My Father's Tears and Other Stories
by John Updike
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Book Summary Information
Author: John UpdikeEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-06-02
ISBN: 0307271560
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of My Father's Tears and Other Stories
Book Review: Deeply moving last stories
Summary: 5 Stars
I found this work a more deeply moving one than many other Updike works I have read. Updike is always the supreme artistic craftsman, the master of the precise observation, the surprising definition of a familiar reality which throws it into a new light. He is the master of description of the mundane world. And his capacity for creating beauty in incredibly complex sentences is perhaps unmatched by any other contemporary writer.
Yet in all his detailings of small- town everyday life, and all his chroniclings of the passions of his always strongly individuated characters there has seemed to me a level of feeling missing, which made me less than fully `sympathetic' to his work.
In these stories however which focus on aging and death, memory and its connecting together of various stages of life a certain poignancy enters which I anyway, did not feel before. Strangely it is less for the fictional characters themselves , so many of whom are essentially altar egos of Updike, than it is for the figure of the master - maker Updike himself.
For in this set of stories there often seems an even closer than ordinary connection between the writer's own personal experience and the fictional work he makes of it. Surely the title story `My Father's Tears' which describes the one time the protagonist has seen his father cry echoes Updike's own life- experience His father cried for the son moving away from him into other worlds he will not understand. The end of the story will have the son unable to cry at the news of his father's death, as his father's tears have `used up' his own.
So too this closeness is felt in a story like `The Guardians' in which the young child grows to perception through observation of the four adults who he has been raised by, mother and father, grandfather and grandmother. So there are also stories in which the elderly protagonist not simply meets with friends from childhood, or lovers from another time of life but in a sense recreates the experience of the early time in such a way as to throw it into a wholly different perspective. The metaphor of putting one's own life into perspective through seeing it as one layer of a series of layers lived in one place is at the center of the long story `Personal Archaeology'.
These stories give a persistent sense of what a deeply thoughtful and smart person their narrator is . Updike's writing provides his readers a kind of pleasure in knowing the world better. This of course is reflected in the writing about material things, but also in a certain wisdom about human relationships. Even in the opening piece of the work which is more straightforward memoir than any other, the account of a family vacation in Morocco shows a kind of subtle psychological understanding, in which one senses that the story is written by a divorced father longing for the time when his world and family were balanced and whole, in a way they might never exactly be again. In `The Blue Light' there is at another stage of life an aging father and grandfather's reassessment of his whole family world, and his discovery of the odd distance there is between himself and all that is closest to him.
There is then too in this work a sadness and longing which is greater than in any other work of his that I know. It is of course the longing for powers one no longer has, in love and even in lust. But it is also longing for those times which are gone, and those people transformed by time into nearly unrecognizable caricatures of their former selves. It is too a longing for the experiencing of the richness of the world , an experience Updike in his omnivorous curiosity `covered' in his writing- an experiencing which will disappear with death.
The longing the reader has is surpisingly less evoked by any of the characters than it is for the consciousness of Updike himself. This consciousness which so plentifully `preserved' in all that he has given us in past, has ceased creating and will do no future work. The reader in a sense longs for all the works Updike could have and would have written in response to the unfolding reality of America.
In a sense this longing connects with a different one , one which finds expression in a number of the stories of this work. This is the longing for and affirmation of a higher emotional and spiritual meaning within everyday experience. One such instance of this is the 'Varieties of Religious Experience' which retells the story of the Terror Bombing of the World Trade Center in 2001 from the perspective of four different parties. There the character Dan who at the opening shock of the explosion becomes atheist in the end makes a conversion back to a comfortable communal Christianity. Another is in powerful story "The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe. Here the focus is on how Science has given us a chilling picture of a Cosmos whose parts are moving away from each other at accelerating speed. Fairchild the protagonist suffers depression at own increasing isolation and declining powers. He longs for contact and intimacy , even if it comes through some kind of violation and injury. As the pine doors of an unbequeathable much-treasured family heirloom suddenly fall on him Fairchild in the `split second that he sees it coming' is not depressed." The consciousness of 'understanding' if only for a brief moment renews his sense of his life's meaningfulness.
Updike was a master in writing about worlds of Art and Culture. He was also the rare fiction - writers who had solidly informed picture of worlds of Science and Religion.
In this he was a seeker of knowledge and meaning whose writing gave sense and Beauty to whatever he experienced.
The world of American Literature is of course incredibly richer for his having lived and written.His farewell gift to us is another evidence of how deeply he will be missed.
Summary of My Father's Tears and Other Stories
John Updike?s first collection of new short fiction since the year 2000, My Father?s Tears finds the author in a valedictory mood as he mingles narratives of his native Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel.?Personal Archaeology? considers life as a sequence of half-buried layers, and ?The Full Glass? distills a lifetime?s happiness into one brimming moment of an old man?s bedtime routine. High-school class reunions, in ?The Walk with Elizanne? and ?The Road Home,? restore their hero to youth?s commonwealth where, as the narrator of the title story confides, ?the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition.? Exotic locales encountered in the journeys of adulthood include Morocco, Florida, Spain, Italy, and India. The territory of childhood, with its fundamental, formative mysteries, is explored in ?The Guardians,? ?The Laughter of the Gods,? and ?Kinderszenen.? Love?s fumblings among the bourgeoisie yield the tart comedy of ?Free,? ?Delicate Wives,? ?The Apparition,? and ?Outage.?
In sum, American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11 finds reflection in these glittering pieces of observation, remembrance, and imagination.
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