book of a deliberate stylist, and the style sometimes subsists on its own, unrelated to the simple events it is intended to serve.

The story seems to a European reader to be very American.”—British author and critic Anthony Burgess from “Review of Of the Farm in Commonweal[6] 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.