The Maples Stories (Hardcover)

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Product Description

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Collected together for the first time in hardcover, these eighteen classic stories from across John Updike’s career form a luminous chronicle of the life and times of one marriage in all its rich emotional complexity.

In 1956, Updike published a story, “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next two decades, he returned to these characters again and again, tracing their years together raising children, finding moments of intermittent happiness, and facing the heartbreak of infidelity and estrangement. Seventeen Maples stories were collected in 1979 in a paperback edition titled Too Far to Go, prompted by a television adaptation. Now those stories appear in hardcover for the first time, with the addition of a later story, “Grandparenting,” which returns us to the Maples’s lives long after their wrenching divorce.

About the Author

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. He was the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. He died in 2009.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Everyman's Library (August 4, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307271765
• ISBN-13: 978-0307271761
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 4.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #85,556 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Updike at his best and briefest..., August 5, 2009

By	Great Faulkner's Ghost (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

How wonderful and how poignant to have the tragicomic saga of the marriage of Richard and Joan Maples appear at long last in one slender and beautifully bound volume. Wonderful because when read together, these individual short stories, authored by John Updike over a period of almost 40 years, emerge as something considerably greater than the sum of the parts. Poignant because they are appearing now, in the year when Updike, America's foremost and perhaps last man of letters passed away, leaving us to remember, to miss, and to celebrate him through his humane and witty short stories, novels, and essays.

The stories in this book trace the brief rise and prolonged fall of a quintessentially American marriage that begins with a "Snowfall in Greenwich Village" early in the age of Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower and ends with "Grand Parenting " (1993) just before the dawn of the Bill and Hillary Clinton era. In between, the Maples experience most of the joys and all of the sorrows of modern middle class marriage, playing catch up with the 60s sexual revolution, navigating the tides of easy divorce and painful reconciliations, second families, lovers who just won't stop calling at home (Your Lover Just Called), and almost everything else that undercut but at the same time energized American marriage and family life in the latter half of the 20th century. Not all the stories are pretty, and some of the scenes are downright ugly (and all too realistic), and yet through it all, the Maples, as they drift apart, reconcile, separate and finally divorce, show more vitality, joy in living, and yes, true love for each other, than many "happily" married couples ever achieve.

As a richly documented narrative of the American Century, or least the post-WWII part of it, viewed through the lens of one marriage and two lives, the Maples stories collected here are, in my opinion, second only to the the four volume Rabbit tetralogy (Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest) in achieving a moving fictional reality. In a way, I feel I got to know the Maples as well or better than I knew the Angstroms, and while I felt that the dangerously over-educated Maple's problems were far more their own fault, often arising out of their own superficiality and over intellectualizing of basic human emotions and erotic urges, I cannot help being drawn to to them by their often misguided, but heroic attempts to find some sort of accommodation between the life they were leading and the life they wanted to lead, or at least thought they wanted to lead if they could only move on. The path was strewn with loneliness tears, and misery, but in the end, the Maples, like Rabbit Angstrom, achieved something more than just a life -- -- they achieved lives lived, if not well, at least lived fully, in some sort of love with each other, and finally, as we leave them, surviving to the rueful joys of shared grand parenthood.

In short, this collection of stories, while too brief and ending long before we would like it to, turns out to be more than the sum of its parts, and despite its brevity, immensely worthwhile. A lot like the Maple's marriage, in fact.