[1] The residents of the Diamond County Home for the Aged prepare for their annual fair, a summer celebration at which they sell their crafts and produce to the people of the nearby town.

The fair is at first rained out, and the young prefect, Conner, turns the "inmates" against him by arguing with the noble Hook (94 years old, a former teacher with strong religious beliefs).

As examples, Donald Barr of The New York Times deemed it "a work of intellectual imagination and great charity," [4] while Commentary called it a "hearty but not very successful try at a first novel.

"[5] Author and dramatist Richard Gilman acknowledges the “deficiencies in some central qualities” of the novel advanced by critics and offers this caveat: The Poorhouse Fair was a novel of great imaginative accuracy, a delicate ranging of the immediately felt against abstraction, ideology and mechanical ordering of existence…inconclusiveness was precisely what it depended on for the truth of its vision.

[6]Literary critic Whitney Balliet provides this appraisal of The Poorhouse Fair: John Updike, the poet and short-story writer, has done a startling thing in his first novel…producing, with almost academic precision, a classic, if not flawless, example of one…[7] Balliet adds: The Poorhouse Fair couldn’t be farther from the thinly veiled, self-purgative catalog of an author’s adolescence that constitutes the usual first novel.