Many of these tales in this posthumously published collection see Updike revisit the haunts of his childhood from the vantage point of old age. In 'Fiftieth' old friends reconnect at a class reunion, and one of them is left wondering, 'What does it mean: the enormity of having been children and now being old, living next to death.' In the story 'The Full Glass' the protagonist describes somewhat ruefully the rituals of old age. Before going to bed, he raises his nightly water glass 'drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned.' In 'Varieties of Religious Experiences' a grandfather, visiting his daughter in Brooklyn Heights, watches the tower of the World Trade Centre fall, and his view of a God is forever altered.
Read an extract from this book on the New York Times website
Reviews
The New York Times
Michiko Kakutani
“Mr. Updike writes in these stories and poems with the quiet assurance of someone in complete control of his craft. Instead of pushing himself awkwardly into new territory or indulging in creative-writing exercises (as he’s done in earlier tales, where he’s tried to write from the point of view, say, of a suburban iguanodon or a piece of pond scum), he sticks here to what he does best... These two volumes demonstrate ... that his skills in these two genres remained undiminished to the end.”
25/05/2009
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The Sunday Times
Peter Kemp
“[A] magnificent collection... his genius can be seen on peak form. Eighteen stories rich in master strokes of social, psychological and emotional nuance display what made him a matchless fictional documenter of small-town and middle-class American life for five decades... With this book, a talent that burnt brightly for half a century goes out in a blaze of brilliance.”
05/07/2009
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The Spectator
Anne Chisholm
“Although an air of valediction inevitably hovers over this collection of short stories, the last of John Updike’s more than 60 books and published in the wake of his death, it is in no way a depressing read. On the contrary: there is something exhilarating about finding him maintaining to the very end not just his brilliance of observation and narrative but his passionate appreciation of life.”
08/07/2009
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The New York Review of Books
Julian Barnes
“Updike's world often appears a superficially stable place, of mainly white, mainly middle-class suburbia, of houses and families and children and golf and drinking and, of course, adultery—that most conventional way to rise above the conventional, in Nabokov's phrase. But just as Hemingway, the supposed hymner of masculine courage, writes best about cowardice, so Updike, delineator of conventional, continuing America, is incessantly writing about flight.”
15/07/2009
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The Evening Standard
David Sexton
“All short stories risk being too pointed, too neat, too obviously symbolic. Updike, though so superbly skilful, effortlessly able to delineate the sweep of a lifetime in a few pages, positively values these characteristics. The stories are tidy to a fault, overdetermined, clicking into place as they end.”
19/06/2009
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The Financial Times
Simon Schama
“[A] beguiling collection... Not all the stories...are top notch. “Varieties of Religious Experience” was Updike’s ambitious attempt at a 9/11 elegy... Updike was better at the elegiac than the catastrophic. But My Father’s Tears, despite the implication of the title story, isn’t all mood indigo. Updike’s genius was for the richly relished, precisely nailed, moment; his incomparable powers of translation between what is observed and what gets fixed in memory”
11/07/2009
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The Literary Review
Ophelia Field
“This collection of Updike's final stories ... contains several that can stand proudly beside his best... Updike’s episodic 9/11 story, ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’ is longer than the rest and to my mind the weakest... Perhaps it is merely the incongruity of ‘Varieties’ in this collection that makes the story read poorly. Updike always took a conscious pleasure in completing sets in his writing, and without this one anomaly the collection would be more of a set within itself, as well as a fine ending to the writer’s chronicles of American baby-boomer suburbia”
01/07/2009
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The Washington Post
Ron Hansen
“I have rarely encountered fiction that so genially recounts the frailties of old age... Hints of death and dying faintly tinge every story, but there is no pathos or urging to not go gently into that good night; there is just the realist's ironic shrug over the way things are and a healthy appreciation for the largely unrecognized heroism of facing life's decline”
14/06/2009
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The Guardian
Martin Amis
“My Father's Tears is Updike's last book, and perhaps his least distinguished. But it ends, all the same, with the glimmer, the thwarted promise, of a happier ending... Updike's creations live, and authorial love is what sustains them.”
04/07/2009
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The New York Times
T.C. Boyle
“Among all the writers of our time, he was the most gifted in illuminating the phenomenological world. But in these stories, like David Kern at his reunion, he presents details in a testimonial way, as a feat of recollection, and sometimes — as in “Kinderszenen” and “The Guardians,” which both present a young child’s perspective on Updike’s familiar world — the details tend to overwhelm the artistry of the stories themselves.”
05/06/2009
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The Los Angeles Times
John Freeman
“...an uneven and grimly literal collection of fiction... An artist always hides in plain view, some less obviously than others, and "My Father's Tears" feels like a coming clean... The whiff of confession, however, does not generate the heat of fiction's more mysterious properties. And there are other reasons this is a demoralizing book. White characters are described in full description; the rest are dark threatening smudges on the sideline.”
07/06/2009
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Times Literary Supplement
Giles Harvey
“The line between good prose and bad prose, as Updike's work amply demonstrates, is difficult to draw and easy to cross. Great stylists, by dint of their greatness, are always in danger of curdling into self-parody: they are so incorrigibly themselves. Nowhere is Updike's prose more unsteady than when it is describing the experience of ageing and the prospect of death.”
10/07/2009
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The New Statesman
Leo Robson
“The book is, obviously and egregiously, far too long. Even Joyce was pushing it a bit in Dubliners, but whereas the 15 stories in that collection were coherent, the 18 stories here, with their planished prose and weakness for homily and epiphany, are merely homogeneous... The book exhibits all the infirmities of the sex-and-sycamores formula that Updike favoured throughout his last two decades... [An] upsettingly bad book”
02/07/2009
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