Traversing emotional wreckage

The tenuous twin career paths of fiction writing and academia (Updike, who has taught English at Boston area colleges, has written six books for young readers and a previous collection, “Out on the Marsh’’), and the specific complications of mixed-race families (he married a Kenyan woman) inform many of these variations-on-a-theme stories.

The title of “Old Girlfriends’’ is misleading. In some of these fine pieces of short fiction written by the son of the late John Updike, past romances are mentioned only cursorily, and in others, such as the tender, plaintive “Shining So Nicely in the Sun,’’ about a young man’s brief visit to see his grandmother, old girl- friends don’t figure at all.

Updike’s protagonists, all men, are far more interested in cars than in former flames, a fact that I would have registered even if I weren’t the editor of a car magazine. Automobiles play major roles in at least half the stories. Three of the pieces introduce cars in the their first sentences. In one of these, “In the Age of Convertibles,’’ one sexy set of wheels after another is totaled, each casualty in commission of some assignation, as the teenage narrator charts the kind of suburban romantic wreckage that the author’s father famously depicted in scandalous (for their time) novels like “Couples.’’ In other stories, like “Geranium’’ and “The Woman From Out of Town,’’ other young men witness adultery’s unsubtle dance.

The cars that appear here are either remembered from childhood, the vehicles totemic signifiers of grown men’s sexual power and recklessness (and Updike’s alter-egos’ weakness and timidity), or else they’re unreliable, secondhand objects of desire - and sometimes both, in a collection that may have been justifiably titled “Old Cars.’’ The motif is economical and apt. Updike lavishes a lot of beautifully rendered anxiety and nostalgia on those Mustangs, Corvairs, Buick Skylarks and the ever-reappearing beat-up Volkswagen Bug. Readers shouldn’t expect to become all heated up by an accumulation of notches on the bedpost; Updike’s protagonists try to accord the cars - and for that matter, the old girlfriends - a whiff of adventure, but mostly they come to symbolize checkered glory days, mishaps, and impotence.

The men of these stories are tentative, sensitive, and above all observant souls. They seem like “writers,’’ and not of the brawny Ernest Hemingway or Norman Mailer variety. And the pieces themselves, in the minimalist, New Yorker tradition of the ’80s, don’t exactly overwhelm with incident. But Updike’s voice is so sure and compassionate, and the characters’ memories so richly textured and insistently evocative, that they linger and unfold in the mind weeks after one has put the book down.

“Shining So Nicely in the Sun’’ takes us to Reading, Pa., (John Updike’s birthplace). Thomas, a dreamy and jobless young man who is waiting for his life to start in New York City - where he has a fiancee we don’t hear much about - takes dutiful three-hour “escape’’ bus rides to see his paternal grandmother, Joanna, in the country. Much of the story centers on Joanna’s strong desire, but fading ability, to drive her Skylark around Reading.

The story opens on a minor note of presentiment when Joanna fails to come for Thomas when his bus arrives; this time he doesn’t see her “waiting by the curb, her penumbra of white hair rising up from the driver’s seat.’’ The rest of the story is about the errands the two do together with Thomas at the wheel and the chores he does around the farm. It’s simple enough, but it’s presented with the nervous air of a young man who is glad to give up pressing adult obligations for some teenage chores of easy mastery, like mowing the lawn. At the same time, the countryside has made its inescapable transition to suburban development tract. It’s all being paved over: Joanna’s life, daily rituals, the woman herself. In Updike’s hands, this coming-of-age story about mortality hints at ineffable despair.

The title story begins in therapy, as Trevor, a grad student, takes no-nonsense advice from a bosomy Holocaust survivor named Sonya, who seems to give both Trevor and the book the kick they need when she takes a look at her patient (whose self-description is “shy by nature and uneager to offend’’) and tells him, “Remember, time and energy . . . that’s all we have.’’ This seems to send the book’s young men into an incrementally more willful landscape of capable fatherhood, illicit Caribbean trysts, and stylish sunglasses that not even some wheezing old Nissans and VWs can sully. Though they try.

Drew Limsky is the editor of Lexus Magazine.