Book review: My Father's Tears and Other Stories

Published on Friday 19 June 2009 18:33

MY FATHER'S TEARS AND OTHER STORIES John Updike Hamish Hamilton, £18.99

TWENTY years ago, John Updike published a memoir, Self-Consciousness, which opens with an extended reminiscence of his hometown. The author has been stranded for the evening while his family are at the movies, and he walks the streets in a light rain, reliving the past in the incantatory detail with which he informed and illuminated his fiction, recording the essence of his time among us.

In My Father's Tears And Other Stories, Updike's final collection of new fiction, all but one of the 18 stories were published in the last decade, and their themes and situations hark back to the author's earliest autobiographical fiction, especially the stories set in Olinger, Updike's fictionalised version of Shillington. The difference here is that the protagonists in this collection are, for the most part, at the end of their lives, and so the news of familial drama and divorce and the cocktail parties, barbecues and casual wooings of quotidian life in suburbia is given retrospectively, wistfully, presented in the larger context as memories of lost moments and lost opportunities.

Two of the stories here feature a familiar Updike alter ego, David Kern, the boy who teetered on the brink of losing his faith all those years ago in Pigeon Feathers, now grown old and hesitant. Both are set in motion by Kern's return to Olinger, first for a high school class reunion and then for a nearby conference. In the more successful of the two, The Walk With Elizanne, Kern and his second wife go first to the local hospital to visit a classmate who is unable to attend the reunion because of her infirmity. Mamie is bedridden, emaciated, old, dwelling, as she says, in the "last chapter" of her life, and yet Kern remembers her as she was in kindergarten.

At the reunion, Kern encounters Elizanne, whom he also knew as a child but who even then represented the exotic. She electrifies him by telling him how much he'd meant to her all these years because he was the first boy to walk her home and kiss her. This occasions a flood of recollected sensory detail, Updike at his best, an eternalising of the moment of that kiss which stands in defiance of age and decrepitude and the bone cancer winnowing Mamie. In the final scene, the story takes a bold leap into the past, illuminating the walk and the kiss, Elizanne pattering on in her soft breathless adolescent voice and already arrived on her parents' doorstep with so much more to tell.

In the second Kern story – The Road Home – David is unable to find the country club where he has arranged to meet several of his classmates who, unlike him, have remained in their hometown. The drive allows the memories to wash over him. At dinner he bombards his classmates with reminiscence, challenging them to match his mnemonic abilities. For his classmates, Olinger's past has been tempered by its present and so holds little of the magic with which Kern invests it. Ultimately, they treat him as an outsider.

Here lies the triumph and the limitation of these stories: the obsessive recollection of detail for its own sake. Among all the writers of our time, Updike was the most gifted in illuminating the phenomenological world. But in these stories, 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 overwhelm the artistry of the stories themselves.

Best though is the knowing resignation of the final story, The Full Glass, in which the first-person narrator, approaching 80, takes us through the reduced rituals of the old as they both savour and prepare to give up forever even the simplest animal pleasures. He reflects on an affair he once had with a vibrant, brassy woman, whose death years later "removed a confusing presence from the world, an index to its unfulfilled potential," and considers how all that living has worn him down. And then in the collection's slyly affecting final line, the narrator steps outside of himself to offer up a fatalistic toast, not with intoxicating wine but with water, life's pure essence: "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."