'Tears' a unique collection of Updike stories
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MY FATHER’S TEARS
By John Updike
Knopf, $25.95
John Updike has been such a powerful and prolific voice in American writing for so many years that you can’t really expect a little thing like death to slow him down. We’ve been treated to a posthumous collection of his poetry, and now comes a short story collection that demonstrates once more his mastery of that form.
Only one of the stories wasn’t written in this century. That one, “Morocco,” appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1979. It’s a description of a vacation from hell that would fit nicely into the National Lampoon series of family disasters, with Updike in the Chevy Chase role.
Two other stories are from The Atlantic, three are from Harper’s, two appeared in Playboy, and the other 10 were in The New Yorker, the magazine most identified with Updike. Written in his later years, the stories understandably deal with aging, loss, death — and memories.
Updike’s male characters, residents of Pennsylvania or New England for the most part, are aging, divorced and lonely. Some are seeking to reignite old flames, and mostly the effort is fruitless..
In “Free” a man and his former lover, now both widowed and living in different parts of Florida, meet at her condo after years apart. The meeting is as awkward as it is poignant, and Updike has the good taste to end it before it becomes pathetic.
“The Walk with Elizanne” captures all the mixed emotions of a 50-year high school reunion — the joy at seeing old friends tempered by the realization that this will be your last meeting with many of them.
“The Road Home” is a similar tale — a man returns to the Pennsylvania of his youth to have dinner with some classmates, but suffers the embarrassment of getting lost in his own home town, now a new and somewhat frightening place to him.
“Outage” is about what happens when the power goes off — it’s written about a storm in New England but could easily be about a hurricane in Louisiana. A man and a woman discover that the lack of electricity doesn’t mean they can’t generate sparks of their own.
The title story starts with a parting at a train station and ends with a death. In between a young man goes to school, marries, has children, divorces and remarries, grows old, then looks back on his life and its losses.
His father, seeing him off to school at the train station, has tears in his eyes because he sees what the young man doesn’t: “that time consumes us — that the boy I had been was dying if not already dead, and we would have less and less to do with each other. My life had come out of his, and now I was stealing away with it.”
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