My Father's Tears and Other Stories

If The Afterlife (the mid-1990s collection which was my introduction to him) was John Updike's thesis on old age, then My Father's Tears is his dissertation. While themes of autobiography, old age, of looking back at youth and the times and places of its setting (with either sentiment or anguished hyper-comprehension) punctuate these stories, I found them both meaningful and less dismal than it seems so many others do. Travel stories leaven the book and are a nice accompaniment to heftier fare, with India, Spain and Morocco visited among other locales. The title tale and Personal Archaeology are the two best pieces in the book, with the latter story being as good as anything Updike ever penned. (Living as I do in a nearly ninety-year-old house surrounded by "artifacts" of past occupants, many of them bearing a family origin, Personal Archaeology struck me in a very confronting way, and skillfully speaks of the push of time against us all, those alive now and those who came before us. I read the story twice, the second time immediately after the first.) While charges that "Updike repeated themes in My Father's Tears" have validity, the short stories in this collection also present us with a clear window into their author's mindset in the final decade of his life, and in so doing grant us his wisdom. My Father's Tears is an anthology that possesses a weight that presses in against the spirit of a reader in such a way that these are often anything but simple (or at times enjoyable) reads, but in their complexity, their honesty, their creator's telepathic mastery at transforming thought to word, they bestow much on those who make time to give them the understanding they deserve. Despite his age we all thought we'd have John Updike, the greatest American short story writer of his generation, with us for many more years---we all hoped for another decade---instead we have My Father's Tears, and it is a poignant goodbye from a man whose literary capability we are not likely to see again in our times.

I found this work a more deeply moving one than many other Updike works I have read. Updike is always the supreme artistic craftsman, the master of the precise observation, the surprising definition of a familiar reality which throws it into a new light. He is the master of description of the mundane world. And his capacity for creating beauty in incredibly complex sentences is perhaps unmatched by any other contemporary writer. Yet in all his detailings of small- town everyday life, and all his chroniclings of the passions of his always strongly individuated characters there has seemed to me a level of feeling missing, which made me less than fully `sympathetic' to his work. In these stories however which focus on aging and death, memory and its connecting together of various stages of life a certain poignancy enters which I anyway, did not feel before. Strangely it is less for the fictional characters themselves , so many of whom are essentially altar egos of Updike, than it is for the figure of the master - maker Updike himself. For in this set of stories there often seems an even closer than ordinary connection between the writer's own personal experience and the fictional work he makes of it. Surely the title story `My Father's Tears' which describes the one time the protagonist has seen his father cry echoes Updike's own life- experience His father cried for the son moving away from him into other worlds he will not understand. The end of the story will have the son unable to cry at the news of his father's death, as his father's tears have `used up' his own. So too this closeness is felt in a story like `The Guardians' in which the young child grows to perception through observation of the four adults who he has been raised by, mother and father, grandfather and grandmother. So there are also stories in which the elderly protagonist not simply meets with friends from childhood, or lovers from another time of life but in a sense recreates the experience of the early time in such a way as to throw it into a wholly different perspective. The metaphor of putting one's own life into perspective through seeing it as one layer of a series of layers lived in one place is at the center of the long story `Personal Archaeology'. These stories give a persistent sense of what a deeply thoughtful and smart person their narrator is . Updike's writing provides his readers a kind of pleasure in knowing the world better. This of course is reflected in the writing about material things, but also in a certain wisdom about human relationships. Even in the opening piece of the work which is more straightforward memoir than any other, the account of a family vacation in Morocco shows a kind of subtle psychological understanding, in which one senses that the story is written by a divorced father longing for the time when his world and family were balanced and whole, in a way they might never exactly be again. In `The Blue Light' there is at another stag

Updike left us readers of his fiction with a final volume of short stories and poetry. "My Father's Tears" takes us on his final decade through the medium of the short story. This is a must read for his fans and highly recommended for a fiction reader wanting to discover one of the great masters of fiction in the past fifty years.

After just a few pages of My Father's Tears it became apparent to me what a brilliant, brilliant writer John Updike was. This collection is the first work of his I have read after his death and the existential struggle of many of the characters in these stories is striking. Many of these characters are older, reflecting on lives that have sped past them, attempting to deal with the unknowable that faces them, as presumably, Updike was as he wrote them. These existential struggles are just one aspect of this very strong, very well-written collection. Updike is able to take mundane aspects of life and make them shimmer and delight with his luminous prose. These are wonderful stories. Enjoy them!

MY FATHER'S TEARS is the last in a sterling lineup of stories from the master storyteller John Updike, who passed away in January 2009. With 18 tales in all, the book has a wide range of characters, themes, times and settings. But all of them have a common thread --- that of delving into the human spirit and capturing the emotion of the moment. And they were previously published in various magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's and The New Yorker. Most of the main characters are male, but there are some of the female persuasion. Themes include aging, reminiscing, love lost and religion, among others. Times range from the Depression era to that of the modern-day world. Updike uses some fictional places in Pennsylvania to mirror those of his hometown of Shillington. The settings also include the state of Florida and such exotic locales as India, Spain, Italy and Morocco The first story, titled "Morocco," takes place in that country and is based on a true story from events that occurred there in 1969. "The Walk with Elizanne" revolves around a high school reunion where two former high school sweethearts meet up after 50 years. A young child is the main character of three entries: "The Guardians," "The Laughter of the Gods" and "Kinderszenen." Love and its imperfections are the themes of "Free," "Delicate Wives," "The Apparition," and "Outage." An interesting and sobering piece, "Variations of Religious Experience," explores the concept of religion and how it affects our thoughts and actions. The story centers on the horrific events of 9/11 and is told from the perspectives of a man watching the Twin Towers collapse from a distance as he looks out an apartment window, one of the hijackers who flies his jet into a tower, an office worker who is trapped in one of the towers and leaps to his death, and a passenger on the doomed plane that crashes in Pennsylvania. Each views his religion (or lack thereof) differently, and their reactions are varied as the events unfold. Prior to reading this volume of short stories, my exposure to Updike's writings had been limited to a couple of volumes from the Rabbit series. Dedicated fans will enjoy MY FATHER'S TEARS, while newcomers can expand their enjoyment by perusing the many other short stories and novels he has produced. All readers should cherish this latest collection as it will be the last by this renowned and prolific author, unless new ones are discovered posthumously. --- Reviewed by Christine M. Irvin