Trust Me: Short Stories [Paperback]

John Updike (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 27, 1996

John Updike's short story collections are occasions for celebration -- the pleasures to be found in them are great indeed. This marvelous volume contains one gem after another, stories to be savored one at a time and returned to again and again.

Here is trust betrayed -- and fulfilled. Here are parents struggling to maintain that fragile claim on their offspring's childish awe....Here are husbands and wives as only Updike knows them, leaving each other, loving each other, often at the same time. Here are passion ignited and quenched, absurd hope, regret at the last minute. Here is life as we live in it, in twenty-two stories of uncommon beauty and pathos from a master storyteller at the peak of his brilliant career.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As the chronicler of a certain kind of upper middle-class, sophisticated culture, Updike has few peers. The 22 stories in his new collection cover familiar ground, but always with a resonance and relevance that deliver fresh shocks of recognition. In Updike's world, fractured marriages are a condition of modern life. Ex-mates, new mates or lovers multiply in complex arrangements, "victims of middle aged recklessness." Adultery is not defended or explained; it is inevitable and routine. The children of these many-bedded partners pay the price for their parents' un- and re-coupling. A tone of nostalgia, loss and pain is pervasive; retribution is sure to be exacted. As Updike ages, so do some of his characters, men who in their 50s or 60s, who, like the protagonists of The Wallet and Death of Distant Friends contemplate "the premonition of extinction." In all of the narratives, Updike's inspired gift for imagery is employed to stunning effect. One responds to these stories with a visceral feeling of empathy, of having been exposed to the essence of life seen through a master's eye. 50.000 first printing; Literary Guild dual main selection.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

A few stories here come from magazines not found in most public libraries. Most treat familiar Updike themes (marriage, adultery, and divorce; the onset of middle age or old age; sickness and death) with familiar Updike techniques (role reversal, mirror scenes and characters, extended similes, traditional symbolism). Also familiar is the mostly high quality, even of newer material, such as an unobtrusive experiment in first-person plural narration in "Leaf Season," the relation between sex and sleep (explored more thoroughly in "Pygmalion" than in "Killing" or "Slippage"), and the use of the "f"-word in a New Yorker (!) story, "Unstuck." The two failures, "Still Some Use" and "Poker Night," are done in by bathetic imagery. More disturbing is a tendency to draw the moral, as if Updike shared with the artist of "Learn a Trade" a lack of trust in his own work. Let's hope not. Literary Guild dual main selection. Hugh M. Crane, Cambridge P.L., Mass.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (August 27, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0449912175
• ISBN-13: 978-0449912171
• Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 0.8 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,225,235 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Trust Updike, July 13, 2000

By 

Tom Adair - See all my reviews

This review is from: Trust Me: Short Stories (Paperback)

What, really, can one say against John Updike? Where, in these stories, can he be faulted? Well, the question need not be so rhetorical. One might, for example, consider the charge that his material is relatively unvarying. Time and again in his short stories Updike returns to the same territory: the white, middle-class couple caught up in the flux of an extra-marital affair. This is the central theme of no less than six of these twenty-two tales, but it touches the edges of many of the others too. And of these others all are confined to the same domestic and social milieu - from 'Killing', in which a daughter must cope with her father's death from Alzheimer's Disease, to 'The City', in which a salesman unexpectedly contracts appendicitis while on a business trip. Where is the broader vision - the black characters, the homosexuals, the political radicals? They are absent from Updike's vision. And yet, if this artist paints on a restricted canvas, it is the detail and style of the brushstrokes that redeems his art. 'Trust Me' is as reliable - as trustworthy - a demonstration as any work in the Updike corpus that the man's linguistic style is extraordinary. Central to it is an astonishing facility for metaphor; no less characteristic is his ear for the musical, his faculty for critical analysis, and a taste for symbolism that is at once unobtrusive and yet deeply satisfying. With such an abundance of stylistic gifts all working simultaneously, the unchanging world of Updike's characters remains fresh and, in 'Trust Me', fresher than ever.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Good First Choice for the Updike Reader, August 3, 2000

By 

Michael Younder - See all my reviews

This review is from: Trust Me: Short Stories (Paperback)

Men, women, what works and what does not - this seems to be the central theme of Trust Me. This was my first Updike book and as a collection of short stories, Trust Me represents a wise choice in this regard. The reader gets a taste of the Updike style in several short works which, despite being rich in detail and innuendo, are easily consumable - especially if read from start to finish without any long breaks.

3.0 out of 5 stars Some beautiful writing in pedestrian stories, December 15, 2011

By 

Christopher Hivner (Dallastown, PA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Trust Me: Short Stories (Paperback)

This is only the second Updike book I have read so I'm not overly familiar with his work. This collection of stories explores the relationships between men and women, husbands and wives and many times their lovers. This is not an uplifting collection as most of the characters have serious personality flaws and troubled partnerships. Out of 20 or so stories there were 4 I really liked: "Trust Me", "Killing", "Still of Some Use" and "Getting into the Set". The rest were mainly OK, a few were very dull. Mr. Updike can certainly write. Several times I stopped reading to let one of his turns of phrase or description really sink in because it was so beautiful. There are times he overdoes it, gets too complex when simplicity would do. I found a few of the stories, like "The City" to be pointless and after getting halfway through, a sameness crept into the tales. The characters started becoming each other, their lives and foibles very much the same as a story or two before. I'm glad I read the book. Its always a pleasure to read a writer who can put words together with as much elegance as Updike can, but the overall experience of Trust Me was pedestrian.