Too Far to Go [Hardcover]

John UPDIKE (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Fawcett Crest (1979)
• ASIN: B000KP8FM0
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)

More 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, and since 1957 lived in Massachusetts. He was the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. John Updike died on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars All Together Now, August 6, 2000

By 

Tom Adair - See all my reviews

This review is from: Too Far to Go (Mass Market Paperback)

In 1956 John Updike wrote a short story about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next twenty years he found himself returning to these characters at regular intervals, writing a total of thirteen more stories in order to track the couple's progress through parenthood, infidelity and eventual divorce. This volume gathers the stories together and supplements it with two first-person meditations in the voice of Richard Maple and with a 'fragment' - an aborted attempt to write a seventeenth story. Most of the pieces have, inevitably, been published before - ten of the seventeen in earlier short story collections. It is nevertheless good to have a complete Maples volume. In many ways these are Updike's strongest characters, particularly in the quality of their conversations with one another. The book amounts to a definitive portrait of what we, as domestic animals, have become: complex, soul-baring, sophisticated, gamesome, oblique, selfish, loving.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thou still unravishd bride of quietness..., February 21, 2004

By 

"kaneda48" (California, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Too Far to Go (Mass Market Paperback)

Of all the scientific works that have dealt with the subject of love, marriage, divorce, children, parents, and care, none can truly explain the complex emotional waves that crash into lives of people when love is born. John Updike's Too Far Too Go is an astonishing work of literary fiction dealing with the early love and eventual separation of a young man and woman. Using simple language that is refined and beautiful, Updike masterfully explores the complex emotions that arise out of marital conflict and the stress it can cause on others, especially children. Updike's characters are so real that it becomes hard not to feel true sympathy for them. They are flawed as any human being, which makes them so wonderful.

His best work in Too Far To Go is "Separating", the end of the road for the Maples who have been dealing with marital troubles and are contemplating a short separation. Being the child of a divorced family, I found his account so accurate that it felt as though the words and actions of the characters were lifted word for word from a real conversation. It brought tears to my eyes as Richard, who seems always to be the collected father, break down and cry at dinner and confess his own shortcomings to his family. Every couple considering marriage and every child whose life has been so hurt by a divorce should read Updike's work in Too Far To Go. He is truly an American treasure and a master of the English language.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Greater than the sum of its parts, September 15, 2005

By 

Billy Pilgrim (Detroit-ish) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Too Far to Go (Mass Market Paperback)

This book is comprised of several short stories, which, like the title characters themselves, often seem like little more than sketches. Although I initially found that frustrating, I eventually came to realize that that works in this book's favor. As the title would suggest, the focus is on the Maples- their marriage, their infidelities- and the brevity and compactness of the stories helps to highlight that. Current events, politics, and the existence and plight of children are of secondary importance, and are mentioned, when they are mentioned at all, primarily to mark the passing of time and to fit the stories into a larger context.

Like a relationship that has ended, in which we remember the beginning and the ending more than the middle, the two stories that stand out the most are the first and the last, "Snowing in Greenwich Village" and the ironically-titled "Here Come the Maples".

"Snowing in Greenwich Village" shows a young couple just beginning their lives together, naive and inexperienced, who know very little about each other. "Here Come the Maples", by contrast, shows a couple who deeply understand one another, the result of familiarity and the passage of time as much as love. By this point, however, it's too late, and there's nothing they can do but go their separate ways. The final sentence is a perfect summation, touching and sad, that, despite its transparent literary-ness, still gets me choked up just recalling it.