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My Father's Tears and Other Stories

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MY FATHER'S TEARS is the last in a sterling lineup of stories from the master storyteller John Updike, who passed away in January 2009. With 18 tales in all, the book has a wide range of characters, themes, times and settings. But all of them have a common thread --- that of delving into the human spirit and capturing the emotion of the moment. And they were previously published in various magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's and The New Yorker.

Most of the main characters are male, but there are some of the female persuasion. Themes include aging, reminiscing, love lost and religion, among others. Times range from the Depression era to that of the modern-day world. Updike uses some fictional places in Pennsylvania to mirror those of his hometown of Shillington. The settings also include the state of Florida and such exotic locales as India, Spain, Italy and Morocco

The first story, titled "Morocco," takes place in that country and is based on a true story from events that occurred there in 1969. "The Walk with Elizanne" revolves around a high school reunion where two former high school sweethearts meet up after 50 years. A young child is the main character of three entries: "The Guardians," "The Laughter of the Gods" and "Kinderszenen." Love and its imperfections are the themes of "Free," "Delicate Wives," "The Apparition," and "Outage."

An interesting and sobering piece, "Variations of Religious Experience," explores the concept of religion and how it affects our thoughts and actions. The story centers on the horrific events of 9/11 and is told from the perspectives of a man watching the Twin Towers collapse from a distance as he looks out an apartment window, one of the hijackers who flies his jet into a tower, an office worker who is trapped in one of the towers and leaps to his death, and a passenger on the doomed plane that crashes in Pennsylvania. Each views his religion (or lack thereof) differently, and their reactions are varied as the events unfold.

Prior to reading this volume of short stories, my exposure to Updike's writings had been limited to a couple of volumes from the Rabbit series. Dedicated fans will enjoy MY FATHER'S TEARS, while newcomers can expand their enjoyment by perusing the many other short stories and novels he has produced. All readers should cherish this latest collection as it will be the last by this renowned and prolific author, unless new ones are discovered posthumously.

--- Reviewed by Christine M. Irvin

I'm more of a fan of Updike's short stories than his novels so "My Father's Tears" is tailor made for me.

Updike's last three published works- the novel "The Widows of Eastwick," his collection of poems "Endpoint" and this short story collection- all have the air of finality to them. They were musings on growing older, losing friends and coming to the end of one's life journey. But rather than being depressing, they are melancholy without being maudlin.

"My Father's Tears" is, with the exception of the first story, a collection of tales published after 2000. "Morocco," first published in the 70s, is a travelogue of the small, but not catastrophic, pitfalls that befall a family as they travel in a foreign land. The book then fast forwards through the decades; the characters in these late tales are trapped by their own personal histories, facing the dilemma that occurs when they realize that there isn't much more time ahead of them and the past weighs them down even though they realize it's futile to mourn the mistakes they once made.

One of my favorite tales in this collection is "Personal Archaeology," which manages to be affecting and sad while making me realize that once we're gone, things just continue. "My Father's Tears" is a great final story collection. I feel guilty for wanting anything more from Updike as he was more than prolific in his long career. RIP.

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.

If The Afterlife (the mid-1990s collection which was my introduction to him) was John Updike's thesis on old age, then My Father's Tears is his dissertation.

While themes of autobiography, old age, of looking back at youth and the times and places of its setting (with either sentiment or anguished hyper-comprehension) punctuate these stories, I found them both meaningful and less dismal than it seems so many others do. Travel stories leaven the book and are a nice accompaniment to heftier fare, with India, Spain and Morocco visited among other locales. The title tale and Personal Archaeology are the two best pieces in the book, with the latter story being as good as anything Updike ever penned. (Living as I do in a nearly ninety-year-old house surrounded by "artifacts" of past occupants, many of them bearing a family origin, Personal Archaeology struck me in a very confronting way, and skillfully speaks of the push of time against us all, those alive now and those who came before us. I read the story twice, the second time immediately after the first.)

While charges that "Updike repeated themes in My Father's Tears" have validity, the short stories in this collection also present us with a clear window into their author's mindset in the final decade of his life, and in so doing grant us his wisdom. My Father's Tears is an anthology that possesses a weight that presses in against the spirit of a reader in such a way that these are often anything but simple (or at times enjoyable) reads, but in their complexity, their honesty, their creator's telepathic mastery at transforming thought to word, they bestow much on those who make time to give them the understanding they deserve.

Despite his age we all thought we'd have John Updike, the greatest American short story writer of his generation, with us for many more years---we all hoped for another decade---instead we have My Father's Tears, and it is a poignant goodbye from a man whose literary capability we are not likely to see again in our times.

Updike left us readers of his fiction with a final volume of short stories and poetry. "My Father's Tears" takes us on his final decade through the medium of the short story. This is a must read for his fans and highly recommended for a fiction reader wanting to discover one of the great masters of fiction in the past fifty years.

Updike's final offering of 18 short stories reflecting on the transience of existece,what residues we leave behind us to be remembered by and-most subtly-how the solid structures of our childhood;parents, Grandparents, friends school and place, all slowly vanish and change as does our own roll in the scheme of things.

Updike is perhaps the first to make note of how technology has rapidly changed relationships and the society we live in.

'Personal Archeology' 'The Guardians' 'Kinderszenew' all stand out in exploring the themes of aging,of change.

Also in this collection is 'Varieties of Religious Experience' viewing 9/11 from each perspective;perpetrator,witness,victim.This will surely become THE 9/11 literary story.

This is my first encounter with Updike and I am left very impressed. He's been often reccommended but I was always put off by the awful 'Witches of Eastwick' film, though I should have kept to my own belief that films are no more than edited highlights of a book-dumbed down highlights at that-and decided from reading.

'My Fathers Tears' is a wonderful parting gift from Updike.Do read;you wont be disappointed.

My Father's Tears is Updike's last book of short stories, published a few months after he died. That it is a posthumous work is poignant: a collection of fictional memories and old age anecdotes, it exudes a before-the-grave redolence, a sense that the author knew these were his last moments in this world. The stories are unconnected, but they all have aging men as protagonists, they all are about looking back or dealing with one's declining years.

My Father's Tears' tone and style is not, say, that of a Raymond Carver, made of tiny crucial twists and hinging on odd but telling details and situations. Rather, these are pedal-tone codas, sepia pictures of remembered depression and war-era childhoods, ruminations on a changed world. The lens is turned towards long-buried relationships only evoked again thanks to a glimpsed suburban alley, a school reunion; or, kaleidoscope-like, it sees dissolved family bonds reconfigure under new, variegated patterns.

Most of the stories are set in small East Coast towns, and the reader could be forgiven for believing the divorce rate in New England is 100%, with everyone having affairs the whole community knows about, but fair enough: painful emotional choices make for more engaging fiction. In the middle of the book is a piece about 9/11: slightly eye-rolling, but I suppose American authors felt they had to do that. Nor is the collection devoid of an autobiographical air. I found the stories got better towards the end, that their pace became more varied and their lessons richer. Perhaps it is just that one gets into their slow, nostalgic stride, or that the message sinks in that old age, the approach of death, are manageable prospects after all. Maybe, retrospectively, this is a book best to be read after the age of forty.

The short stories in this volume capture Updike doing precisely what he did best: latching onto the very nuances of the American male in particular (while not all of the tales in this volume are told from the male perspective) and speaking from their point of view in a way that makes you empathetic with them when, when told from any other angle you would want to throttle them.

It is for this reason that Updike was a rare writer and a great loss, for he could pinpoint these nuances and then speak for and from them, giving them voice and breadth like no one else.

In "Blue Light", for example, the protagonist is someone I would on the surface have a hard time feeling much of anything for. An aging man seeking to improve his appearance as he lives out his comfortable life in the northeast, we have nothing in common. He tells of a philandering past through flashback, and it is clear he was not particularly good to any of his three wives. Yet there is something of him that is revealed that is sensitive and left exposed that we do share; not the same vulnerabilities or regrets, certainly, but vulnerabilities and regrets all the same.

The whole volume was a good read, but I particularly enjoyed "Delicate Wives," "Blue Light," and "Personal Archaeology."

If the last sentence of the last story in this collection --"The Full Glass" -- is the last sentence of fiction that John Updike publishes, it is perfect -- simultaneously life-affirming and heartbreaking without any easy religious consolations.

I just finished reading this collection this morning and I enjoyed all the stories; they hang together well, with no jarring false notes (I'll sometimes read a story collection and ask myself, "What was THAT doing there?"). Other than the story with the perfect ending I just finished, the other story that stands out for me is "Kinderszenen" with its child's-eye view of the Pennsylvania in the 1930s in which Updike grew. John Updike's power of description has always been the power that stands out for me in the sharpest relief, but I don't think I've ever seen the world described so precisely through a child's point of view as I have in that story.

Goodbye John. Those of us who grew up reading you will miss you.

After just a few pages of My Father's Tears it became apparent to me what a brilliant, brilliant writer John Updike was. This collection is the first work of his I have read after his death and the existential struggle of many of the characters in these stories is striking. Many of these characters are older, reflecting on lives that have sped past them, attempting to deal with the unknowable that faces them, as presumably, Updike was as he wrote them. These existential struggles are just one aspect of this very strong, very well-written collection. Updike is able to take mundane aspects of life and make them shimmer and delight with his luminous prose. These are wonderful stories. Enjoy them!