Updike plumbs familiar themes, places of the heart
MY FATHER'S TEARS
AND OTHER STORIES
By John Updike
Knopf, 292 pp., $25.95
The blurb for John Updike's last collection of stories finds him in a "valedictory mood," words that speak truly to the stories, individually and collectively.
About a dozen years ago, interviewed by Charlie Rose, Updike suggested that he was "packing my bag a little bit," and in 2004 he collected his "Early Stories, 1953-1975." Of the 18 in "My Father's Tears," all except the opening one, "Morocco," appeared in the new century. "Morocco," written in 1979, is an entertaining account of an American family (surely the Updikes in 1969) escaping from England, where they are living for the year, to what they mistakenly think will be the warm breezes of North Africa. Other stories, relatively light efforts, treat of tourist visits to Spain and India; there are also familiar returns to Updike territory when the protagonist visits an old lover ("Free") or rediscovers a high-school sweetheart ("The Walk with Elizanne").
Like many of his stories over the decades, the best of these last ones don't read like "stories" with a beginning, middle, and rousing end, but like reflective essays that explore a feeling, an inclination, in the direction of a clarifying moment. In "Personal Archaeology," a retired man in "increasing isolation - as his golfing buddies die off and there's no office to go to - takes an interest in the grounds of his home on the Massachusetts coast. Walking about them, he turns up relics from what he decides are the property's four "eras." His final buried treasure consists of some old golf balls he remembers hitting into the woods just for fun: "He had never expected to find them. They marked, he supposed, the beginning of his era." Personal archaeology is also in "Free," where a man who has, under his wife's guidance, become an "ever more effortless impersonation of a well-bred stick," decides, after the wife's death, to visit a woman in Florida with whom, decades earlier, he had had an affair. Remarried and twice divorced, the woman, after feeding him lunch, invites him to go for a swim with her. "But you're free now," she tells him after he declines and prepares to depart. He responds by deciding that "free" is a state of mind: "Looking back at us - maybe that was as free as things get." The retrospective view overpowers any future-directed impulses.
The collection's longest story is titled, after William James's great book, "Varieties of Religious Experience." That experience is the 9/11 devastation of the New York towers as seen from four perspectives: a man viewing it from his daughter's apartment in Brooklyn; one of the perpetrators, Mohammed, days before the event; a man trapped in his cubicle in one of the towers; and a woman on Flight 93, registering things as they go terribly wrong. There is a fashionable dogma that says it's impossible, or at least deeply unwise, to write fiction about this unspeakable happening; on the contrary, Updike's measured, intense treatment feels appropriate and convincing.
But the heart of the book, yet once more, are stories about what Updike once referred to as "the Pennsylvania thing," his growing up with family and friends. In "The Guardians," the young boy feels "the four adults as sides of a perfect square, with a diagonal from each corner to a central point. He was that point, protected on all sides, loved from every direction." Parents and grandparents are his protectors: "They would not steer him wrong; his death would come tactfully, and was nowhere near close," the story ends. But in "The Road Home," the boy - David Kern, whom we met decades ago in "Pigeon Feathers" - has grown old, and driving about his former home territory, he has trouble navigating the changed landscape: "The area manifested itself as a shapeless shadowy mire, experienced at a perilous speed." On more than one occasion Updike has written affectingly about his mother; in "My Father's Tears" - tears that the boy saw only once when his father saw his son off to Harvard - the boy grown old reflects that he has never really left Pennsylvania, "where the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition."
In the most moving poem in his recently published sequence, "Endpoint," Updike writes, "Perhaps/ we meet our heaven at the start and not/ the end of life." The final story in the new book, "The Full Glass," is a compendium of what the man "approaching eighty" calls cherished "full-glass" experiences. At its end, as he prepares to swallow his daily "life-prolonging pills," he has a full glass of water waiting on the marble sink top and reflects: "If I can read this strange old guy's mind aright, he's drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned." In a fine tribune to Updike, the British novelist Ian McEwan noted that "we have lived with the expectation of his new novel or story or essay so long, all our lives, that it does not seem possible that this flow of invention should suddenly cease." To cease a career of fiction in a toast to the world with a full glass, is nothing less than an act of radiance.
William H. Pritchard is professor of English at Amherst College and the author of "Updike: America's Man of Letters." 