Updike enthusiasts will have no trouble recognizing the author's stamp in this last, melancholy collection. Updike revisits characters and settings from earlier works as his male protagonists, now in their twilight years, glance wistfully over their shoulders at past lives and former loves. The New York Times Book Review cited this "obsessive recollection of detail for its own sake" as both a triumph and a limitation, but critics unanimously regarded Updike as one of the great writers of our time, with an exceptional body of work. Only the San Francisco Chronicle was less enthusiastic about this collection, citing repetitive story lines and self-absorbed narrators. Overall, however, critics described My Father's Tears as a poignant, compelling read -- and a fitting culmination by an author who will be sorely missed.
*Starred Review* Updike’s first collection of short stories since 2000, published posthumously following his January 2009 death, stands to be his last book, or so it would appear unless more posthumous publications are to come. That his final book should be a collection of short stories may only fuel the ongoing debate over whether Updike’s lasting reputation will rest on his novels or on his stories. No conclusions need to be drawn as this point; it is enough right now to savor this swan song and to be reminded of how splendid a writer Updike was. These marvelously wrought stories should not be regarded as a career summation but, rather, as evidence of a career interrupted. As Rabbit Angstrom, protagonist of Updike’s now-classic quartet of novels, has aged as the author himself has aged, so, too, have the characters in his stories. For instance, in “Morocco,” a husband and father remembers a family trip to North Africa in 1969 as a time when he and his spouse and children were “still molded, it seemed, forever together.” And in “Free,” a man looks back over his years of having an affair and ponders just what kind of freedom he wanted. September songs from an American master. --Brad Hooper
About the Author
John Updikewas 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 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the father of four children and the author of more than sixty books, including collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His books have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Howells Medal, among other honors. He died in January 2009.
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Ron Hansen In January, John Updike died of cancer at the age of 76. The 20th century's preeminent man of letters, Updike was equally at home with the novel, essays, criticism and poetry, but he will probably find his most lasting fame with his short stories, some of which were already classics in his lifetime. So it is fitting that we have as a fond valedictory this, John Updike's 12th collection of short fiction, the last one he completed before he died. Eighteen stories are included in "My Father's Tears," arranged, as was his habit, in the order in which Updike wrote them. I have rarely encountered fiction that so genially recounts the frailties of old age. "Afraid of appearing senile," a professor revisiting his hometown fails to ask a motel clerk to repeat her hurried driving directions and gets horribly lost. A former floor refinisher considers the pleasure of having a full glass of water on the bathroom sink to "sluice down the anti-cholesterol pill, the anti-inflammatory, the sleeping, the calcium supplement . . . along with the Xalatan drops to stave off glaucoma and the Systane drops to ease dry eye." And a high school reunion prompts one character to note that "the list of our deceased classmates on the back of the program grows longer; the class beauties have gone to fat or bony crone-hood; the sports stars and non-athletes alike move about with the aid of pacemakers and plastic knees, retired and taking up space at an age when most of our fathers were considerately dead." In general the characters are flush New Englanders with children and grandchildren, who have the wealth for exotic travel and the luxury of time for reminiscence or, as Updike calls it, "personal archaeology." Hints of death and dying faintly tinge every story, but there is no pathos or urging to not go gently into that good night; there is just the realist's ironic shrug over the way things are and a healthy appreciation for the largely unrecognized heroism of facing life's decline, as when a character remembers that "for two years he had lain beside Irene feeling her disease growing like a child of theirs. He had stayed awake in the shadow of her silence, marvelling at the stark untouchable beauty of her stoicism. In the dark her pain had seemed an incandescence." The story "My Father's Tears" begins with a narrator very much like Updike recalling how his father cried as his son left Pennsylvania for Harvard, having foreseen "that the boy I had been was dying if not already dead, and we would have less and less to do with each other. My life had come out of his, and now I was stealing away with it." Contrasted with that memory are those of his first wife's father, a serene Unitarian minister in St. Louis who vacationed in a Vermont farmhouse each summer and invited the newly married couple there. Whereas his own much-loved father "enacted the role of an underdog, a man whose every day, at school or elsewhere, proceeded through a series of scrapes and embarrassments," the father-in-law was aloof and magisterial, a confident man who moved among his houseguests "like a planet exempt from the law of gravitational attraction." "He was to be brought low, all dignity shed, before he died. Alzheimer's didn't so much invade his brain as deepen the benign fuzziness and preoccupation that had always been there." It was a heart attack that felled the narrator's father, in an era in which there were no options like open-heart surgery and angioplasty. Yet, facing the finality of his loss, the narrator finds himself unable to cry. "My father's tears had used up mine." Updike at his finest can be seen in "Varieties of Religious Experience," which considers four wildly different characters and their reactions to the events of 9/11, "when, as abruptly as a girl letting fall her linen gown, the entire skyscraper dropped its sheath and vanished, with a silvery rippling noise." A lawyer watching on television loses his faith in God and is later "aggrieved by the grotesque and pitiable sight of a great modern nation attempting to heal itself through this tired old magic of flags and candles -- the human spirit stubbornly spilling its colorful vain gestures into the void." The story then shifts to Mohamed, one of the Muslim perpetrators, who thinks of America as an "unclean society disfigured by an appalling laxity of laws and an electronic delirium of supposed opportunities and pleasures." Jim Finch has an office high up in the World Trade Center and is on the phone with his wife when he realizes the enormity of his predicament. And a fourth character is Carolyn, onboard the flight that a scrum of passengers forced to plow into the earth of Pennsylvania rather than the White House. "Mercy, Carolyn managed to cry distinctly inside her pounding head. Dear, Lord, have mercy." "Kinderszenen," which is German for "child scenes," records a little boy's careful observations of farm and family life in the 1930s, and "The Walk with Elizanne" elegiacally considers the 50th reunion of the graduating class of Olinger High School, Olinger being the fictional stand-in for the Shillington, Penn., of Updike's youth and of many of his finest stories. Even the protagonist's name, David Kern, is one that habitual readers of Updike's fiction will connect with, for these stories are acts of affectionate recapitulation, not wondrous exploration. Like his earlier novel "Villages," this book holds up to the sunlight and gently turns objects Updike has considered before, seeing glimmers and refractions that are slightly different from those he had formerly put down on paper. As such, "My Father's Tears" is a self-conscious salute to a grand career of imagining and gorgeously describing our America, along with a wink of gratitude to those readers who have shared the journey. And its last line is all Updike: "If I can read this strange old guy's mind aright, he's drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned."
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Morocco
The seacoast road went smoothly up and down, but compared with an American highway it was eerily empty. Other cars appeared menacing on it, approaching like bullets, straddling the center strip. Along the roadside, alone in all that sunswept space, little girls in multicolored Berber costume held out bouquets of flowers—violets? poppies?—which we were afraid to stop and accept. What were we afraid of? A trap. Bandits. Undertipping, or overtipping. Not knowing enough French, and no Arabic or Berber. “Don’t stop, Daddy, don’t!” was the cry; and it was true, when we did stop at markets, interested persons out of the local landscape would gather about our rented Renault, peering in and offering unintelligible invitations.
We were an American family living in England in 1969 and had come to Morocco naïvely thinking it would be, in April, as absolute an escape to the sun as a trip to the Caribbean from the Eastern United States would be at the same time of year.
But Restinga, where a British travel agency as innocent as we of climatic realities had sent us, was deserted and windy. The hotel, freshly built by decree of the progressive, tourism-minded king, was semicircular in shape. At night, doors in the curving corridors slammed, and a solitary guard in a burnoose kept watch over the vacant rooms and the strange family of pre-season Americans. By day, the waves were too choppy to swim in, and the Mediterranean was not so much wine-dark as oil-black. Walking along the beach, we picked up tar on our feet. When we lay down on the beach, wind blew sand into our ears. Off in the distance, apartment buildings of pink concrete were slowly being assembled, and there were signs that in a month vacationers from somewhere would fill the bleak plazas, the boarded-up arcades. But for now there was only the whipping wind, a useless sun, and—singly, idly, silently in the middle distance—Arabs. Or were they Berbers? Dark men, at any rate, in robes, who frightened our baby, Genevieve. Fantastic as it seems now, when she is so tall and lovely in her spangled disco dress, she was then overweight and eight. Caleb was ten, Mark twelve, and Judith a budding fourteen.
“Je le regrette beaucoup,” I told the manager of the Restinga hotel, a blue-sweatered young man who wandered about closing doors that had blown open, “mais il faut que nous partirons. Trop de vent, et pas de bain de la mer.”
“Trop de vent,” he agreed, laughing, as if reassured that we were not as crazy as we had seemed.
“Les enfants sont malheureux, aussi ma femme. Je regrette beaucoup de partir. L’hôtel, c’est beau, en été.” I should have used the subjunctive or the future tense, and stopped trying to explain.
The manager gave our departure his stoical blessing but explained, in cascades of financial French, why he could not refund the money we had prepaid in London. So I was left with a little cash, a Hertz credit card, four children, a wife, and plane tickets that bound us to ten more days in Morocco.
We took a bus to Tangier. We stood beside an empty road at noon, six stray Americans, chunky and vulnerable in our woolly English clothes with our suitcases full of continental sun togs bought at Lilywhite’s and of Penguins for vacation reading. The sun beat upon us, and the wind. The road dissolved at either end in a pink shimmer. “I can’t believe this,” my wife said. “I could cry.”
“Don’t panic the kids,” I said. “What else can we do?” I asked. “There are no taxis. We have no money.”
“There must be something,” she said. Somehow, my mem- ory of the moment has dressed her in a highly unflattering navy-blue beret.
“I’m scared,” Genevieve announced, clutching her knapsack and looking painfully hot and rosy in her heavy gray overcoat.
“Baby,” sneered her big sister, who attracted stares from native men everywhere and was feeling a certain power.
“The bus will come,” Daddy promised, looking over their heads to the vanishing point where the road merged in the pink confusion of the new buildings the king was very slowly erecting.
A thin dark man in a dirty caftan materialized and spoke to us in a lengthy nasal language. He held out his palms as if to have them read.
“Dad, the man is talking to you,” Mark, then prepubescent and now a graduate student in computer science, said, very embarrassed.
“I know he is,” I told him, helplessly.
“What’s he saying, Dad?” Genevieve asked.
“He’s asking if this is the bus stop,” I lied.
The man, continuing to speak, came closer, confiding a breath rich in Muslim essences—native spices, tooth decay, pious fasting with its parched membranes. His remarks grew more rapid and urgent, but a light was dying in his bloodshot eyes.
“Tell him to go away.” This suggestion came from Caleb, our silent, stoic, sensible child, now a college junior majoring in zoology.
“I think he will,” I hazarded, and the man did, shaking his skeletal head at our unresponsive idiocy. Our little family clustered closer in relief. Sand blew into our shoes, and the semicircular halls of the abandoned hotel, our only home in this foreign land, howled at our backs like some deep-voiced, clumsy musical instrument.
The bus! The bus to Tangier! We waved—how we waved!—and with an incredulous toot the bus stopped. It was the green of tired grass, and chickens in slatted coops were tied to the top, along with rolled-up rugs. Inside, there were Moroccans: dusty hunched patient unknown people, wearing knit little things on their heads and knit little things on their feet, their bodies mixed in with their bundles, the women wrapped in black, some with veils, all eyes glittering upward in alarmed amazement at this onrush of large, flushed, childish Americans.
The fare, a few dirhams, was taken noncommittally by a driver, who had a Nasseresque mustache and a jaw to match. There was room at the back of the bus. As we wrestled our ponderous suitcases down the aisle, the bus swayed, and I feared we might crush with our bulky innocence this frag- ile vehicle and its delicately balanced freight. Deeper into the bus, an indigenous smell, as of burned rope, intensified.
In Tangier, the swaying bus was exchanged for a single overloaded taxi, whose driver in his desire to unload us came into the Hertz office and tried to help the negotiations along. Allah be praised, his help was not needed: the yellow plastic Hertz card that I produced did it all. Had I been able to produce also the pale green of an American Express card, our suspenseful career down the coast, from Tangier to Rabat to Casablanca and then through the narrower streets of El Jadida and Essaouira and Tafraout, would have been greatly eased, for at each hotel it was necessary to beg the clerk to accept a personal check on a London bank, and none but the most expensive hotels would risk it; hence the odd intervals of luxury that punctuated our penurious flight from the Mediterranean winds.
The avenues of Rabat as we drove into the city were festooned in red. Any thought that we were being welcomed with red banners gave way when we saw hammers and sickles and posters of Lenin. A Soviet high-level delegation, which included Kosygin and Podgorny, was being received by the versatile king, we discovered at the Rabat Hilton, which was booked so solid with Communists that it could not shelter even the most needy children of free enterprise.
But a hotel less in demand by the Soviets took us in, and at dinner, starved, we were sat down in a ring on piled carpets, around what in memory seems an immense brass tray, while a laughing barefoot girl tiptoed at our backs, sprinkling rosewater into our hair. Mark, tickled, made his monkey face.
This sensation of being beautifully served amid undercurrents of amusement recurred in a meadow high above the sea, where, after miles of empty landscape and empty stomachs, a minuscule restaurant, scarcely more than a lean-to, advertised itself with a wooden arrow. We stopped the rented Renault and with trepidation walked across the grass, single-file, feeling again huge, as when we trod deeper into that fragrant bus. We halted when a man emerged from the shack bearing a table, and a boy emerged carrying chairs. With an air of amusement all around, this furniture was set on the grassy earth, in a spot we lightly indicated. From the shed were produced in time wine, rice, kebabs, and Cokes, which we consumed in sight of the Atlantic, of beige cliffs, and of vast pastures grazed by a single donkey—the only customers, for all we knew, that this beautiful restaurant by the sea had ever had.
Even on the rough back road to Tafraout, into the stony hills of the Low Atlas, with the gas gauge saying zero and not a house, not a sheep or goat, in sight, a little girl in a dip of the unpaved track held out a handful of flowers. The road here had become one with the rocks of a dry riverbed, so our Renault was moving slowly, so slowly she had time, when she saw we were truly not going to stop, to whip our fenders with the flowers and to throw them at the open car window. One or two fell inside, onto our laps. The rest fell onto the asphalt beside her feet. In the rearview mirror I saw the little girl stamp her foot in rage. Perhaps she cried. She was about the age of Genevieve, who expressed empathy and sadness as the girl diminished behind us and dropped from sight.
