Reviewed here: My Father's Tears, by John Updike; Old Girlfriends, by David Updike
As Leonard Cohen wryly observed, “If you do have love it's a kind of wound, and if you don't have it, it's worse,” an apt summation of the life and work of John Updike (1932-2009), one of the Western Canon's enduring talents destined, no doubt, to achieve the kind of immortality his son, David (who, incidentally, explores similar middle-class territorial angst), can only imagine for himself at the start of what promises to be a formidable artistic vocation.
Updike père's publisher recently released the double-entendre titled short-story collection, My Father's Tears, purportedly his 63rd work (spanning poetry, prose and criticism) to appear in print. Made up of short fiction written since 2000, its 18 entries revisit temporal, philosophical and geographical terrain well known to his legions of admiring readers following the punctilious stylist's various efforts, from New York (1958's The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures and, a year later, The Same Door: Short Stories) to Ipswich, Mass. (1963's The Centaur, the early Olinger series and much of the Rabbit saga – including the travails of Henry Bech as well as 2003's omnibus künstlerromantic achievement, The Early Years).
My Father's Tears, by John Updike, Knopf Canada, 224 pages, $32
With My Father's Tears, something old, new and brilliantly blue dominates an understandably uneven set of narratives, a handful of which debuted in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's etc. Although the dominant elegiac tone often wanders dangerously close to the near-sloppily maudlin, the work's finest entries make of it not only a completist's must-own, it also provides both new and seasoned comers with an astonishing array of the variously beautiful weapons in Updike's linguistic/stylistic arsenal.
Invariably compared favourably with the work of Cheever, Irving, Proust, Bellow et al., the virtuoso's sharply honed showpieces issue from his preternatural abilities to inhabit the mindscape and enlarge the soulscape of each of his fully realized characters in situ. Whether traversing the chaotic and episodic quotidian or venturing into lovingly rendered dream states, each of his seemingly effortless – yet obviously near-obsessively polished – creations combines a kind of hope against hope or love of love. In his lifelong quest to locate le seul mot juste, Updike makes the mundane miraculous while simultaneously transforming it into a kind of diurnal distillation of all that was, is and shall immutably be.
Consider Personal Archaeology, a valedictorian lament in which the aging narrator, Craig Martin, takes stock of his intimately familiar yet paradoxically foreign relationship with the cyclical traces of life, decay, death and resurrection on parade across his small square of real estate: “In Craig's mind, the property had four eras before his … Craig dated most of the oddments he found in the woods – Mason jars, flowerpots, shotgun shells, rubber tires half sunk in the leaf-mould and holding a yellow oblong of scummy water, pieces of buried iron pipe, rusted strands of wire … carried the ghost of electricity; parts of a motorcycle engine, filmed with blackened grease, remembered a time when the steep old roads served a young man's racing game.”
David takes up the torch and regularly illuminates the twin apprehensions of longing and reviling when it comes to the slings and sorrows of love
If one character's life flourishes in the residue of fecund objects redolent with association, another's blossoms during a near-epiphanous moment where existence begins and ends with a tantalizing glimpse of glorious transport when “the horizon springs a rim of lights” and “Nature drips a little anesthetic into your veins each day that makes you think another day is as good as a year, and another year as long as a lifetime. … I lift the glass, its water sweetened by its brief wait on the marble sinktop. 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” (The Full Glass).
