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Collected Early Stories
Shillington, Pennsylvania, the birthplace of John Updike, has become through the gift of his fiction the birthright of every American reader, as much a part of our cultural geography as Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, or Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi. Called “Olinger” in many of the stories collected here, it is the quintessential American small town, “a square mile of middle-class homes physically distinguished by a bend in the central avenue that compels some side streets to deviate from the grid pattern.” Its homely 1940s particulars—the public schools, the luncheonette, the ice-plant fairgrounds, the Lutheran church—provided Updike with his first, authentic taste of life. It yielded a trove of ordinary American experience that, when transmuted into art, proved extraordinary—one of the great treasures of postwar American literature.
“To transcribe middleness with all its grits, bumps, and anonymities, in its fullness of satisfaction and mystery”—that was Updike’s mission from the start. The familial intimacy and boyhood awakenings evoked in the Olinger stories—“Pigeon Feathers,” “Flight,” “A Sense of Shelter,” “The Happiest I’ve Been”—were but part of that mission. The earliest story here, “Ace in the Hole,” written when Updike was a Harvard senior, tells of a former high school athlete’s uneasy adjustment to the demands of adult life. Others dramatize a young couple’s first brush with adultery, an expatriate family’s complicated feelings for their French bébé-sitter, and the pride of a New England deacon in his seldom-used yet sturdy church building, “this ancient thing” that, despite punishment by the elements and neglect by the community it was built to serve, “will not quite die.” All capture the shared passions, doubts, and longings of Updike’s generation, and, in his famous phrase, “give the mundane its beautiful due.”
Of the 102 stories gathered here, eighty first appeared in The New Yorker. Most were revised by the author for his collections The Same Door (1959), Pigeon Feathers (1962), The Music School (1966), Museums and Women (1972), Problems (1979), and The Early Stories (2003). All were written from 1953 to 1975, when Updike was in his twenties, thirties, and early forties, and are arranged here, for the first time, in the order in which they were completed.
Each is offered in its latest, definitive text, and some incorporate posthumous corrections found in Updike’s personal copies of his books.
“To transcribe middleness with all its grits, bumps, and anonymities, in its fullness of satisfaction and mystery”—that was Updike’s mission from the start. The familial intimacy and boyhood awakenings evoked in the Olinger stories—“Pigeon Feathers,” “Flight,” “A Sense of Shelter,” “The Happiest I’ve Been”—were but part of that mission. The earliest story here, “Ace in the Hole,” written when Updike was a Harvard senior, tells of a former high school athlete’s uneasy adjustment to the demands of adult life. Others dramatize a young couple’s first brush with adultery, an expatriate family’s complicated feelings for their French bébé-sitter, and the pride of a New England deacon in his seldom-used yet sturdy church building, “this ancient thing” that, despite punishment by the elements and neglect by the community it was built to serve, “will not quite die.” All capture the shared passions, doubts, and longings of Updike’s generation, and, in his famous phrase, “give the mundane its beautiful due.”
Of the 102 stories gathered here, eighty first appeared in The New Yorker. Most were revised by the author for his collections The Same Door (1959), Pigeon Feathers (1962), The Music School (1966), Museums and Women (1972), Problems (1979), and The Early Stories (2003). All were written from 1953 to 1975, when Updike was in his twenties, thirties, and early forties, and are arranged here, for the first time, in the order in which they were completed.
Each is offered in its latest, definitive text, and some incorporate posthumous corrections found in Updike’s personal copies of his books.
955 pages, Hardcover
Published September 12, 2013
7 people are currently reading
54 people want to read
About the author
John Updike
863 books2,437 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 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 27, 2020
This one surprised me. It is a luxurious and splendid collection. Well worth the money. My first Updike. Reading it resulted in me buying 12 of his books. For some reason, he has acquired a reputation recently, and most of the chatter about his work takes the form of complaints. This might therefore be the best place to start with his oeuvre.
Listing off major themes and my emotional responses to the stories:
Fatherhood’s and husbandhood’s sinuous triumphs and challenges. Nice mix of life stages represented. Though women are always secondary characters. Many main characters resemble one another or are simply cut and paste versions of Updike - or they come off that way.
Death contemplated from the perspective of youth as a discovery of mortality arrived at abruptly. Sort of a universal feeling, portrayed with startling elegance. The lyrical brilliance is everywhere, as are the scintillating similes. Updike is at times reminiscent of Bradbury, but in this volume, he is devoted to Realism, and can be quite boring. He relies on plot very rarely.
Men shoved along the march toward death, assembling in their persons various paraphernalia of dignity. The mysteries of unassuming men - the men who uncomplainingly hoist the world upon their shoulder, only to expire pitifully in the next instant. Updike's observational facility is construed through poetic juxtapositions.
Some of the stories are short sketches, exquisitely rendered snapshots, even, on occasion, still-lifes.
Updike is well-practiced in the art of literary allusion, as well as imagistic illusions. His command of description is magisterial.
DFW lumped him in with Mailer and Roth as GAMN (Great American Male Narcissi). This proclivity is not evident in this collection of his work. I'm assuming in later books, Updike turns into a sex-crazed dirty old man Narcissist. I'm basing this on how other people have described him. His language strikes a chord. The words are always brave, stating with poignant fierceness, never hiding behind safer, cliched lines. They have the spontaneous quality of free verse.
It would be hard to believe that the eight or nine thousand pages of writing he produced are all so inspired, uniformly pleasant to read, or infused with such radiance.
Pointing out the differences between Brits and Americans, rich and poor, young and old, never gets old with him, at least not yet.
Homely stories, in that the home is the theater of the drama, played out in unflattering starkness.
Visions of Christian life and Atheistic death. Some of the proclivities of Thomas Wolfe, but with a more honed style, no nonsense, a storytelling agenda unclouded by aesthetic bravado. Snow-covered parking lots, and equipment crowded back rooms, offices and book-lined studies. The quietude of Sunday afternoons; such pleasantries as make us thankful for our uneventful lives.
They possess the blandness of daytime television, how a lot of life is wasted between conversations, which are hardly ever thrilling. American ennui, childhood angst, prim and well-educated, privileged, sniveling. The dawning of maturity, nostalgia’s blush upon a quaint memory. The tales don’t require analysis, they yield to light, casual, leisurely reading. They are deceptive, glowing with inner warmth.
The stories are very tame, cool, refulgent, quiet, you can get the sense of relaxing into them.
Slow and methodical, employing straightforward 3rd person unvarying perspective. Sometimes it is only a lucid expression of palpable tension between characters. His stories seem ideally suited for the New Yorker, that is to say, they are inconsequential. The connective tissue of ordinary lives.
Flowing consistency, humdrum existence, everyday life, ie. strong emotions are often absent from the stories or are merely implied. Many of them rely on ephemeral epiphanies. Cool detachment, affected attitudes, hipness. The skill lies in the minute observations. The tales are easy to grasp, addictive, do not suffer from accumulation, are riddled with pop references, but just superb precision, fabulous word choice, blossoming prose cataracts, pervasive humor, implicit loneliness, the evocation of being young, naive, full of one’s self to the brim, the lives of unproductive, idle lounge lizards, in often entrancing descriptive prose.
American life, freedom, a certain type of indulgent selfish boorishness, middle class woes. Caring, and knowing it, is enough, feeling it in your bones, for these characters. Even when his storytelling ceases to be relevant and interesting, his sentences sustain themselves. Allusions to Joyce, Plato, Wodehouse, W. H. Hudson, philosophers, psychologists, etc. Speckled with memorabilia from the 50s and 60s. The utopian era of American ennui. He settles into a more utilitarian style toward the latter half, Sherwood Anderson-esque, accompanied by youthful moments of clarity. Dark moments are few and far between.
Couples and young men, never too poor, never quite happy, nor overwhelmed with despair.
Beautiful flora, elegant rooms, charming furniture, clean shops and safe streets, streetcars, smoke-filled sitting rooms, the mesmeric melody of words, intricately assembling crystalline images.
And the persistence of morality: how over time, a person, when interacting with others, begins to sense something in themselves called a soul. Some stories are meditations, solitary recordings of daily details, and associations, impressions, dusty photographs, sepia-toned reminiscences.
Some stand-outs include a bedtime story about a wizard. “The Persistence of Desire,” contains a brilliant episode at the eye doctor. A lot of husband-wife spats, children making mischief.
Evocations of childhood so convincing and effervescent as to be awe-inspiring. Dinosaurs at a dinner party - the mingling of surrealism into later stories. In some he begins to depart from Realism in favor of satire, but only in brief experiments, all of which prove to be magnificent departures. Makes me wish he would have stuck to satirical fantasy. There is a conversation with a Baluchiterium. (Throughout, his vocabulary is immense.) “The Pro” draws parallels which boil down to “Golf is life, life is lessons.” The interactions of paramecium, more dinosaurs, extinct animals reverberating into the consciousness of bored narrators. After 800 pages of 19th-century meekness we are treated to a 25-page sex scene in “Transaction” - showcasing another side of Updike’s talent.
All 102 stories are richly resplendent with the potential of artful language. “The Chaste Planet” is one of his most fascinating stories, in that it is satirical speculative story about the musical mating rituals of pickeloid Jovians.
Let your troubles melt away, live in the moment. Read rippling character intentions in his ripe dialogue, where cigarettes serve stylistic purposes. He is an expert at picking key quirks out of gestures. These slices of life are full of wonder, tender moments, and a strained self-conscious judgement of the world. Even a story about nothing is fascinating, containing many remarkable turns of phrase. With pithy sentences aplenty, Updike presents a thrilling panorama of descriptive detail through aptly chosen images, showcasing holistic human beings depicted in unflattering lighting, effortlessly smooth, moody, in displays of the pleasures of exercising the imagination. Pining after a vanished ideal, the disillusion that comes with growing up, and much, much more.
Listing off major themes and my emotional responses to the stories:
Fatherhood’s and husbandhood’s sinuous triumphs and challenges. Nice mix of life stages represented. Though women are always secondary characters. Many main characters resemble one another or are simply cut and paste versions of Updike - or they come off that way.
Death contemplated from the perspective of youth as a discovery of mortality arrived at abruptly. Sort of a universal feeling, portrayed with startling elegance. The lyrical brilliance is everywhere, as are the scintillating similes. Updike is at times reminiscent of Bradbury, but in this volume, he is devoted to Realism, and can be quite boring. He relies on plot very rarely.
Men shoved along the march toward death, assembling in their persons various paraphernalia of dignity. The mysteries of unassuming men - the men who uncomplainingly hoist the world upon their shoulder, only to expire pitifully in the next instant. Updike's observational facility is construed through poetic juxtapositions.
Some of the stories are short sketches, exquisitely rendered snapshots, even, on occasion, still-lifes.
Updike is well-practiced in the art of literary allusion, as well as imagistic illusions. His command of description is magisterial.
DFW lumped him in with Mailer and Roth as GAMN (Great American Male Narcissi). This proclivity is not evident in this collection of his work. I'm assuming in later books, Updike turns into a sex-crazed dirty old man Narcissist. I'm basing this on how other people have described him. His language strikes a chord. The words are always brave, stating with poignant fierceness, never hiding behind safer, cliched lines. They have the spontaneous quality of free verse.
It would be hard to believe that the eight or nine thousand pages of writing he produced are all so inspired, uniformly pleasant to read, or infused with such radiance.
Pointing out the differences between Brits and Americans, rich and poor, young and old, never gets old with him, at least not yet.
Homely stories, in that the home is the theater of the drama, played out in unflattering starkness.
Visions of Christian life and Atheistic death. Some of the proclivities of Thomas Wolfe, but with a more honed style, no nonsense, a storytelling agenda unclouded by aesthetic bravado. Snow-covered parking lots, and equipment crowded back rooms, offices and book-lined studies. The quietude of Sunday afternoons; such pleasantries as make us thankful for our uneventful lives.
They possess the blandness of daytime television, how a lot of life is wasted between conversations, which are hardly ever thrilling. American ennui, childhood angst, prim and well-educated, privileged, sniveling. The dawning of maturity, nostalgia’s blush upon a quaint memory. The tales don’t require analysis, they yield to light, casual, leisurely reading. They are deceptive, glowing with inner warmth.
The stories are very tame, cool, refulgent, quiet, you can get the sense of relaxing into them.
Slow and methodical, employing straightforward 3rd person unvarying perspective. Sometimes it is only a lucid expression of palpable tension between characters. His stories seem ideally suited for the New Yorker, that is to say, they are inconsequential. The connective tissue of ordinary lives.
Flowing consistency, humdrum existence, everyday life, ie. strong emotions are often absent from the stories or are merely implied. Many of them rely on ephemeral epiphanies. Cool detachment, affected attitudes, hipness. The skill lies in the minute observations. The tales are easy to grasp, addictive, do not suffer from accumulation, are riddled with pop references, but just superb precision, fabulous word choice, blossoming prose cataracts, pervasive humor, implicit loneliness, the evocation of being young, naive, full of one’s self to the brim, the lives of unproductive, idle lounge lizards, in often entrancing descriptive prose.
American life, freedom, a certain type of indulgent selfish boorishness, middle class woes. Caring, and knowing it, is enough, feeling it in your bones, for these characters. Even when his storytelling ceases to be relevant and interesting, his sentences sustain themselves. Allusions to Joyce, Plato, Wodehouse, W. H. Hudson, philosophers, psychologists, etc. Speckled with memorabilia from the 50s and 60s. The utopian era of American ennui. He settles into a more utilitarian style toward the latter half, Sherwood Anderson-esque, accompanied by youthful moments of clarity. Dark moments are few and far between.
Couples and young men, never too poor, never quite happy, nor overwhelmed with despair.
Beautiful flora, elegant rooms, charming furniture, clean shops and safe streets, streetcars, smoke-filled sitting rooms, the mesmeric melody of words, intricately assembling crystalline images.
And the persistence of morality: how over time, a person, when interacting with others, begins to sense something in themselves called a soul. Some stories are meditations, solitary recordings of daily details, and associations, impressions, dusty photographs, sepia-toned reminiscences.
Some stand-outs include a bedtime story about a wizard. “The Persistence of Desire,” contains a brilliant episode at the eye doctor. A lot of husband-wife spats, children making mischief.
Evocations of childhood so convincing and effervescent as to be awe-inspiring. Dinosaurs at a dinner party - the mingling of surrealism into later stories. In some he begins to depart from Realism in favor of satire, but only in brief experiments, all of which prove to be magnificent departures. Makes me wish he would have stuck to satirical fantasy. There is a conversation with a Baluchiterium. (Throughout, his vocabulary is immense.) “The Pro” draws parallels which boil down to “Golf is life, life is lessons.” The interactions of paramecium, more dinosaurs, extinct animals reverberating into the consciousness of bored narrators. After 800 pages of 19th-century meekness we are treated to a 25-page sex scene in “Transaction” - showcasing another side of Updike’s talent.
All 102 stories are richly resplendent with the potential of artful language. “The Chaste Planet” is one of his most fascinating stories, in that it is satirical speculative story about the musical mating rituals of pickeloid Jovians.
Let your troubles melt away, live in the moment. Read rippling character intentions in his ripe dialogue, where cigarettes serve stylistic purposes. He is an expert at picking key quirks out of gestures. These slices of life are full of wonder, tender moments, and a strained self-conscious judgement of the world. Even a story about nothing is fascinating, containing many remarkable turns of phrase. With pithy sentences aplenty, Updike presents a thrilling panorama of descriptive detail through aptly chosen images, showcasing holistic human beings depicted in unflattering lighting, effortlessly smooth, moody, in displays of the pleasures of exercising the imagination. Pining after a vanished ideal, the disillusion that comes with growing up, and much, much more.
January 29, 2020
I finished the 876 pages and 102 stories in the first volume of The Library of America edition of John Updikes’s Collected Stories eager to take up the second volume. I had read many of the stories when they originally appeared in The New Yorker, as early as when I was an undergraduate at the beginning of the 1960s, but enjoyed coming to them again and experiencing their overwhelming cumulative effect.
You (and Mary McCarthy) can have the Rabbit novels. For this reader, the greatest gift from Updike is his short stories. With the exception of a rare few decided duds, even the stories that don’t ultimately work keep you reading with interest and reward. They may occasionally disappoint in the end, but they almost never disappoint along the way.
How to explain this? Well, for one thing, from the beginning of his career Updike had an uncommon way with arresting and memorable detail. From his 1957 story “Intercession”: “The man was freckled and iron-haired, except for red eyebrows; they stood out from his forehead like car-door handles.” How’s that for vivid?
Here”s the opening to his 1961 “Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car”:
“Different things move us. I, David Kern, am always affected — reassured, nostalgically pleased, even as a member of my animal species, made proud — by the sight of bare earth that has been smoothed and packed firm by the passage of human feet. Such spots abound in small towns: the furtive break in the playground fence dignified into a thoroughfare, the trough of dust underneath each swing, the blurred path worn across a wedge of grass, the anonymous little mound or embankment polished by play and strewn with pebbles like the confetti aftermath of a wedding. “
From his 1965 story “The Stare”: “When she laughed, her teeth were bared like a skull’s, and when she stared, her great, grave, perfectly shaped eyes insisted on their shape like a statue’s.” (The dates I’m citing are the dates of first publication. This 1965 story was actually submitted to The New Yorker in 1962.)
Updike also has the signature ability to illuminate the deepest and most basic human emotions and thereby strike a strong chord in a reader. In the 1959 story “Home,” one of his most moving early works, a young man is returning to the home of his childhood: “… he was intensely excited, and grew more so as in folds of familiarity the land tightened around him.” “Folds of familiarity”— Yes, yes, that’s our Updike, a master who was never afraid to court loveliness (or shy about often locating it in the erotic.)
In his 1965 story “The Rescue,” a brief appearance by a young member of a ski patrol team gets this sharp assessment: “His red ears protruded and his face swirled with freckles; he was so plainly delighted to be himself, so clearly somebody’s cherished son, that Caroline had to smile.” So has a reader.
As early as the late 1950s or early 1960s, Updike more or less announced in his work that he was aiming for greatness. Hey — Joyce could do that; why not Updike? He named his forbears and set out. Well, by God, the fact of the matter is that he delivered.
An anthologist, able to include only one story by Updike, might go crazy trying to make the choice.
Updike’s keen eye ever informs the work. From his remarkable 1969 story “The Corner’: “He was a stocky young man, with hair combed wet, so the tooth furrows showed.” That story, a strong contender if I were the anthologist, closes with this:
“The driver’s story had been strange, but no stranger, to the people who live here, than the truth that the corner is one among many on the map of the town, and the town is a dot on the map of the state, and the state is a mere patch on the globe, and the globe is invisible from any of the stars overhead.”
From the 1972 “The Gun Shop”: “Ben noticed in the dead grass the rusty serrate shapes of strawberry leaves, precise as fossils.”
Later in that same story, an old man has “the erect carriage of a child who is straining to see.”
In the closing to his 1973 “Daughter, Last Glimpses Of”, the narrator is still adjusting to having a rooster in his yard. Of its morning crowing: “He never moderates his joy, though I am gradually growing deafer to it. That must be the difference between soulless creatures and human beings: creatures find every dawn remarkable as the ones previous, whereas the soul grows calluses.”
Updike never scrimps on language, and why should he when he has so much of it at his disposal? From his 1970 story “The Deacon”: “They go to drive-in movies, and sit islanded in acres of fornication.” (Every writer might do well to occasionally venture a word that Spell Check does not recognize.)
Yes, it has to be said that Updike’s language sometimes becomes cluttered, precious or overwrought, but just when you’re thinking that, he’ll do something that takes your breath away, brings you to tears or makes you smile and lets you forgive: All right, Updike, go on.
If purchased together, the two volumes of The Library of America edition, with their archival pages bound in full cloth with a sewn-in ribbon bookmark, come in a protective slipcase featuring a striking reductive portrait of the author by the late Alex Katz. (Updike’s own early training was in the visual arts.) Edited by Christopher Carduff, each volume also comes with a chronology that amounts to a succinct biography, as well as a record of previous publication and helpful endnotes. (Going through the publication record, I agreed with New Yorker editor William Maxwell on the handful of stories — particularly “I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying” and “The Beloved” —that he declined.)
You (and Mary McCarthy) can have the Rabbit novels. For this reader, the greatest gift from Updike is his short stories. With the exception of a rare few decided duds, even the stories that don’t ultimately work keep you reading with interest and reward. They may occasionally disappoint in the end, but they almost never disappoint along the way.
How to explain this? Well, for one thing, from the beginning of his career Updike had an uncommon way with arresting and memorable detail. From his 1957 story “Intercession”: “The man was freckled and iron-haired, except for red eyebrows; they stood out from his forehead like car-door handles.” How’s that for vivid?
Here”s the opening to his 1961 “Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car”:
“Different things move us. I, David Kern, am always affected — reassured, nostalgically pleased, even as a member of my animal species, made proud — by the sight of bare earth that has been smoothed and packed firm by the passage of human feet. Such spots abound in small towns: the furtive break in the playground fence dignified into a thoroughfare, the trough of dust underneath each swing, the blurred path worn across a wedge of grass, the anonymous little mound or embankment polished by play and strewn with pebbles like the confetti aftermath of a wedding. “
From his 1965 story “The Stare”: “When she laughed, her teeth were bared like a skull’s, and when she stared, her great, grave, perfectly shaped eyes insisted on their shape like a statue’s.” (The dates I’m citing are the dates of first publication. This 1965 story was actually submitted to The New Yorker in 1962.)
Updike also has the signature ability to illuminate the deepest and most basic human emotions and thereby strike a strong chord in a reader. In the 1959 story “Home,” one of his most moving early works, a young man is returning to the home of his childhood: “… he was intensely excited, and grew more so as in folds of familiarity the land tightened around him.” “Folds of familiarity”— Yes, yes, that’s our Updike, a master who was never afraid to court loveliness (or shy about often locating it in the erotic.)
In his 1965 story “The Rescue,” a brief appearance by a young member of a ski patrol team gets this sharp assessment: “His red ears protruded and his face swirled with freckles; he was so plainly delighted to be himself, so clearly somebody’s cherished son, that Caroline had to smile.” So has a reader.
As early as the late 1950s or early 1960s, Updike more or less announced in his work that he was aiming for greatness. Hey — Joyce could do that; why not Updike? He named his forbears and set out. Well, by God, the fact of the matter is that he delivered.
An anthologist, able to include only one story by Updike, might go crazy trying to make the choice.
Updike’s keen eye ever informs the work. From his remarkable 1969 story “The Corner’: “He was a stocky young man, with hair combed wet, so the tooth furrows showed.” That story, a strong contender if I were the anthologist, closes with this:
“The driver’s story had been strange, but no stranger, to the people who live here, than the truth that the corner is one among many on the map of the town, and the town is a dot on the map of the state, and the state is a mere patch on the globe, and the globe is invisible from any of the stars overhead.”
From the 1972 “The Gun Shop”: “Ben noticed in the dead grass the rusty serrate shapes of strawberry leaves, precise as fossils.”
Later in that same story, an old man has “the erect carriage of a child who is straining to see.”
In the closing to his 1973 “Daughter, Last Glimpses Of”, the narrator is still adjusting to having a rooster in his yard. Of its morning crowing: “He never moderates his joy, though I am gradually growing deafer to it. That must be the difference between soulless creatures and human beings: creatures find every dawn remarkable as the ones previous, whereas the soul grows calluses.”
Updike never scrimps on language, and why should he when he has so much of it at his disposal? From his 1970 story “The Deacon”: “They go to drive-in movies, and sit islanded in acres of fornication.” (Every writer might do well to occasionally venture a word that Spell Check does not recognize.)
Yes, it has to be said that Updike’s language sometimes becomes cluttered, precious or overwrought, but just when you’re thinking that, he’ll do something that takes your breath away, brings you to tears or makes you smile and lets you forgive: All right, Updike, go on.
If purchased together, the two volumes of The Library of America edition, with their archival pages bound in full cloth with a sewn-in ribbon bookmark, come in a protective slipcase featuring a striking reductive portrait of the author by the late Alex Katz. (Updike’s own early training was in the visual arts.) Edited by Christopher Carduff, each volume also comes with a chronology that amounts to a succinct biography, as well as a record of previous publication and helpful endnotes. (Going through the publication record, I agreed with New Yorker editor William Maxwell on the handful of stories — particularly “I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying” and “The Beloved” —that he declined.)
November 7, 2018
Novels require such a commitment to finish that they engender strong feelings; a great novel can inspire love, while a poor one can make us resentful for the time wasted to finish. On the other hand, short stories require so small a commitment of time, that they hardly inspire any feeling at all. Either a pleasant sensation or indifference, because if we don’t like a story we can simply stop reading.
After reading a few stories in Updike's collection, I felt that pleasant sensation; it was immediately apparent that he is quite good. I would compare Updike to the 19th century prose stylists like Ruskin, Pater, and Arnold, based on the easily digestible prose style, the voluminous output, and the instinct to capture the spirit of the age. But he lacks the ability to live in the heart of conflict, or to describe a world filled with complex webs of tension; He is merely pleasant, a quiet observer of details, and did not inspire strong feelings in me.
Many of these stories have an anthropological vibe, teaching what life was like in the 40’s and 50’s. “The Kid’s Whistling” and “When everyone Was Pregnant are two examples. Sometimes, Updike produces a story that touches deeply. “The Doctor’s Wife," deals with the racial tension in a Caribbean island. “The Lifeguard" shows that a superficial person might have hidden depths. And “The Gun Shop” shows how character traits blend together across three generations of fathers and sons.
After reading a few stories in Updike's collection, I felt that pleasant sensation; it was immediately apparent that he is quite good. I would compare Updike to the 19th century prose stylists like Ruskin, Pater, and Arnold, based on the easily digestible prose style, the voluminous output, and the instinct to capture the spirit of the age. But he lacks the ability to live in the heart of conflict, or to describe a world filled with complex webs of tension; He is merely pleasant, a quiet observer of details, and did not inspire strong feelings in me.
Many of these stories have an anthropological vibe, teaching what life was like in the 40’s and 50’s. “The Kid’s Whistling” and “When everyone Was Pregnant are two examples. Sometimes, Updike produces a story that touches deeply. “The Doctor’s Wife," deals with the racial tension in a Caribbean island. “The Lifeguard" shows that a superficial person might have hidden depths. And “The Gun Shop” shows how character traits blend together across three generations of fathers and sons.
January 27, 2015
A brilliant collection, full of wonderful moments and turns of phrase. Some stories are trifles, but that's to be expected with so many stories. At times devastating, which is really all you can ask for.
December 5, 2025
Este volumen reúne más de dos décadas de cuentos en los que
John UPDIKE
afina su voz y se consolida como uno de los grandes observadores de la vida norteamericana del siglo XX. Desde sus relatos juveniles de los años cincuenta, luminosos y llenos de nostalgia, hasta las piezas más maduras y complejas de los setenta, el tomo traza la evolución de un escritor que convierte lo cotidiano en materia literaria de primer orden.
Los primeros cuentos destacan por su sensibilidad hacia la juventud y el despertar emocional: textos como "The Happiest I’ve Been", "Flight" o A & P capturan con una claridad casi fotográfica ese momento en que la vida se abre como una promesa, pero ya deja ver la sombra del tiempo. En ellos aparece el Updike más amable, íntimo y melancólico.
A partir de los años sesenta, los relatos se vuelven más introspectivos y moralmente más densos. Temas como el deseo, la culpa, el matrimonio y la infidelidad se vuelven constantes. Cuentos como "The Persistence of Desire", "Snowing on Greenwich Village" o "A Gift from the City" muestran a un UPDIKE que examina la fragilidad humana con una mezcla única de compasión e ironía, fiel a su trasfondo religioso y a su capacidad para registrar las contradicciones de la clase media estadounidense. Su prosa —siempre precisa, luminosa y detallista— logra que escenas aparentemente triviales revelen emociones profundas. Pocos escritores han descrito mejor el vértigo del deseo, la incomodidad moral o el paso de la juventud a la adultez.
"Collected Early Stories" no solo es un compendio de cuentos: es el retrato de un escritor en plena formación que, a lo largo de veintidós años, transforma la vida cotidiana en literatura poderosa. Un libro para leer despacio, saboreando cada gesto, cada mirada y cada silencio.
Los primeros cuentos destacan por su sensibilidad hacia la juventud y el despertar emocional: textos como "The Happiest I’ve Been", "Flight" o A & P capturan con una claridad casi fotográfica ese momento en que la vida se abre como una promesa, pero ya deja ver la sombra del tiempo. En ellos aparece el Updike más amable, íntimo y melancólico.
A partir de los años sesenta, los relatos se vuelven más introspectivos y moralmente más densos. Temas como el deseo, la culpa, el matrimonio y la infidelidad se vuelven constantes. Cuentos como "The Persistence of Desire", "Snowing on Greenwich Village" o "A Gift from the City" muestran a un UPDIKE que examina la fragilidad humana con una mezcla única de compasión e ironía, fiel a su trasfondo religioso y a su capacidad para registrar las contradicciones de la clase media estadounidense. Su prosa —siempre precisa, luminosa y detallista— logra que escenas aparentemente triviales revelen emociones profundas. Pocos escritores han descrito mejor el vértigo del deseo, la incomodidad moral o el paso de la juventud a la adultez.
"Collected Early Stories" no solo es un compendio de cuentos: es el retrato de un escritor en plena formación que, a lo largo de veintidós años, transforma la vida cotidiana en literatura poderosa. Un libro para leer despacio, saboreando cada gesto, cada mirada y cada silencio.
June 7, 2020
I have to admit this collection was a bit of a slog for me to get through. I was primarily looking to read the "Tarbox"stories, his fictional version of Ipswich, Massachusetts, the town where he lived with his wife and children in the 1960's and my own home town. Since I grew up there during the period he was living in it and writing about it, it is fun to play the "Do I recognize this place?" or "Do I recognize this person?" game. For the most part, he does not disappoint. However, most of the other stories in this collection reinforce an opinion I have held about Updike for a long time: that although his powers of observation and poetic description are virtually unsurpassed, his subject matter is so tightly focused on the male-angst dominated, artificial bubble world of 60's white-America suburban privilege and experience that it sometimes feels like a waste of talent. He is of his place and time, and has captured that, but the view is so limited as to feel claustrophobic. Many of the earlier stories have not aged well. The attitudes sometimes feel not only alien, but repugnant, and many rely heavily on references to things that no longer have meaning, (and probably wouldn't have even in the 60's unless I was from a particular social class). It's like a glimpse into the behavior of members of some private, exclusive club. Initially interesting, but quickly tedious, once you realize the profound emptiness behind it's activities.
I own and occasionally read a large anthology of Ray Bradbury's collected short stories. I like Bradbury and Updike for similar reasons; the poetry of their writing, but Bradbury's writing has aged much better, not because he isn't also a male writer from approximately the same time period, subject to many of the same biases and blind spots as Updike, but because his stories are so varied and strive to be about something so much larger than privileged, white male experience. They are more fantastical, but oddly, far more accessible some 50+ years after they were written. You could also compare him with Rod Serling. Another contemporary (whose writing I love) who had extraordinary writing talent, but used it to address a much broader range of experiences.
I know this is probably an apples to oranges to comparison, and possibly a bit unfair, but there it is.
I own and occasionally read a large anthology of Ray Bradbury's collected short stories. I like Bradbury and Updike for similar reasons; the poetry of their writing, but Bradbury's writing has aged much better, not because he isn't also a male writer from approximately the same time period, subject to many of the same biases and blind spots as Updike, but because his stories are so varied and strive to be about something so much larger than privileged, white male experience. They are more fantastical, but oddly, far more accessible some 50+ years after they were written. You could also compare him with Rod Serling. Another contemporary (whose writing I love) who had extraordinary writing talent, but used it to address a much broader range of experiences.
I know this is probably an apples to oranges to comparison, and possibly a bit unfair, but there it is.
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December 6, 2013Fiction U662a 2013
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