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Summary
Summary
A sensational collection of stories of the American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11, by one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series.
John Updike mingles narratives of Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel: "Personal Archaeology" considers life as a sequence of half-buried layers, and "The Full Glass" distills a lifetime's happiness into one brimming moment of an old man's bedtime routine. High-school class reunions, in "The Walk with Elizanne" and "The Road Home," restore their hero to youth's commonwealth where, as the narrator of the title story confides, "the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition." Exotic locales encountered in the journeys of adulthood include Morocco, Florida, Spain, Italy, and India. The territory of childhood, with its fundamental, formative mysteries, is explored in "The Guardians," "The Laughter of the Gods," and "Kinderszenen." Love's fumblings among the bourgeoisie yield the tart comedy of "Free," "Delicate Wives," "The Apparition," and "Outage."
Author Notes
American novelist, poet, and critic John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on March 18, 1932. He received an A.B. degree from Harvard University, which he attended on a scholarship, in 1954. After graduation, he accepted a one-year fellowship to study painting at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England. After returning from England in 1955, he worked for two years on the staff of The New Yorker. This marked the beginning of a long relationship with the magazine, during which he has contributed numerous short stories, poems, and book reviews.
Although Updike's first published book was a collection of verse, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (1958), his renown as a writer is based on his fiction, beginning with The Poorhouse Fair (1959). During his lifetime, he wrote more than 50 books and primarily focused on middle-class America and their major concerns---marriage, divorce, religion, materialism, and sex. Among his best-known works are the Rabbit tetrology---Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1988). Rabbit, Run introduces Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom as a 26-year-old salesman of dime-store gadgets trapped in an unhappy marriage in a dismal Pennsylvania town, looking back wistfully on his days as a high school basketball star. Rabbit Redux takes up the story 10 years later, and Rabbit's relationship with representative figures of the 1960s enables Updike to provide social commentary in a story marked by mellow wisdom and compassion in spite of some shocking jolts. In Rabbit Is Rich, Harry is comfortably middle-aged and complacent, and much of the book seems to satirize the country-club set and the swinging sexual/social life of Rabbit and his friends. Finally, in Rabbit at Rest, Harry arrives at the age where he must confront his mortality. Updike won the Pulitzer Prize for both Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest.
Updike's other novels range widely in subject and locale, from The Poorhouse Fair, about a home for the aged that seems to be a microcosm for society as a whole, through The Court (1978), about a revolution in Africa, to The Witches of Eastwick (1984), in which Updike tries to write from inside the sensibilities of three witches in contemporary New England. The Centaur (1963) is a subtle, complicated allegorical novel that won Updike the National Book Award in 1964. In addition to his novels, Updike also has written short stories, poems, critical essays, and reviews. Self-Consciousness (1989) is a memoir of his early life, his thoughts on issues such as the Vietnam War, and his attitude toward religion. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. He died of lung cancer on January 27, 2009 at the age of 76.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Updike compresses the strata of a life in his delicately rendered, tremendously moving posthumous collection. In "Free," the memory of a life-affirming affair buckles against a man's loyalty to his deceased wife: he recognizes that becoming a "well-bred stick" offers more consolation in old age than the sluggish arousal of his sensuality. In "The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe," the retired protagonist, depressed by what he perceives as the universe's indifference to human affairs, is done in by the accumulated detritus of his life. Many characters are haunted by a sense of isolation, such as the protagonist of "Personal Archaeology," who roams his Massachusetts estate, searching for traces of previous ownership while sifting through his own petty contribution, or the emotionally stranded absentee landlord of an Alton, Pa., family farm in "The Road Home," who returns after 50 years and finds himself lost in his hometown. From "Kinderszenen," which depicts the anxious time of smalltown late 1930s, to "Varieties of Religious Experience," in which a grandfather watches the twin towers fall, time ushers in brutal changes. With masterly assurance, Updike transforms the familiar into the mysterious. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Updike's first collection of short stories since 2000, published posthumously following his January 2009 death, stands to be his last book, or so it would appear unless more posthumous publications are to come. That his final book should be a collection of short stories may only fuel the ongoing debate over whether Updike's lasting reputation will rest on his novels or on his stories. No conclusions need to be drawn as this point; it is enough right now to savor this swan song and to be reminded of how splendid a writer Updike was. These marvelously wrought stories should not be regarded as a career summation but, rather, as evidence of a career interrupted. As Rabbit Angstrom, protagonist of Updike's now-classic quartet of novels, has aged as the author himself has aged, so, too, have the characters in his stories. For instance, in Morocco, a husband and father remembers a family trip to North Africa in 1969 as a time when he and his spouse and children were still molded, it seemed, forever together. And in Free, a man looks back over his years of having an affair and ponders just what kind of freedom he wanted. September songs from an American master.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2009 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Reflection and reconsideration abound in the late (19322009) great author's final finished collection of stories. The mood is unmistakably autumnal, as we encounter elderly males who explore familiar surroundings and simultaneously consolatory and troubling memories ("Personal Archaeology," "The Road Home," "My Father's Tears"); straying husbands burdened by conflicted remembrance of long-ago thrills ("Free," "The Walk with Elizanne"); and seniors abroad, adapting timidly yet eagerly to the promises and threats of cultures that are foreign in a dizzying multiplicity of ways ("Morocco," "Spanish Prelude to a Second Marriage"). Just as a representative Updike youngster intuits that he "can never be an ordinary, everyday boy," so do his counterparts at the far end of the aging spectrum clearly foresee their own absorption into the universal and infinite. Among the more telling examples: the victim of a mugging while vacationing in Spain, who understands thatlike the physically universe ultimately reducible to the prophecies of "cosmic theory"he is simply wearing out ("The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe"); the psoriasis patient helped by an innovative treatment ("Blue Light") which reconciles him to his place as an integral part of an ever-changing world; and the near-octogenarian who relives his early years as a prelude to surrendering their continuation in his senescence ("The Full Glass"). There are missteps: stories too discursive to bear much dramatic weight, and a gathering of involved perspectives of the 9/11 catastrophe that seems a test run for Updike's 2006 novel Terrorist. But the ache of knowing and celebrating how we've lived, what it all may mean and where we're going give this final testament a beauty and gravity that crown a brilliant, enduring life's work and legacy. A fine final act. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Updike passed away in 2009, and his final collection of short fiction-beautifully and precisely crafted stories of the American experience-is a lovely farewell gift to be enjoyed by his many fans and those new to the iconic writer. (LJ 11/1/09) (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Morocco The seacoast road went smoothly up and down, but compared with an American highway it was eerily empty. Other cars appeared menacing on it, approaching like bullets, straddling the center strip. Along the roadside, alone in all that sunswept space, little girls in multicolored Berber costume held out bouquets of flowers--violets? poppies?--which we were afraid to stop and accept. What were we afraid of? A trap. Bandits. Undertipping, or overtipping. Not knowing enough French, and no Arabic or Berber. "Don't stop, Daddy, don't!" was the cry; and it was true, when we did stop at markets, interested persons out of the local landscape would gather about our rented Renault, peering in and offering unintelligible invitations. We were an American family living in England in 1969 and had come to Morocco naïvely thinking it would be, in April, as absolute an escape to the sun as a trip to the Caribbean from the Eastern United States would be at the same time of year. But Restinga, where a British travel agency as innocent as we of climatic realities had sent us, was deserted and windy. The hotel, freshly built by decree of the progressive, tourism-minded king, was semicircular in shape. At night, doors in the curving corridors slammed, and a solitary guard in a burnoose kept watch over the vacant rooms and the strange family of pre-season Americans. By day, the waves were too choppy to swim in, and the Mediterranean was not so much wine-dark as oil-black. Walking along the beach, we picked up tar on our feet. When we lay down on the beach, wind blew sand into our ears. Off in the distance, apartment buildings of pink concrete were slowly being assembled, and there were signs that in a month vacationers from somewhere would fill the bleak plazas, the boarded-up arcades. But for now there was only the whipping wind, a useless sun, and--singly, idly, silently in the middle distance--Arabs. Or were they Berbers? Dark men, at any rate, in robes, who frightened our baby, Genevieve. Fantastic as it seems now, when she is so tall and lovely in her spangled disco dress, she was then overweight and eight. Caleb was ten, Mark twelve, and Judith a budding fourteen. " Je le regrette beaucoup ," I told the manager of the Restinga hotel, a blue-sweatered young man who wandered about closing doors that had blown open, " mais il faut que nous partirons. Trop de vent, et pas de bain de la mer." " Trop de vent, " he agreed, laughing, as if reassured that we were not as crazy as we had seemed. " Les enfants sont malheureux, aussi ma femme. Je regrette beaucoup de partir. L'hôtel, c'est beau, en été. " I should have used the subjunctive or the future tense, and stopped trying to explain. The manager gave our departure his stoical blessing but explained, in cascades of financial French, why he could not refund the money we had prepaid in London. So I was left with a little cash, a Hertz credit card, four children, a wife, and plane tickets that bound us to ten more days in Morocco. We took a bus to Tangier. We stood beside an empty road at noon, six stray Americans, chunky and vulnerable in our woolly English clothes with our suitcases full of continental sun togs bought at Lilywhite's and of Penguins for vacation reading. The sun beat upon us, and the wind. The road dissolved at either end in a pink shimmer. "I can't believe this," my wife said. "I could cry." "Don't panic the kids," I said. "What else can we do?" I asked. "There are no taxis. We have no money." "There must be some thing," she said. Somehow, my mem- ory of the moment has dressed her in a highly unflattering navy-blue beret. "I'm scared," Genevieve annou Excerpted from My Father's Tears and Other Stories by John Updike All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
