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Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories
“The Maples stories trace the decline and fall of a marriage,” writes the author in his Foreword, a marriage that is threatened early on by the temptations of infidelity (“Snowing in Greenwich Village”) and that ends in a midlife divorce (“Here Come the Maples”). “They also illumine a history in many ways happy, of growing children and a million mundane moments shared.” That all blessings are mixed and fleeting does not make them less real, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. “A tribe segregated in a valley develops an accent, then a dialect, and then a language all its own; so does a couple. Let this collection preserve one particular dead tongue, no easier to parse than Latin.”
256 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published June 12, 1982
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411 people want to read
About the author
John Updike
860 books2,425 followersJohn Hoyer Updike was an American writer. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike is well known for his careful craftsmanship and prolific writing, having published 22 novels and more than a dozen short story collections as well as poetry, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker since the 1950s. His works often explore sex, faith, and death, and their inter-relationships.
He died of lung cancer at age 76.
He died of lung cancer at age 76.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews
March 2, 2020
Some of my favourite books consist of linked short stories, from Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kittredge and Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? to Susan Minot’s Monkeys.
I find this format very satisfying, perhaps because it mimics real life. Most of our lives aren’t structured like grand novels, with well-written beginnings, middles and ends; they’re a collection of snapshots or moments. The best fiction makes you feel like characters’ lives keep going after you’ve read about them, and the linked story collection confirms this, leaving most of the unimportant stuff out. You don’t need an overarching narrative to make a book – or people's lives – have significance.
Over a period of several decades, John Updike wrote a total of 17 stories about the upper-middle-class U.S. East Coast couple Joan and Richard Maple. He published them in magazines (mostly The New Yorker) and in different collections, and then gathered them anew in this book in 1979. (One final Maples story was written in 1994, then added to future editions.)
Updike would check in on the Maples, his domestic alter egos, every few years to see how their lives were working out. He chronicles their early marriage, their enduring love, their affairs, their vacations, their awkward faux pas, their expanding family and waistlines, their minor illnesses, their separation, their divorce, and finally their status as grandparents.
As expected, there’s a range of styles in the book, but most of the stories are written in an observant, highly detailed realistic prose. Updike can describe things that I never knew it was possible to describe. He understands people so well. He knows how and why we say one thing when we mean another. He can capture anxiety and guilt in a look, a gesture (one of the more interesting stories is called “Gesturing”), a seemingly simple question, a scrunch of the nose.
Some stories haven’t aged well; they feel dated, stuck in a particular era of wife- and husband-swapping. Often a symbol will feel a little too obvious. The Maples never seen to have money problems, which seems unusual. One story alludes to, among other things, Renoir’s Bathers, Masacchio’s Expulsion From The Garden, Japanese erotic painting, a quote from Rodin, Titian’s Venus, Manet’s Olympia. We get it, John. You attended Harvard.
And sometimes his prose can be self-consciously ornate and clever, almost solipsistic.
But I really like this book. His characters are flawed but believable. I think it was Alice Munro who said that ordinary people have access to excitement through adultery, and that’s certainly illustrated here. There’s also a sense of different eras passing. Joan gets involved in the civil rights movement. The legacy of the Vietnam War lingers. You feel the emerging counter culture in a couple of stories. The story "Separating," about Joan and Richard telling their children that they're attempting a trial separation is one of the best stories on this familiar topic. I've probably read it half a dozen times and it still affects me.
I’m hoping to read more Updike soon, to finish off the Rabbit quartet, dip into his poetry and read a couple more of the stand-alone novels. I know his output was uneven. He was so prolific, it had to be. But you can’t go wrong with his stories, especially these.
I find this format very satisfying, perhaps because it mimics real life. Most of our lives aren’t structured like grand novels, with well-written beginnings, middles and ends; they’re a collection of snapshots or moments. The best fiction makes you feel like characters’ lives keep going after you’ve read about them, and the linked story collection confirms this, leaving most of the unimportant stuff out. You don’t need an overarching narrative to make a book – or people's lives – have significance.
Over a period of several decades, John Updike wrote a total of 17 stories about the upper-middle-class U.S. East Coast couple Joan and Richard Maple. He published them in magazines (mostly The New Yorker) and in different collections, and then gathered them anew in this book in 1979. (One final Maples story was written in 1994, then added to future editions.)
Updike would check in on the Maples, his domestic alter egos, every few years to see how their lives were working out. He chronicles their early marriage, their enduring love, their affairs, their vacations, their awkward faux pas, their expanding family and waistlines, their minor illnesses, their separation, their divorce, and finally their status as grandparents.
As expected, there’s a range of styles in the book, but most of the stories are written in an observant, highly detailed realistic prose. Updike can describe things that I never knew it was possible to describe. He understands people so well. He knows how and why we say one thing when we mean another. He can capture anxiety and guilt in a look, a gesture (one of the more interesting stories is called “Gesturing”), a seemingly simple question, a scrunch of the nose.
Some stories haven’t aged well; they feel dated, stuck in a particular era of wife- and husband-swapping. Often a symbol will feel a little too obvious. The Maples never seen to have money problems, which seems unusual. One story alludes to, among other things, Renoir’s Bathers, Masacchio’s Expulsion From The Garden, Japanese erotic painting, a quote from Rodin, Titian’s Venus, Manet’s Olympia. We get it, John. You attended Harvard.
And sometimes his prose can be self-consciously ornate and clever, almost solipsistic.
But I really like this book. His characters are flawed but believable. I think it was Alice Munro who said that ordinary people have access to excitement through adultery, and that’s certainly illustrated here. There’s also a sense of different eras passing. Joan gets involved in the civil rights movement. The legacy of the Vietnam War lingers. You feel the emerging counter culture in a couple of stories. The story "Separating," about Joan and Richard telling their children that they're attempting a trial separation is one of the best stories on this familiar topic. I've probably read it half a dozen times and it still affects me.
I’m hoping to read more Updike soon, to finish off the Rabbit quartet, dip into his poetry and read a couple more of the stand-alone novels. I know his output was uneven. He was so prolific, it had to be. But you can’t go wrong with his stories, especially these.
February 9, 2017
This book was my first exposure to Updike and his penetrating glance into American married couples in the 50s to the 70s. It was actually a series of articles he published in the New Yorker and so each story stands on its own. This collection of 13 of the stories follows the trials and tribulations, the betrayals and compromises that the Maples make over their two plus decades together. No-one describes infidelity quite as precisely as Updike. This is a great collection but I think that Couples by Updike is even a better narrative on the subject. This is a great book for a short vacation on the beach or the ski slopes.
January 5, 2012
More than anything I'll take away from this read a reminder that very few writers have ever written sentences like Updike. The stories in this collection, all about the slow death of a marriage, span his career. In the strongest stories -- perhaps half of them -- the couple is sympathetic and genuinely saddened at the impending demise of their marriage. In the weaker stories, the couple strikes me as too stereotypically late-1960s, early-1970s, i.e. a bit too swinging and at ease with the other's infidelities. At moments the characters feel inconsistent, but I assume that this is the result of writing stand-alone stories about them over decades rather than writing a single collection about then over a 4-5-year period. But the man could write. The Rabbit books, especially the first, remain his best work, in my opinion.
May 1, 2012
adultery in suburbia already seems like a bit of an anachronism, but updike is witty enough to compensate for this. the book is a series of short stories chronicling the demise of joan and richard maples' 20 year marriage. overwhelmingly, the narratives are not pretty, and some of the scenes are unabashedly ugly, and yet through it all, the maples, as they drift apart, reconcile, separate and finally divorce, exude more vitality, joie de vivre and love, than many "happily" married couples ever achieve. that the relationship ends is less than ideal, but updike reminds readers that "all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds." blessing are mixed--joan and richard shared a million mundane moments, many of them happy, and ultimately, that is what is what triumphs. and as updike guides us to these insights, he delights readers with his cunning images and play on words, describing an incompetent medical intern trying to draw blood as "atrociously clumsy vampire." much like the maples' marriage, this collection is immensely worthwhile, despite its shortcomings and intempestivity.
December 18, 2024
I used to think that marriages end due to significant events, profound differences, or a lack of love between two people. However, the Maples story reveals a different truth: love alone is not enough; mundane and less glamorous forces often prevail: “In life there are four forces: love, habit, time and boredom. Love and habit at short range are immensely powerful, but time, lacking a minus charge, accumulates inexorably, and with its brother boredom levels all.”
But this is not a completely sad story. John Updike’s Forward says it well: “Though the Maples stories trace the decline and fall of a marriage, they also illuminate a history in many ways happy, of growing children, and a million mundane moments shared. That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. The moral of these stories is that all blessings are mixed. Also, that people are incorrigibly themselves.”
But this is not a completely sad story. John Updike’s Forward says it well: “Though the Maples stories trace the decline and fall of a marriage, they also illuminate a history in many ways happy, of growing children, and a million mundane moments shared. That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. The moral of these stories is that all blessings are mixed. Also, that people are incorrigibly themselves.”
January 27, 2020
Firecracker short stories. The intensity, anger, lost opportunity -- it's amazing. It's depressing as hell, too, but that's what life was like for many people in the 60s and 70s, as they seemingly had every option in the world, but they were paralyzed by the sense of not making the right choice. (It's like that again today.)
These short stories chronicle the life of an unhappy married couple, the Maples. They drink to much, they say unforgivable things to each other, they cheat over and over again. It's not clear at all why they stay together even for a few years, except that they are caught in the inertia of cultural expectations and some vague sense that they once were happy together (though it seems that they never really were). It's brutal.
The most intense story for me is when Richard and Joan drive into Boston so that they can give blood to offset the use of blood by an aunt who needs major surgery. (I didn't even know that was an expectation about relatives, but it's been confirmed to me that it's accurate.) Richard is so nasty, in part because he hates Joan, and part because he's never given blood and is scared. Joan has experience with blood and isn't scared. She alternately feels affection for Richard and then hatred about his weakness and cruelty. Their dialogue in the car and then their interior dialogue while they're lying next to each other giving blood is chilling.
But so many other stories also hit hard. Over and over, secret lovers call, and the trick is up. Or liaisons are revealed in angry outbursts. It's deception and distrust, page after page. And their efforts at reconciliation are pathetic, such as the Rome story early in the collection. As you read that story, you think, okay, they will get divorced the next week. And they don't. They slog on for another decade and a half.
Some commenters have said the prose is luminous or glowing, or whatever. I don't think so. I think it's clear and concise. The dialogue is the big star, as Updike gets just the right mix of wit and anger, but without it being so perfect that you feel that real people couldn't say it in the heat of the moment.
I guess it's possible to criticize the stories as out of date. Joan doesn't work, and she's not expected to. She's not happy about it, but she doesn't fight the system in the way that women of her era started to do. Same with her reaction to Richard's endless philandering. Doing the passive-aggressive thing probably is less than many women did. But there's also an accuracy about the time that's important to remember, and it's revealed in one of the late stories when they do get a divorce. It was soon after no-fault divorces were allowed in their state -- a reminder that until very recently, getting a divorce could only be done through acrimonious allegations of harm. The lightness they feel in getting their divorce fairly amicably is, I'm sure, exactly how unreal it felt to people of that era, as they knew what the procedure would have been a year or two earlier.
Also, it's important to remember that these are privileged white people. Richard has a good job, and they live in upper middle class circumstances. Their problems are basically all of their own making. They are unhappy with each other because they are each individually unhappy. But they do not have the troubles that many people had at that time -- whether racial/ethnic, sexuality, or other things. Personally, this issue didn't diminish my respect for the stories and the intensity of the characters, but I could imagine someone saying, Hey, these guys have nothing to complain about, so why do I care that they're angry drunks?
These short stories chronicle the life of an unhappy married couple, the Maples. They drink to much, they say unforgivable things to each other, they cheat over and over again. It's not clear at all why they stay together even for a few years, except that they are caught in the inertia of cultural expectations and some vague sense that they once were happy together (though it seems that they never really were). It's brutal.
The most intense story for me is when Richard and Joan drive into Boston so that they can give blood to offset the use of blood by an aunt who needs major surgery. (I didn't even know that was an expectation about relatives, but it's been confirmed to me that it's accurate.) Richard is so nasty, in part because he hates Joan, and part because he's never given blood and is scared. Joan has experience with blood and isn't scared. She alternately feels affection for Richard and then hatred about his weakness and cruelty. Their dialogue in the car and then their interior dialogue while they're lying next to each other giving blood is chilling.
But so many other stories also hit hard. Over and over, secret lovers call, and the trick is up. Or liaisons are revealed in angry outbursts. It's deception and distrust, page after page. And their efforts at reconciliation are pathetic, such as the Rome story early in the collection. As you read that story, you think, okay, they will get divorced the next week. And they don't. They slog on for another decade and a half.
Some commenters have said the prose is luminous or glowing, or whatever. I don't think so. I think it's clear and concise. The dialogue is the big star, as Updike gets just the right mix of wit and anger, but without it being so perfect that you feel that real people couldn't say it in the heat of the moment.
I guess it's possible to criticize the stories as out of date. Joan doesn't work, and she's not expected to. She's not happy about it, but she doesn't fight the system in the way that women of her era started to do. Same with her reaction to Richard's endless philandering. Doing the passive-aggressive thing probably is less than many women did. But there's also an accuracy about the time that's important to remember, and it's revealed in one of the late stories when they do get a divorce. It was soon after no-fault divorces were allowed in their state -- a reminder that until very recently, getting a divorce could only be done through acrimonious allegations of harm. The lightness they feel in getting their divorce fairly amicably is, I'm sure, exactly how unreal it felt to people of that era, as they knew what the procedure would have been a year or two earlier.
Also, it's important to remember that these are privileged white people. Richard has a good job, and they live in upper middle class circumstances. Their problems are basically all of their own making. They are unhappy with each other because they are each individually unhappy. But they do not have the troubles that many people had at that time -- whether racial/ethnic, sexuality, or other things. Personally, this issue didn't diminish my respect for the stories and the intensity of the characters, but I could imagine someone saying, Hey, these guys have nothing to complain about, so why do I care that they're angry drunks?
November 13, 2016
The writing was unbearably slow and unnecessary in a few parts of the book. The two stories that really stood out were Grandparenting, which I think is the absolute best short story in the book and Your Lover Just Called, which is just this bear animosity and almost hatred that both of them emit towards each other.
The last story Grandparenting also had two of these lines that are so so quotable:
Speaking of his firstborn, Judith:
And the last line in the book, talking of his newborn grandson:
The last story Grandparenting also had two of these lines that are so so quotable:
Speaking of his firstborn, Judith:
Judith had been born in England, ... She was the first baby he had ever held; he had thought it would be a precarious experience, shot through with fear of dropping something so precious and fragile, but no, in even the smallest infant there was an adhesive force, a something that actively fit your arms and hands, banishing the fear. ... We are in this together, Dad, the baby's body had assured him, and we'll both get through it.
And the last line in the book, talking of his newborn grandson:
And the child's miniature body did adhere to his chest and arms, though more weakly than the infants he had presumed to call his own. Nobody belongs to us, except in memory
December 25, 2018
I found these stories well written but underwhelming. I couldn't stand either Richard or Joan, whose serial infidelities, which they would actually discuss with one another as though they were no big deal, were hard for me to understand. It also felt incestuous after a while since they kept husband and wife swapping within the same small circle of friends. Maybe people really acted this way, but it made me very unsympathetic to both main characters. (We never get into Joan's head, so I'm not sure what she was thinking.) "Marching Through Boston" made me cringe when Richard mimicked black people in a racist and stereotyping manner. I liked the last story quite a bit. I read it before the others and since you don't know that the Maples were each unfaithful to one another throughout their marriage, it just seems that their feelings for one another were never deep enough or passionate enough, though they get along well. I know that Updike liked to write about the everyday lives of ordinary people, but it seems to me that he wasted a lot of talent and words on characters who weren't worth his--or my--time.
November 24, 2014
More hopeful than heartbreaking, Updike's characters do not teach or even warn us, but they do seem to breathe. I didn't like the Maples at first, especially the Mister, but as all the pieces fall (both into place and apart), their "human-ness" sort of conquered me.
November 17, 2018
Gave up. Unbearable tedium co.pared to the Bech books.
July 18, 2023
As the title suggest, this volume collects all of Updike’s Maples stories into a single volume, including several that were never previously collected. Despite having already read most of these I reread them here for three reasons: one being that they’ve consistently been among Updike’s best work; two being I noticed the volume had an Audible audiobook version whereas before I’d read them without an audiobook; and three because I thought it would be worthwhile to read them all together as a whole rather than piecemeal as separate-though-related short stories. I definitely made the right choice as I thoroughly enjoyed my time with these stories. They are Updike at his most elegant, graceful, funny, ambivalent, and understatedly poignant. They feel like impressionistic snapshots, little slices and scenes from a married couple’s life that touches on everything from their early love and lustful passions to their relationships with the children to their affairs and eventual divorce to life after divorce when their own children are having children. I love how easily Updike slips between moods and modes, from the prosaically everyday to the poetically lyrical, finding these pockets of feeling and emotion to fit with the subtly shifting views of a relationship. Both Richard and Joan themselves feel prosaically real; neither are given complex personalities, but they’re given enough that we read them as all-too human.
There are so many quietly touching, memorable moments throughout these stories that I could easily balloon this into a 2k+ word review mentioning them all. Rather than do that I will simply single out two of my favorites. One comes from the story Plumbing in which The Maples are moving, and I just loved Updike’s description of looking back on the empty house and seeing the ghosts of a life lived there while the space remains indifferent to our memories of presence and our absence: “The old house, the house we left, a mile away, seems relieved to be rid of our furniture. The rooms where we lived, where we staged our meals and ceremonies and self-dramatizations and where some of us went from infancy to adolescence – rooms and stairways so imbued with our daily motions that their irregularities were bred into our bones and could be traversed in the dark – do not seem to mourn, as I’d imagined they would. The house exults in its sudden size, in the reach of its empty corners. Floorboards long muffled by carpets shine as if freshly varnished. Sun pours unobstructed through the curtainless windows. The house is young again. It, too, had a self, a life, which for a time was eclipsed by our lives; now, before its new owners come to burden it, it is free. Now only moonlight makes the floor creak. When, some mornings, I return, to retrieve a few final oddments – andirons, picture frames – the space of the house greets me with virginal impudence. Opening the front door is like opening the door to the cat who comes in with the morning milk, who mews in passing on his way to the beds still warm with our night’s sleep, his routine so tenuously attached to ours, by a single mew and a shared roof. Nature is tougher than ecologists admit. Our house forgot us in a day.”
I’ll also mention this lovely moment from the beginning of Twin Beds in Rome, which does more than perhaps any other passage in this collection to summarize The Maples’s relationship: “THE MAPLES HAD talked and thought about separation so long it seemed it would never come. For their conversations, increasingly ambivalent and ruthless as accusation, retraction, blow, and caress alternated and cancelled, had the final effect of knitting them ever tighter together in a painful, helpless, degrading intimacy. And their lovemaking, like a perversely healthy child whose growth defies every deficiency of nutrition, continued; when their tongues at last fell silent, their bodies collapsed together as two mute armies might gratefully mingle, released from the absurd hostilities decreed by two mad kings. Bleeding, mangled, reverently laid in its tomb a dozen times, their marriage could not die. Burning to leave one another, they left, out of marital habit, together.”
One thing I think can be gleaned from both these passages is the poise with which Updike presents opposites in conflict: the pregnant memory of a life lived by those who lived in the place Vs the virginal emptiness and indifference of the place itself; or the tension between the intellectual desire for separation Vs the physical inevitability of togetherness. Especially in the latter, that final sentence is a small masterpiece of balance and subversion of expectation: “they left” but did so “together,” essentially creating a synthesis out of the thesis and antithesis of wanting to leave and stay with each other, they instead leave together. It’s clever, yes, but it also cuts to the heart these stories full of emotional ambivalences that are often alleviated by humor. Overall, this collection along with the Rabbit novels are undoubtedly Updike at his best; it just makes me wonder all the more why he had so many mis-steps elsewhere.
There are so many quietly touching, memorable moments throughout these stories that I could easily balloon this into a 2k+ word review mentioning them all. Rather than do that I will simply single out two of my favorites. One comes from the story Plumbing in which The Maples are moving, and I just loved Updike’s description of looking back on the empty house and seeing the ghosts of a life lived there while the space remains indifferent to our memories of presence and our absence: “The old house, the house we left, a mile away, seems relieved to be rid of our furniture. The rooms where we lived, where we staged our meals and ceremonies and self-dramatizations and where some of us went from infancy to adolescence – rooms and stairways so imbued with our daily motions that their irregularities were bred into our bones and could be traversed in the dark – do not seem to mourn, as I’d imagined they would. The house exults in its sudden size, in the reach of its empty corners. Floorboards long muffled by carpets shine as if freshly varnished. Sun pours unobstructed through the curtainless windows. The house is young again. It, too, had a self, a life, which for a time was eclipsed by our lives; now, before its new owners come to burden it, it is free. Now only moonlight makes the floor creak. When, some mornings, I return, to retrieve a few final oddments – andirons, picture frames – the space of the house greets me with virginal impudence. Opening the front door is like opening the door to the cat who comes in with the morning milk, who mews in passing on his way to the beds still warm with our night’s sleep, his routine so tenuously attached to ours, by a single mew and a shared roof. Nature is tougher than ecologists admit. Our house forgot us in a day.”
I’ll also mention this lovely moment from the beginning of Twin Beds in Rome, which does more than perhaps any other passage in this collection to summarize The Maples’s relationship: “THE MAPLES HAD talked and thought about separation so long it seemed it would never come. For their conversations, increasingly ambivalent and ruthless as accusation, retraction, blow, and caress alternated and cancelled, had the final effect of knitting them ever tighter together in a painful, helpless, degrading intimacy. And their lovemaking, like a perversely healthy child whose growth defies every deficiency of nutrition, continued; when their tongues at last fell silent, their bodies collapsed together as two mute armies might gratefully mingle, released from the absurd hostilities decreed by two mad kings. Bleeding, mangled, reverently laid in its tomb a dozen times, their marriage could not die. Burning to leave one another, they left, out of marital habit, together.”
One thing I think can be gleaned from both these passages is the poise with which Updike presents opposites in conflict: the pregnant memory of a life lived by those who lived in the place Vs the virginal emptiness and indifference of the place itself; or the tension between the intellectual desire for separation Vs the physical inevitability of togetherness. Especially in the latter, that final sentence is a small masterpiece of balance and subversion of expectation: “they left” but did so “together,” essentially creating a synthesis out of the thesis and antithesis of wanting to leave and stay with each other, they instead leave together. It’s clever, yes, but it also cuts to the heart these stories full of emotional ambivalences that are often alleviated by humor. Overall, this collection along with the Rabbit novels are undoubtedly Updike at his best; it just makes me wonder all the more why he had so many mis-steps elsewhere.
August 23, 2023
I read this immediately after reading Of the Farm and not long after rereading Rabbit, Run. I liked Of the Farm much better because Updike's strength is inner dialogue/emotionality and there is much more fertile soil for that in Of the Farm because it involves a poignant time in someone's life with their mother dying and a new relationship and someone else's almost grown kid, and these elements are left to brew together for an extended period with not much to do on what was essentially a vacation.
Here, most of the stories are not just short but small in terms of their import. Even where it touches on deeper topics like infidelity and divorce, those issues are dealt with in a way that seems empty of any meaning. The Maples cheat on each other serially for years and stay together, they stop having sex but stay together, and then they get divorced for no apparent reason. The main problem I have is that other than the typical Updike man's unending fascination with and quasi-religious worship of all things feminine, there appears no indication whatsoever throughout this anthology of what made the relationship worth saving in the first place. In the first stories when the Maples were young, there is already an established mood of drudgery and resentment. Perhaps if the story began in the very early days of infatuation and obsession and the telling felt real enough, I could have understood why both were holding on so tightly to the idea of being together, but that was missing here. The same would be accomplished if there was an inner dialogue focusing on their duty to honor their vows, but that was completely missing as well. None of his characters take religion or duty very seriously. Updike is effective when his characters discuss their work, but that is largely missing here to focus instead on the Maples' ugly personal lives. There is a rather poignant section where he is about to leave the family home but decides that he has a duty to fix a doorlock before he goes, and he thinks of it as a sort of transactional last chore needed to be done to earn his right to abandon his marriage. Its an excellent metaphor for the sort of half-assed casual morality that certain people indulge in to make life make a little more sense.
If these stories work at all, they work as an unintentional satire of the emptiness of the American way of life and culture. Frankly I think it does work on that level because Updike is, if nothing else, a faithful reporter of the unabashedly selfish, vain and entitled inner life of the average post-war American. Rabbit, Run, works so well as a work of art because it is a story of a selfish, amoral young adult man in a crisis caused by his selfishness and amorality. Ultimately his seflishness in abandoning his hapless alcoholic wife indirectly murders his own child. Rabbit is just as selfish as Richard Maple, and ultimately makes the decision to stay with his wife for selfish reasons (mainly social pressure), but despite the fact that Rabbit never really changes there is a powerful thread of guilt running through it, a feeling that he knows that he should rise above his nature even though he can't or won't. The Maples by contrast don't know they're lost and seemingly don't feel any guilt. They don't even feel the usual anger at each other's infidelities, just relief at no longer having to keep the secret once they've admitted to their affairs. Neither do they even touch on the idea of declaring an "open marriage" or ask themselves or discuss with each other whether monogamy means anything to them. One wonders why they even talk about it or anything for that matter. Maybe that's the lesson here, that they never had the equipment or desire for real connection to begin with, but if so I don't see how that justifies so many stories over so many years.
One final note: there is a story about Richard's thoughts about the emerging sexuality of his oldest daughter and it is mentioned repeatedly that the daughter french kisses her mom whenever a normal child would give their mom a peck. What the actual fuck? Was that a thing in the fucking 50s or 60s or whenever this was? It's treated as matter of fact, and his only reaction to it is that he's jealous that he just gets a closed-mouth kiss. Honestly this is the biggest evidence to me that the whole thing is a satire. Surely Updike himself doesn't think this is normal right? And if not, then he is attributing to this family that they think it's normal. Frankly, though, I don't think any of it, including this section, was an intentional satire. I think Updike was just a perv and got off on that idea. Was this the one published in Playboy I wonder? Maybe that explains it.
Here, most of the stories are not just short but small in terms of their import. Even where it touches on deeper topics like infidelity and divorce, those issues are dealt with in a way that seems empty of any meaning. The Maples cheat on each other serially for years and stay together, they stop having sex but stay together, and then they get divorced for no apparent reason. The main problem I have is that other than the typical Updike man's unending fascination with and quasi-religious worship of all things feminine, there appears no indication whatsoever throughout this anthology of what made the relationship worth saving in the first place. In the first stories when the Maples were young, there is already an established mood of drudgery and resentment. Perhaps if the story began in the very early days of infatuation and obsession and the telling felt real enough, I could have understood why both were holding on so tightly to the idea of being together, but that was missing here. The same would be accomplished if there was an inner dialogue focusing on their duty to honor their vows, but that was completely missing as well. None of his characters take religion or duty very seriously. Updike is effective when his characters discuss their work, but that is largely missing here to focus instead on the Maples' ugly personal lives. There is a rather poignant section where he is about to leave the family home but decides that he has a duty to fix a doorlock before he goes, and he thinks of it as a sort of transactional last chore needed to be done to earn his right to abandon his marriage. Its an excellent metaphor for the sort of half-assed casual morality that certain people indulge in to make life make a little more sense.
If these stories work at all, they work as an unintentional satire of the emptiness of the American way of life and culture. Frankly I think it does work on that level because Updike is, if nothing else, a faithful reporter of the unabashedly selfish, vain and entitled inner life of the average post-war American. Rabbit, Run, works so well as a work of art because it is a story of a selfish, amoral young adult man in a crisis caused by his selfishness and amorality. Ultimately his seflishness in abandoning his hapless alcoholic wife indirectly murders his own child. Rabbit is just as selfish as Richard Maple, and ultimately makes the decision to stay with his wife for selfish reasons (mainly social pressure), but despite the fact that Rabbit never really changes there is a powerful thread of guilt running through it, a feeling that he knows that he should rise above his nature even though he can't or won't. The Maples by contrast don't know they're lost and seemingly don't feel any guilt. They don't even feel the usual anger at each other's infidelities, just relief at no longer having to keep the secret once they've admitted to their affairs. Neither do they even touch on the idea of declaring an "open marriage" or ask themselves or discuss with each other whether monogamy means anything to them. One wonders why they even talk about it or anything for that matter. Maybe that's the lesson here, that they never had the equipment or desire for real connection to begin with, but if so I don't see how that justifies so many stories over so many years.
One final note: there is a story about Richard's thoughts about the emerging sexuality of his oldest daughter and it is mentioned repeatedly that the daughter french kisses her mom whenever a normal child would give their mom a peck. What the actual fuck? Was that a thing in the fucking 50s or 60s or whenever this was? It's treated as matter of fact, and his only reaction to it is that he's jealous that he just gets a closed-mouth kiss. Honestly this is the biggest evidence to me that the whole thing is a satire. Surely Updike himself doesn't think this is normal right? And if not, then he is attributing to this family that they think it's normal. Frankly, though, I don't think any of it, including this section, was an intentional satire. I think Updike was just a perv and got off on that idea. Was this the one published in Playboy I wonder? Maybe that explains it.
July 27, 2024
This is my second reading of this but the first was so long ago this may have well been the first.
I'm not sure if this book lead me to become a divorce lawyer( I don't think so) or for that matter to get divorced( definitely not) but the Maples, stories 60 to 70 years after being written hold up beautifully as an ode to a failed suburban marriage. It's a rarity that stories written over a long time(over 20 years) can be woven together , almost but not quite as a novel. But this is Updike at his best , at least at his short fiction best. At times this is brutal and at times tender, but it rings with some truth. God I miss his writing. He isn't for everyone. I believe I was once accused of being a misogynist for making him among my favorites.
Maybe true but I hope not.
I'm not sure if this book lead me to become a divorce lawyer( I don't think so) or for that matter to get divorced( definitely not) but the Maples, stories 60 to 70 years after being written hold up beautifully as an ode to a failed suburban marriage. It's a rarity that stories written over a long time(over 20 years) can be woven together , almost but not quite as a novel. But this is Updike at his best , at least at his short fiction best. At times this is brutal and at times tender, but it rings with some truth. God I miss his writing. He isn't for everyone. I believe I was once accused of being a misogynist for making him among my favorites.
Maybe true but I hope not.
January 23, 2025
I’ve been a John Updike reader for ages, perhaps ever since I first read the Rabbit series. My favourite has always been ‘Couples’ which more than other of his books deals with man-woman relationships. I had never read any short stories of him, until the title of this book (Too Far to Go) was mentioned in some article I recently read in my favourite Belgian magazine.
What? An Updike collection of short stories I had never heard of? And the author died in 2009, so meanwhile more than 15 years ago, and no-one ever mentions his name any more! I was lucky to find this collection and read it, one short story at a time, as a bedside book.
Brilliant, such beautiful (and lyrical) words, sentences and descriptions, so sad the story of a marriage in decline.
This is my ‘new’ Updike favourite!
What? An Updike collection of short stories I had never heard of? And the author died in 2009, so meanwhile more than 15 years ago, and no-one ever mentions his name any more! I was lucky to find this collection and read it, one short story at a time, as a bedside book.
Brilliant, such beautiful (and lyrical) words, sentences and descriptions, so sad the story of a marriage in decline.
This is my ‘new’ Updike favourite!
August 29, 2025
Poignant.
Updikes really captures what life and relationships can be like. Snapshots of stories. Language between couples. True love that transcends relationships. People being themselves while also changing.
This book, which is a collection of stories, reads so so easily. I am sad that it is over but, as Updike said, “if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.”
I read in another review that “Updike can describe things that I never knew were possible to describe”. This reviewer captures succinctly why Updike jumped to one of my favorite authors of all time. I love his balance of prose, his understanding of human characters, and his ability to capture the true meaning of seemingly mundane activity or objects. Can’t wait to read more.
Updikes really captures what life and relationships can be like. Snapshots of stories. Language between couples. True love that transcends relationships. People being themselves while also changing.
This book, which is a collection of stories, reads so so easily. I am sad that it is over but, as Updike said, “if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.”
I read in another review that “Updike can describe things that I never knew were possible to describe”. This reviewer captures succinctly why Updike jumped to one of my favorite authors of all time. I love his balance of prose, his understanding of human characters, and his ability to capture the true meaning of seemingly mundane activity or objects. Can’t wait to read more.
May 1, 2024
Didn't expect to like this as much as I do. Don't get me wrong: there are portions that are cringe-worthy, not only because they are so stuck in a particular time, but because they feel like they arise from a particular insulated and self-absorbed mind-set. And still, there are other portions that are transcendent in capturing a gesture, an expression, a hard-to-pin-down feeling (and yet Updike pins it as well as anyone could). The subtleties and clumsiness of how we communicate with one another and the wonder that we are able to communicate in spite of our clumsiness...I will seek out the Maples story that is not included here.
Read
March 27, 2024I enjoyed Updike’s interlinked collection “Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories” when I read it in the 1970s, and revisiting it with Mikita has been fun. The individual tales are smartly crafted, and they gain in effectiveness from their connections and positions in the book as a whole. Updike is certainly one of the very best chroniclers of middle-class American life. This isn’t one of his major works, but it’s far from negligible.
October 26, 2024
I loved this author, and his great literary achievements tower over most 20th century writers. I very much enjoyed this account of a couple, who deeply love each other and their four children, but slowly see their marriage unwind. I'm making a project of rereading Updike, and discovering some works I missed along the way.
December 18, 2025
For me, this is the perfect novel. The prose is immaculate and clever. The story, sadly, is all too realistic and common. Yet Updike in his genius, somehow makes the reader fall in love with the messiness of marriage in all it's hidden ways that only the two married understand.
Want to read
September 27, 2024Ben ongeveer op de helft, op blz 107. Weet niet waarom ik gestopt was, vond het aardig.
January 3, 2025
“Oh but they were close”
Read
December 7, 2023This is a series of stories, all published more or less separately, not in order over the course of two decades. The stories detail a marriage that comes together, falls apart, and the family that it left behind.
Some specific reviews.
"Snowing in Greenwich Village" This is the first of the “Maples” stories, about a married couple who goes through the throes of falling in love, getting married, having children, slowly falling out of love, and then eventually, painfully having a divorce. The Maples are one of the several John Updike narratives that get revisited from time to time. The Rabbit books, the Bech books, and the Maples stories are the main three, but a few others here and there. It feels clear, but really only John Updike knows, that the Maples probably share a lot with Updike, in ways that it often feels like Harry Angstron (Rabbit) does not. They met in college, they are wasp-y, and they have that kind of young love that so many early novels and stories used to be like, when people got married so much younger than they do now, and have a handful of kids before their brains are even fully formed and they figure some things about themselves. In this story, they are young and in love, but also, the seeds are there for the eventual dissolution of their marriage. They are kind of bored with sleeping with each other, and other people seem as if not more interesting than each other.
Marching Through Boston - In this middle period Maples story, we see Richard partly at his worst. The family is going to a march on Boston led by the SLC and Martin Luther King Jr. Richard is resentful because he’s not really all that liberal but more so because his wife has just returned from a trip South where she already attended several marches there. In the war between who is actually a good person, this challenges him. His bad behavior centers mostly around playing at minstrel show imitations and antagonizing his wife and their daughter.
The Taste of Metal - Another Maple, and in this one we get to see thing fall apart in full swing and right before our eyes. They are leaving a party, one rife with subtexts and hidden meanings and Richard decides to drive, fairly drunk, against sense. Joan is in the passenger seat eyeing the young woman they’re driving home, knowing that whether she will begin an affair with Richard will have to at least be addressed.
Your Lover Just Called - Back to the Maples, in the age of resentment, as they play against each other in part playful, part intense antagonism. Anytime a phone rings, the other jokingly and not so jokingly accuses the other of receiving a call from their “lover” a real or imagined adversarial being in each other’s lives. This bleeds out from the phonecalls into those other areas of their lives. This is that space where two people are only not beginning to realize they should be looking at divorce, for everyone’s sakes.
Eros Rampant - This is the sort of meatiest of the Maples stories, if for you the meat means the rundown of infidelity and the kinds of neighborhood debauchery you want to see in an incisive Updike story or an Updike-like story. This is also a rundown of the neighbors too to boot.
Sublimating - This is a story where the Maples are simply resigned now, if not actually actively looking to make the changes they know they will need to. It’s a calm of a story.
Twin Beds in Rome - A late Maples story in which the couple is moving closer to a divorce and have taken a trip to Rome that is meant to be a kind of “kill or cure” moment for them. The stress and tension between them, along with whatever love there was and is, is framed in the story by a hotel room with two twin beds instead of a double.
Separating - The Maples are giving a trial separation a go, at least for the summer to see how it feels. Unfortunately that means telling each of their children and trying to sort through the gamut of reactions this causes.
Here Come the Maples - One of the later Maples stories, ostensibly about Richard going to the city clerk’s office to file the divorce papers and get the marriage license for the process, but also about the actual concept of a “no-fault” divorce. We also learn that among everything, they married at 21, which is insane.
Some specific reviews.
"Snowing in Greenwich Village" This is the first of the “Maples” stories, about a married couple who goes through the throes of falling in love, getting married, having children, slowly falling out of love, and then eventually, painfully having a divorce. The Maples are one of the several John Updike narratives that get revisited from time to time. The Rabbit books, the Bech books, and the Maples stories are the main three, but a few others here and there. It feels clear, but really only John Updike knows, that the Maples probably share a lot with Updike, in ways that it often feels like Harry Angstron (Rabbit) does not. They met in college, they are wasp-y, and they have that kind of young love that so many early novels and stories used to be like, when people got married so much younger than they do now, and have a handful of kids before their brains are even fully formed and they figure some things about themselves. In this story, they are young and in love, but also, the seeds are there for the eventual dissolution of their marriage. They are kind of bored with sleeping with each other, and other people seem as if not more interesting than each other.
Marching Through Boston - In this middle period Maples story, we see Richard partly at his worst. The family is going to a march on Boston led by the SLC and Martin Luther King Jr. Richard is resentful because he’s not really all that liberal but more so because his wife has just returned from a trip South where she already attended several marches there. In the war between who is actually a good person, this challenges him. His bad behavior centers mostly around playing at minstrel show imitations and antagonizing his wife and their daughter.
The Taste of Metal - Another Maple, and in this one we get to see thing fall apart in full swing and right before our eyes. They are leaving a party, one rife with subtexts and hidden meanings and Richard decides to drive, fairly drunk, against sense. Joan is in the passenger seat eyeing the young woman they’re driving home, knowing that whether she will begin an affair with Richard will have to at least be addressed.
Your Lover Just Called - Back to the Maples, in the age of resentment, as they play against each other in part playful, part intense antagonism. Anytime a phone rings, the other jokingly and not so jokingly accuses the other of receiving a call from their “lover” a real or imagined adversarial being in each other’s lives. This bleeds out from the phonecalls into those other areas of their lives. This is that space where two people are only not beginning to realize they should be looking at divorce, for everyone’s sakes.
Eros Rampant - This is the sort of meatiest of the Maples stories, if for you the meat means the rundown of infidelity and the kinds of neighborhood debauchery you want to see in an incisive Updike story or an Updike-like story. This is also a rundown of the neighbors too to boot.
Sublimating - This is a story where the Maples are simply resigned now, if not actually actively looking to make the changes they know they will need to. It’s a calm of a story.
Twin Beds in Rome - A late Maples story in which the couple is moving closer to a divorce and have taken a trip to Rome that is meant to be a kind of “kill or cure” moment for them. The stress and tension between them, along with whatever love there was and is, is framed in the story by a hotel room with two twin beds instead of a double.
Separating - The Maples are giving a trial separation a go, at least for the summer to see how it feels. Unfortunately that means telling each of their children and trying to sort through the gamut of reactions this causes.
Here Come the Maples - One of the later Maples stories, ostensibly about Richard going to the city clerk’s office to file the divorce papers and get the marriage license for the process, but also about the actual concept of a “no-fault” divorce. We also learn that among everything, they married at 21, which is insane.
February 22, 2013
I enjoyed this book. I think it was well-crafted, and I do like the linked story collection, which I have been trying to do myself in the recent months. That said, I must admit that I was glad to see the book come to an end. It wasn't as if I was dragging myself through the book. It's just that I needed a break from Dick and Joan after a while. As you know, if you read that Maples stories, then you understand that they take place over the course of this couple's marriage. It is a quite ingenious idea, which leaves the reader wanting more after each story, at least, for the most part. There are some that are not quite as necessary or interesting as the rest, but I suppose that is what married life can be like at times.
Nonetheless, it was interesting that all the stories were from Dick's perspective, and even though Joan has a well-developed character and the reader feels as though he or she knows Joan is as a person and a part of the marriage and family, it would still be nice to get more inside Joan's head. I don't think this is a major critique, but I also don't think it is a minor faux pas. I have to wonder if Updike was not able to put himself in Joan's position as well as he was able to put himself in Dick's position, since it is much easier for man to write from a male perspective than from a female perspective. Regardless, I would've liked to have seen more of that kind of give-and-take in the stories, in terms of finding out what Joan believes about Richard as much as we find what Richard thinks about Joan.
After all the critique, I find myself very much enjoying the stories from a collected perspective. This easily could have been a novel with each story acting is in chapter. That, however, in my opinion, would have lessened the narrative, which I think benefited more from the stretching of the narrative arc over the course of years from story to story as opposed to what it would have had to have been from chapter to chapter. I'm anxious to read more of Updike's work. I think he has a great command of the English language, and I think he has more to say about relationships and the human condition in general.
Nonetheless, it was interesting that all the stories were from Dick's perspective, and even though Joan has a well-developed character and the reader feels as though he or she knows Joan is as a person and a part of the marriage and family, it would still be nice to get more inside Joan's head. I don't think this is a major critique, but I also don't think it is a minor faux pas. I have to wonder if Updike was not able to put himself in Joan's position as well as he was able to put himself in Dick's position, since it is much easier for man to write from a male perspective than from a female perspective. Regardless, I would've liked to have seen more of that kind of give-and-take in the stories, in terms of finding out what Joan believes about Richard as much as we find what Richard thinks about Joan.
After all the critique, I find myself very much enjoying the stories from a collected perspective. This easily could have been a novel with each story acting is in chapter. That, however, in my opinion, would have lessened the narrative, which I think benefited more from the stretching of the narrative arc over the course of years from story to story as opposed to what it would have had to have been from chapter to chapter. I'm anxious to read more of Updike's work. I think he has a great command of the English language, and I think he has more to say about relationships and the human condition in general.
January 2, 2015
This seems to be one of Updike's most highly regarded and beloved works, which is a little surprising. Here is an author who published numerous novels, several large volumes of essays and criticism, and a number of collections of short stories and poems - and this comparatively small group of stories about a foolish yet fascinating couple and their troubled relationship, is considered one of the best things he did. And judging from the author's foreword, one gets the feeling they were a favored creation.
The stories are often snapshots, moments and scenes from Richard and Joan Maples's time together, many of them not pivotal. But taken together, they create a collage-like portrait of a complex relationship, one that touches on others' lives as well - lovers and children, especially. It is a revealing picture of a time and place too, the 1960s and 1970s, featuring the educated middle class of the northeast USA, many of whose marriages were undergoing similar storms and upheavals. Even though I was a part of that milieu myself, I still had trouble really making sense of the Maples, both of whom are moody, adulterous, and prone to making weirdly witty remarks to each other. The reader does feel for them - Richard and Joan seem to love each other, but for some hard-to-fathom reason are unable to keep things together. The proceedings are sometimes touching, and at other times funny - but the humor is a bittersweet and wry Updikean humor, something that not every reader would adore.
It was very enjoyable to spend a little time reading the author's lush, evocative, and occasionally too clever prose, especially during a period when one rarely encounters writing like this in recently published works. Here was an artist of the written word, one who obviously relished using language. One can forgive his occasional ostentations when the love (and the gift) is so much in evidence.
The stories are often snapshots, moments and scenes from Richard and Joan Maples's time together, many of them not pivotal. But taken together, they create a collage-like portrait of a complex relationship, one that touches on others' lives as well - lovers and children, especially. It is a revealing picture of a time and place too, the 1960s and 1970s, featuring the educated middle class of the northeast USA, many of whose marriages were undergoing similar storms and upheavals. Even though I was a part of that milieu myself, I still had trouble really making sense of the Maples, both of whom are moody, adulterous, and prone to making weirdly witty remarks to each other. The reader does feel for them - Richard and Joan seem to love each other, but for some hard-to-fathom reason are unable to keep things together. The proceedings are sometimes touching, and at other times funny - but the humor is a bittersweet and wry Updikean humor, something that not every reader would adore.
It was very enjoyable to spend a little time reading the author's lush, evocative, and occasionally too clever prose, especially during a period when one rarely encounters writing like this in recently published works. Here was an artist of the written word, one who obviously relished using language. One can forgive his occasional ostentations when the love (and the gift) is so much in evidence.
August 15, 2016
On a long plane ride back from the west coast today, I found this on my Kindle and started rereading it. I had forgotten how much I liked this collection of stories, which follows the marriage, from the beginning to its inevitable end, of Richard and Joan Maple. I read the first story tonight, in which the Maples entertain a female neighbor. Richard walks her home, and his brief moments in her apartment provide a foreshadowing of the infidelities that will follow and ultimately bring his marriage to an end. There's a certain sadness to this short story, but then, there's a sadness to the entire book, which essentially describes the wreckage of a family.
Although it's been a while since I've read it, I can still remember how much I enjoyed the last story, which focuses on their divorce hearing. Along the way, Richard finds a booklet on quantum physics and reads it. I'm paraphrasing, but as he went through, he found himself "rooting for the weak force." While I'm not particularly partial to the weak force, i just thought it was an interesting thought, and radioactive decay is probably as good an allegory as any for the slow destruction of the Maples' marriage.
It goes without saying that the prose in this series of stories is just about perfect. We're talking John Updike, after all.
Although it's been a while since I've read it, I can still remember how much I enjoyed the last story, which focuses on their divorce hearing. Along the way, Richard finds a booklet on quantum physics and reads it. I'm paraphrasing, but as he went through, he found himself "rooting for the weak force." While I'm not particularly partial to the weak force, i just thought it was an interesting thought, and radioactive decay is probably as good an allegory as any for the slow destruction of the Maples' marriage.
It goes without saying that the prose in this series of stories is just about perfect. We're talking John Updike, after all.
keep-in-mind
May 8, 2011Too Far to Go (1979 ? 1980) by John Updike
Added 5/3/11. Keep in mind.
New York Times Best Books of the Year (1979)
National Book Award finalist (Fiction 1980)
================================
I might watch the TV adaptation:
"Too Far to Go" (1979-TV)
http://movies.netflix.com/Movie/Too_F...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080032/
"The story of a 20-year marriage, from the days preceding the wedding, up to the time of the divorce that ended it."
NOTE: "In August 2009, Everyman's Library published The Maples Stories, a new edition of Too Far to Go, including the final Maples story "Grandparenting".
FROM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Far_...
Added 5/3/11. Keep in mind.
New York Times Best Books of the Year (1979)
National Book Award finalist (Fiction 1980)
================================
I might watch the TV adaptation:
"Too Far to Go" (1979-TV)
http://movies.netflix.com/Movie/Too_F...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080032/
"The story of a 20-year marriage, from the days preceding the wedding, up to the time of the divorce that ended it."
NOTE: "In August 2009, Everyman's Library published The Maples Stories, a new edition of Too Far to Go, including the final Maples story "Grandparenting".
FROM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Far_...
May 20, 2013
Since this author's death, I've been savouring everything I have yet to read from him. Updike has a unique way with words and gives his readers a mirror into the male soul. This novel, made up of stories strung together, maps the highs and lows of modern divorce. The inconsistencies and hypocrisy of marital "crash and burn" are illustrated with poignant moments of human strength and weakness. And these moments all seem to leave a taste in one's mouth. Whether you like it or not might depend on your taste, but this work of literature has a note of every flavour and finish. Cheers. May not be as good as the Rabbit series, but when it makes me read in 15 page savoured tastes, I know I'm reading another of Updike's finite novels.
September 1, 2018
This is the first time I've read the Maples stories in chronological order, all in one book. I still find the first in the series, "Snowing in Greenwich Village," to be the most intriguing, in part because it hints at the fissures already in place in the young marriage of Richard and Joan Maple. And because it leaves so much unsaid. Sometimes I find Updike says too much. If you've read Adam Begley's excellent biography of Updike, you'll know that many of these stories come almost verbatim from Updike's own crumbling first marriage. All are well-written, typically Updike, oddly both honest and cagey at the same time.
May 25, 2022
This is definitely on the four to five star range, probably closer to four than five so we’ll go with that. A collection of stories written over the course of a little more than two decades but dealing with the same characters throughout so it really reads like a novel. A great portrait both of a marriage and American society during the period, the mid 50s through the 70s. I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to reveal that they end up divorcing, as Updike gives it away in the second line of his introduction to the book. In the end you can understand why things went that way but you can’t really imagine them without each other.
November 1, 2013
Brilliant, bitter stories about a marriage that should never have stayed together. The Maples are, neither one of them, people I'd care to know. At first the wife seems fine, and is just the patient victim of her husband's sourness and infidelities. Eventually we see that she's no angel. They go at each other hammer and tongs, often with brutal humor, but always with brutality. I had to take the stories just one or two at a time to let my brain heal, but all together they are a masterful set of blocks that build to a house that can only crumble.
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