My Father's Tears and Other Stories, and: Endpoint and Other Poems (review)

The stories composing the last prose work John Updike (1932-2009) completed before his death take place in the years between the Depression and the aftermath of 9/11. In fact, the book's longest story, "Varieties of Religious Experience," opens the morning of 9/11. Looking west from his daughter's Brooklyn Heights apartment, a Cincinnati lawyer sees the south tower of the World Trade Center sinking into a column of black smoke. The catastrophe bursts into a multisensory nightmare. In a later scene, this same greasy smoke combines with the stench of burning jet fuel and overwhelming heat to send a room full of screaming office workers in the Tower to, and soon out of, their firm's upper-story windows.

Updike also brings the Depression to vivid life through well-chosen details—or their absence. The grandmother who would always greet the now-senior narrator of "The Guardians" after school is cleaning houses to make ends meet, and the family's Model A Ford has left the driveway. Disappearance is a leading conceit in these fine stories, most of which center on a divorced, remarried father in his seventies whose golfing buddies, poker partners, and business contacts have gone mostly to Florida or the grave.

This archetypal figure, like Updike, is an only child who grew up in eastern Pennsylvania vexed by a stammer and psoriasis. As a young adult, his brains helped him wed above his station but only to divorce his genteel wife some twenty years and three or four children later in order to marry the neighbor with whom he had been sleeping.

Another recurring motif: the fiftieth or fifty-fifth class reunion the Updike stand-in attends, acting on the belief that the self he prizes most is that of his high-school years. But he always leaves these galas unsure of whether the lens of old age has distorted or sharpened his understanding of his "fumbling, vanished" youth. For instance, his surprisingly vivid recollection of a schoolboy flirtation he never acted on with the eponym of "The Walk with Elizanne" makes him ask if the one spot of joy he shared with her slid into oblivion on its own or whether he scotched it deliberately.

His puzzlement bespeaks Updike's treatment of sex in the book. A man's decision to walk away from a panting supine younger neighbor when all the lights in her (and her husband's) house snap back on after several hours of darkness in "Outage" shows sex in My Father's Tears lacking the fire and frenzy Updike gave it in novels like Couples (1968) and Brazil (1994).

The unconsummated foreplay in "Outage" is unique in My Father's Tears. Most of the story's counterparts, in fact, are reminiscential—but without being nostalgic or syrupy. The key events have already taken place; their emanations do not qualify as shock waves. "Free," for example, confirms an earlier decision of an elder and a former "lithe and wanton tormenter of masculine bliss" to break up rather than marry. The value of their intrigue, they now see, lay in the forbidden jungle glamour given it by their respective marriages. They'd have failed as a married couple.

Friends of Updike will also be shocked to find him treating his other favorite subject, or obsession, God and religion, differently from before. Instead of featuring Christian ministers or doctrine, a practice dating from Rabbit Run (1960), Updike twice quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson's statement, "Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact." He believed to the end that God's manifestations, though elusive, remain all important.

An intimation of the hidden stuff that dictates this truth comes forth during a visit to India in "The Apparition." The epiphany of a retired professor fuses a denial of Buddhism's belief in renunciation with an endorsement of "the full acceptance" infusing Hinduism's faith in the meaning and goodness of life in all of its phases...