Customer Reviews

The Early Stories: 1953-1975

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I never much liked Updike's short stories until I started writing short stories myself. Many of the complaints people have with Updike are legitimate. He is usually light on plot. There is virtually no physical action--no fistfights, no murders, no sobbing confessions. But that, to me, is part of Updike's genius.

He always takes the difficult road. He doesn't simply have a husband cheat on his wife; instead, he has the husband worry that he will cheat on his wife, and then he considers the implications. I disagree with critics who accuse Updike of being unemotional. His stories are tangles of pure emotion.

My favorite story in the collection is "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, A Dying Cat, A Traded Car." It's set up as a series of essays that eventually carry the reader into a story about the author's dying father. It feels like a compilation of random events until you get ot the last line, and then you realize that everything is connected, everything has a purpose. It may be the most beautiful ending I've ever read. (The second most beautiful ending is in "The Happiest I've Been.")

Updike is not for everyone. If you like simple, straightforward stories, read Tobias Wolff (he is amazing in a totally different way). But if you're interested in a world vivid with details--a world with no easy questions, let alone answers--try Updike.

One caveat: read slowly--the magic is more in the words than the paragraphs.

I think that in many important ways, John Updike is America's best living writer, with a long history of unmatched insights and integrity, complex and believable characters, and a range that stretches (with great success) from criticism to essays and from poetry to prose.

The Early Stories is a testament to and a forum examining the fiction side of Mr. Updike's talents, including every short story (every one!) he ever published up until 1975, when he was 43 years old. This book is more than 800 pages long, and so I assume that the post-1975 stories were held out both in order to make sure the book could be lifted without strain or (more likely) as the stuff for a second mammoth volume of this great writer's work.

Most of us already know at least a few of the 102 stories in this thick book (I read one, "A & P," when I was in high school, long before I became a fan of Mr. Updike's work, and I didn't even realize he had been the author of it until I saw it again here), and many of the ones we don't know will reveal themselves as gems. But also -- fortunately or unfortunately -- many of the stories here simply don't work: the plots are either dated, or the characters or their motivations are too thin.

Curiously, I am unsure about whether this is positive or negative. I dismiss the possibility that the uneven quality here is natural when examining the work of a young writer not yet fully in control of his powers. After all, Mr. Updike had already created his two most memorable characters -- Rabbit Angstrom and Henry Bech (who appears in this book) -- before most of these stories came to life.

Instead, I see this as welcome proof that Mr. Updike is human, that he doesn't produce something awe inspiring every time his pen touches paper. That's the same realization I had when I saw my boyhood sports hero, quarterback Bob Greise, in a live game for the first time and all he seemed to do was get sacked and throw interceptions and incomplete passes all afternoon. In both cases, it's not the way I would have written the script, but perhaps it makes the truly great performances (and they are here, too) seem even better.

I am a long-standing fan of Updike's short stories (though less so of his novels), and my three-star rating of this book is not a reflection of my general opinion of him as a writer. Nevertheless, I do have some issues with this particular volume.

I think that it was a mistake to collect over 100 short stories under one cover with virtually no sieving. Updike made his living from writing and, and as far as I understand, he never held a regular job after he resigned from the New Yorker at the age of 25 - so I would be the last person to blame him for having published some short stories that were not quite to his general standard. When a small collection contains a couple of such works, this is usually not a problem. The situation inevitably becomes different on a scale of 100+ samples: the gap in quality between the best 10 and the weakest 10 of them is massive, and it is impossible not to notice this. I do not think that exposing his lesser works against the background of so many great stories found in this volume has done Updike's standing any good. I own virtually all collections of short stories ever published by him, and in my opinion he emerges a better author from each of his individual early collections than from this volume that combines their content.

I did not like the fact that while putting together this book Updike decided to change a few things here and there. In particular, the last sentence of the wonderful 'Dentistry and Doubt' is way too subtle in its revised version, and I suspect that some readers may now miss the whole point of the ending: I probably would, had I not read the story the way it was originally published.

Giving the hardback a deckle edge was a bad idea. This feature should really be reserved for luxury editions; the combination of ordinary binding and artificially deckled ordinary paper looks anything but tasteful; in fact, it looks cheap. More importantly, a deckle fore-edge makes it very difficult to browse through the book; locating a particular story in this volume is a constant source of frustration, so I seldom open it any longer. If the publishers were absolutely set on deckling, they should have molested the head or tail edge (or both); the fore-edge needs to be smoothly cut because it has an important practical function: the reader slides his or her thumb across it when looking for something in the book.

Why is there not more hoopla about this extraordinary volume? Although every story has been published before, the effect of reading them all through at once (at about a story a day since its publication, I am about a fifth of the way through) is stunning. In 1972, Vladimir Nabokov said that the greatest short stories of the past fifty years were written in America and he cited Updike as among its most inspired practitioners. He said, "I like so many of Updike's stories that it was difficult to choose one for demonstration and even more difficult to settle on its most inspired bit". Nabokov and Updike share the distinction of being the greatest American writers of the last half-century not to win a Nobel prize and the list of winners is made poor by their absence. American fiction writing does not get any better than this.

I don't normally write Amazon reviews, but I agree with a previous reviewer that the hoopla for this book is not what it should be. Yes, yes, there are stories in here that don't work; but Updike is extraordinary in his Big Themes, and those come through wonderfully in this volume. I wanted to highlight three of them in this review.

(1) The recurring Richard and Joan Maple stories: Updike has a gift for peaking in on a set of characters every 5 years or so without skipping a beat. This, of course, is what the Rabbit Angstrom books do in novel form. In The Early Stories, Updike does this with the Maples in short story form. In each case, he captures their dialog and sarcastic exchanges as if he is writing their stories at the same time; when in fact they are stretched over twenty years.

(2) Prescient name-dropping: In the Rabbit Angstrom books, Updike fortuitously has the auto dealership affiliated with Toyota in the 1960s, which comes to great use in the 1970s. Here in The Early Stories, there is frequent reference to names which will recur in the future in American history; most interesting, Senator Al Gore (Sr).

(3) Love triangle dynamics: To Updike, the party that loses in a married man/married woman/woman mistress triangle is the woman mistress; he plays out this theme in various scenarios. I would suggest Updike's thesis is different than the norm, but one he writes about repeatedly.

Why is there not more hoopla about this extraordinary volume? Although every story has been published before, the effect of reading them all through at once (at about a story a day since its publication, I am about a fifth of the way through) is stunning. In 1972, Vladimir Nabokov said that the greatest short stories of the past fifty years were written in America and he cited Updike as among its most inspired practitioners. He said, "I like so many of Updike's stories that it was difficult to choose one for demonstration and even more difficult to settle on its most inspired bit". Nabokov and Updike share the distinction of being the greatest American writers of the last half-century not to win a Nobel prize and the list of winners is made poor by their absence. American fiction writing does not get any better than this.

Many of these stories were originally published in short story collections (The Same Door, Museums and Women, Problems) that are long out of print and difficult to find. That alone makes this worth owning. Then there is the fact that this represents the collected work of an indisputedly talented and influential writer coming strong out of the gate and finding his voice, at a remarkably young age, before settling into a career and a life.

It is fascinating to observe this evolution and growth, as it happens over two decades, as he moves from, say, "Friends from Philadelphia", which is literal and straightforward, to the Barthelmesque (I don't if that's a word, but it should be) "Problems", which is self-reverential and self-mocking, yet also darkly funny, hinting as it does at the way life has affected the artist and his work. There is the longer "Pigeon Feathers", the (very) short "Eclipse", and the effortlessly brilliant "How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time". Not to mention the Maple stories (which I'd already read in their collected form in Too Far To Go), the classic "A&P", and about, oh, 80 or 90 others, not all of them gems, or even successes, but fascinating and worth reading nonetheless. Add to this the fact that you can observe, through Updike's writing, the country moving from Mid-Century domesticity to Sixties' upheaval and Seventies' rudderlessness and confusion, and you have a truly indispensable collection.

There is also the added bonus of Updike's introduction, in which he reveals his life at the time (married and a father early in his twenties), who escaped to an office to write during the day so he could support his family by selling these stories to the New Yorker. An unexpected, and unexpectedly normal, glimpse of the author and his workings, it's an insight which gives me a new appreciation for these stories and how and why they came to be.

Lastly, don't be daunted by the heft and bulk of this tome, and don't be afraid to pick and choose which stories you read, and in what order...they have a way of staying with you long after you're done reading them.

I have all of his books and refer to them regularly. I highly recommend John Updike, as does the rest of the world.

I love Updike's writing, and his early short stories are phenomenal. It is especially easy to enjoy this collection if you've already read some of his longer fiction.

This collection of early stories, though a bit long winded at points--traditional for Updike writing and understood and accepted by his fans--the stories are nonetheless entrancing and enrapturing. I devoured them like candy. They were the sweet and sumptuous words that only a master of the english language could wove together. Sixty Five stories in twenty two years is nothing to be scoffed at, and something to be admired. With his next novel coming out this year, with two pulitzers, two national book awards, two national book Critic Circle Awards, the only other writer that may deserve a Nobel Prize in Literature more than him is Philip Roth... but in my opinion, I think he has it over Roth.