My Father's Tears And ...

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John Updike

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My Father's Tears And Other Stories

by John Updike

3.69 of 5 stars 3.69 · rating details · 604 ratings · 122 reviews

John Updike’s first collection of new short fiction since 2000 finds the author in a valedictory mood as he mingles narratives of his native Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel.

“Personal Archaeology” considers life as a sequence of half-buried layers, and “The Full Glass” distills a lifetime’s happiness into one brimming moment of an old

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292 pages

Published 2009 by Hamish Hamilton

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Jun 14, 2009 brian rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

goddammit i’m getting old. i still behave like a hyperactive mentally-disabled twenty-three year old, but at thirty-five i already have ‘old fuck syndrome’ -- by which i mean that i loathe my generation all out of proportion. if i read another one of these cutesy assholes writing about the pains it takes to make the perfect mixed CD, i’m gonna cut my legs off with a steak knife. shitty thing is that in thirty years i’m gonna be crapping all over the younger generation and explaining how superior...more goddammit i’m getting old. i still behave like a hyperactive mentally-disabled twenty-three year old, but at thirty-five i already have ‘old fuck syndrome’ -- by which i mean that i loathe my generation all out of proportion. if i read another one of these cutesy assholes writing about the pains it takes to make the perfect mixed CD, i’m gonna cut my legs off with a steak knife. shitty thing is that in thirty years i’m gonna be crapping all over the younger generation and explaining how superior mine was. ugh. the cycle of life is cruel.

well, updike croaked this year and this is his last collection of stories. it’s wonderful. sad and elegaic and gentle. one of his best. and i’ll take the stodgy white male over most of these young whippersnappers running up the scene these days. lemme explain:

in Personal Archaeology a guy wanders around the large yard surrounding his country house and takes stock of the place’s history by what he sees -- shards of teacups encrusted into hard soil conjures images of a young girl, thirty years earlier, hastily burying a broken teacup before mom gets back home; mason jars in the shed bring to life their original owners who lived in the house nearly a century ago. through this simple device updike is able to make universal that which is so banal and ordinary that we hardly consider it, but also so mysterious and ineffable that when it does come up we find ourselves eye-to-eye with the abyss: the subjectivity of human existence and experience.

y’know what i mean -- the ‘born alone, die alone’ thing; the seeking out people to share experience with but always having the nagging feeling that as much as you try, as deep as you go, you can never truly convey the ineffable uniqueness of what it feels like to be ‘you’. or ever truly know another human.

it’s almost unbearable to feel existence so powerfully, to feel the wonderful and mad crush of confusion and happiness and melancholy, to feel alive in a world of music and flesh and ideas... and wonder if anyone truly understands it the way you do. so we write. and we read. and we learn that other people do feel this shit. and they’ve been feeling it way back before homer was writing and they’ll be feeling it up until the world goes pop. and while we never can know if what i'm seeing when i say 'green' is the same as what you're seeing, or what i'm feeling when i say 'love' is the same as what you're feeling... the investigation isn't wholly arid, it does lighten the burden of existence.

so updike. there are not many writers better at conveying the sense of what it means and feels to be here. to be alive. to be alive right now. to exist on earth with a brain, a heart, eyes, a cock/cunt, a soul... and there certainly aren't many writers better at putting across the sense that, despite all of this, most human interaction is marked by botched attempt and missed opportunity.

now get off my damn lawn and turn down that music.(less)

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Oct 18, 2009 Harold Griffin rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Lamenting the prospect of no more Updike, I was excited when I inadvertently discovered this collection of short stories. I thoroughly enjoyed, but cannot say that I loved the volume, which was filled with characteristic insights into the human condition, but without any real knockout tales, just literate, intelligent vintage-Updike musings. The last story, "The Full Glass," ends -- in light of Updike's demise -- with a "toast to the visible world," the toaster's "impending disappearance from it...more

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Apr 30, 2013 Bill rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literary

Proustian Reflections on American Life

Updike, John (2009). My Father’s Tears and Other Stories. New York: Random/Ballantine.

Eighteen previously published stories of fifteen to twenty pages make up this posthumous collection. Each one is a gem – not a bad one among them, and that is all the more remarkable because they are superficially about the most mundane aspects of everyday life in America in the twentieth century. Characters go to the store or a dinner party, a class reunion, or have a fami...more Proustian Reflections on American Life

Updike, John (2009). My Father’s Tears and Other Stories. New York: Random/Ballantine.

Eighteen previously published stories of fifteen to twenty pages make up this posthumous collection. Each one is a gem – not a bad one among them, and that is all the more remarkable because they are superficially about the most mundane aspects of everyday life in America in the twentieth century. Characters go to the store or a dinner party, a class reunion, or have a family vacation in Spain, or join a tour group in India. High drama ensues when one character holds a glance a moment too long, or the electricity goes out at home during a storm, or a character visits his dermatologist. All the action, all the drama, is on the inside. In most cases, the main character reminisces about life and love, time and death, and longs for meanings that never appeared.

The main characters are nearly all adult males, most older, retired, or elderly. They remember fumbling through marriages, affairs,and divorces. They are generally alone now, isolated, divorced; feeling dissatisfied and perplexed; facing irrelevance, meaninglessness, and death. A couple of main characters are young boys who describe confusing, impoverished childhoods in the Depression as they try to find meaning in experience, and describe the often pathetic old people that populate their lives. In most stories, the settings are suffocating New England towns where emotions are locked up by traditional roles and relationships. In a big city setting, we see nothing of wild, creative chaos, but only the staid, emotionally constricted lives of the characters.

So in a sense, these stories are depressing, since they are all about escaped happiness, longing, loss of meaning, unrealized love, and so forth. But isn’t that how life turns out ultimately, for any thoughtful person? There is a sense of sharp self-recognition in the reader. The characters are so alive, and the writing so lyrical, that one becomes deeply immersed. Marveling at the writing, I sometimes got stuck re-reading a single paragraph for a half hour. For example:

“The worst seemed to be over when, in mid-afternoon, his computer died under his eyes. The financial figures he had been painstakingly assembling swooned as a group, sucked into the dead blank screen like glittering water pulled down a drain. Around him, the house seemed to sigh, as all its lights and little engines, its computerized timers and indicators, simultaneously shut down. The sound of wind and rain lashing the trees outside infiltrated the silence.”

The omniscient narrator is strong, even intrusive, so much so that it is difficult to read more than two or three of the stories at a stretch without that narrator becoming tedious. Likewise, the sets become claustrophobic, the tone aridly cognitive-intellectual, and all the characters and locations start to blend into just a few archetypes. The stories are therefore best read in short bursts separated by a day of rest.

Nearly all the stories are third person, past tense, omniscient; a form that facilitates a strong narrative voice. One, written from the point of view of a young boy, is third person, present tense, which struck me as awkward and contrived, but maybe that’s just because it is less common. A story about the attacks of 9-11 switches among several points of view, from a grandfather watching the towers fall to one of the hijackers on Flight 93 into Pennsylvania. All the stories are masterpieces. (less)

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Jun 08, 2012 Alan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I love Updike, so it was sad reading his last book of short stories. These seem so personal that they must be at least half autobiographical. Many take places in Pennsylvania, where he was born, and featured characters in the last part of their lives. Updike stories always show off his great vocabulary, concise and vivid descriptions, and lusty characters. He was interested in sex and illicit relationships all of his life and these stories are no exception. I think his main point was that people...more

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Aug 02, 2011 Christopher F. added it · review of another edition

Most of these I must have read in The New Yorker originally, but the only one I recalled is "The Guardians," which still stands out as pretty much the best—absolutely mind-blowing. "The Apparition," which takes place among American tourists in India, is also superb, and the last line is like a punch in the stomach. Both, like most of these stories, deal with the connection between sex and death in the male brain/mind/Weltanschauung, which is also as I take it the underlying theme of all Updike's...more

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Jul 16, 2010 Angelique rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: books-read-in-2010

Obviously a collection of stories from a dying/old man. I loved the first story and it was all downhill from there. I don't think I can deny that they were well written, I just felt like there were lots of half baked ideas and too much reminiscing.

Parts I liked:

pg. 198 from Emerson's essays "every natural natural fact is a smbol of some spiritual fact"..."Everything is made of one hidden stuff,"..."every hero becomes a bore at last,"..."we boil at different degrees."

pg. 215 "People call his hous...more

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Jan 14, 2010 Regina Mclaughlin rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

As intimate and confessional an assortment of narrators as Updike ever conjured up. Some not likeable, others not trustworthy. AS can be expected, these tales are redolent of familiar sound, taste, see, smell and touch. Updike seizes hold of our nerve endings and tantalizes the brain to interpret this neurologic input: what to make of seeing a garment worn askew, what the feel of a barefoot gambol on grass tells of the past, how a whiff of fragrance can become freighted with long-forgotten assoc...more

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Aug 21, 2009 Sarah rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The short stories in this volume capture Updike doing precisely what he did best: latching onto the very nuances of the American male in particular (while not all of the tales in this volume are told from the male perspective) and speaking from their point of view in a way that makes you empathetic with him when, when told from any other angle you would want to throttle him.
It is for this reason that Updike was a rare writer and a great loss, for he could pinpoint these nuances and then speak f...more

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Mar 30, 2011 Meg - A Bookish Affair rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011, book-club, fiction

John Updike wrote many books in his lifetime (according to Goodreads, he published 22 novels during his lifetime). I had not read any of them before this collection of short stories. The stories cover many different subjects but the human story and experience is at the center of each. Some of the stories I was able to connect with and some I was not able to.

One of my favorite stories in the book was about 9/11. Updike looks at the event from someone watching the World Trade Center falling from B...more

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Dec 21, 2010 Richard Needham rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I am always impressed with Updike’s talent: whether he can be criticized for not writing on ‘great themes’ or faulted as something of a misogynist means nothing in the end to me: he was a great writer and intellect. The title story is one of the best of this last collection of stories, and reminds me of ‘Pigeon Feathers’ another title story from his (first? early?) collection. Typical of Updike, and indicative of his brilliance is a theme, in ‘My Father’s Tears’, of a dancing rainbow of refracti...more

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Nov 10, 2012 Jennifer rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: library-loan, fiction

In a way this was a frustrating book. It is a while since I read any Updike and this collection of short stories has reminded me of what has ended with his death. I loved his Rabbit novels - you could almost smell the male but un-macho sweat. This collection does seem to follow on logically, being much (but not entirely) about the experience of old age. Many of the stories have linking elements. Varieties of Religious Experience was an excruciatingly painful read about 9/11. Initially I baulked...more

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Jul 30, 2009 Bookmarks Magazine rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sept-oct-2009

"Updike enthusiasts will have no trouble recognizing the author's stamp in this last, melancholy collection. Updike revisits characters and settings from earlier works as his male protagonists, now in their twilight years, glance wistfully over their shoulders at past lives and former loves. The New York Times Book Review cited this ""obsessive recollection of detail for its own sake"" as both a triumph and a limitation, but critics unanimously regarded Updike as one of the great writers of our...more

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Jul 27, 2010 Elise rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I tried to read Updike's "Rabbit" books when I was in high school, but never got into them. However, I usually liked the shorter pieces of his, both fiction and non-fiction, that I found in The New Yorker, so I got my dad "My Father's Tears" last Christmas, though I hadn't read this collection of stories myself. Earlier this month, while visiting my parents in rainy Manila, I zipped through "My Father's Tears." Updike is now at the top of my list, along with Jhumpa Lahiri, of favorite short stor...more

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Apr 08, 2010 Cecilia rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2010

This book was not written for me. (I am of the wrong generation, even my parents are of the wrong generation, and I am not a middle class male from rural Pennsylvania.) However, the writing is hypnotic. As I read the stories, I felt as if I were in a gentle whirlpool, on language. The stories have so many overlaps that it feels like continuations from one to the other. It is is if you gently snag one story into the other and draw a new plot line.

At the beginning I did not like this book. I could...more

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Aug 18, 2012 Rich rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"Varieties of Religious Experience" is a trenchant and sad allusion to the ecstasy chronicled in William James' work over 100 years ago. Here it's all delusion and anger and occasional WASPy comfort. Each story drew me in more. Updike strikes me as the non-Catholic version of Flannery O'Connor -- documenting the evil we do and the blindness that drives us to it. Evil is real and sometimes obvious, and more often inside and insidious and selfish. I'm not doing justice with this review, I've becom...more

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Mar 16, 2011 Stephanie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: adult-short-stories, book-club

This is his last short story collection, published near or right after his death. This collection deals with melancholy reminiscing and not an easy book to read in winter (or at any time). I did not read all of the stories. There is a story about 9/11 that I could not finish because of the emotional impact it had on me. I liked the stories "Personal Archeology" and "The Guardian" the best. "The Guardian" has a child narrator and he wonderfully illustrated a child's sensibilities.

Don't get me wr...more

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Sep 03, 2010 Bookreaderljh rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: books-read-in-2010

A very interesting collection of stories but very few stood out in my mind for the story told. What was more interesting was Updike's descriptions of place and people - sort of like painting a picture with words that you look at and admire and see so clearly - but then you move on. A lot of the people and stories seemed to move between stories - different names but similar circumstances. As a lot seemed to be autobiographical, that would make perfect sense. Names have been changed to protect the...more

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Jan 27, 2011 Denis rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Here's an excerpt of a review from a fellow Goodreader...

"...y’know what i mean -- the ‘born alone, die alone’ thing; the seeking out people to share experience with but always having the nagging feeling that as much as you try, as deep as you go, you can never truly convey the ineffable uniqueness of what it feels like to be ‘you’. or ever truly know another human.

it’s almost unbearable to feel existence so powerfully, to feel the wonderful and mad crush of confusion and happiness and melancho...more Here's an excerpt of a review from a fellow Goodreader...

"...y’know what i mean -- the ‘born alone, die alone’ thing; the seeking out people to share experience with but always having the nagging feeling that as much as you try, as deep as you go, you can never truly convey the ineffable uniqueness of what it feels like to be ‘you’. or ever truly know another human.

it’s almost unbearable to feel existence so powerfully, to feel the wonderful and mad crush of confusion and happiness and melancholy, to feel alive in a world of music and flesh and ideas... and wonder if anyone truly understands it the way you do. so we write. and we read. and we learn that other people do feel this shit. and they’ve been feeling it way back before homer was writing and they’ll be feeling it up until the world goes pop. and while we never can know if what i'm seeing when i say 'green' is the same as what you're seeing, or what i'm feeling when i say 'love' is the same as what you're feeling...the investigation isn't wholly arid, it does lighten the burden of existence."

by Brian of Goodreads

I haven't bothered commenting on the books I've read lately, but I like this collection a lot and would feel guilty if I didn't add a little something, myself.

What Brian says supports my views on the values of reading and writing. What better ways for us to share what it truly feels like to be part of life, eh? And for passionate atheists like myself, perhaps sharing in others' writings from as way back as Homer is the closest we'll ever get to believing in transmigration of souls or of being part of something spiritual and bigger than our little old selves.

For those interested in the writing craft, here Updike shoes his mastery at storytelling without gimmick or plot, but with honesty and perspicacious observations on what it feels like to be alive; with the ups and downs, the melancholy and exuberance that living entails. Especially those of us who are at or near middle-age, we can relate with the aging protagonists in these stories as they reflect on their past and present while the inevitable end wags its bony finger, calling them forward.
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Dec 13, 2012 JoeAnn Hart rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I love Updike. No matter what I say about these or any other stories of his does in no way take that love away. Having said that, these stories, almost all written in the 21st century, were good, but they were not great. The writing and insights, as always, were of fantastic flexibility and wonder, but I could sense Updike was too often just meandering through memory, rather than leading the reader through a story. Some endings just ended, some on their faces. But who wants to focus on endings a...more

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Jan 05, 2010 Red Fields rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I read this for a book group. It's not a book I would've chosen on my own. I thought it got off to a good start with the first story but subsequent stories seemed to be too much of the same settings and themes over and over. Only-boy children, raised during/after the Depression, by parents and grandparents, infidelity in the 1960s, sometimes divorce, distance from their children. It was kind of boring although the guy is great at descriptive writing. You can picture everything but after a while...more

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Jan 21, 2013 Mita rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"La vecchiaia è una brutta bestia."
Ho trascinato stancamente questo libro per mesi. Continuavo a ripetermi che non mi piaceva, che era lento, noioso e ripetitivo... e che poi in fondo io ero ancora giovane!
Già, perchè era proprio questo il problema: riconoscere nei meccanismi mentali che muovevano i personaggi gli stessi meccanismi che sentivo pian piano innescarsi nella mia mente.
Non è facile accettare il tempo che passa, e tutto va bene finchè non te ne accorgi: semplicemente non ci pensi!
M...more

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Feb 06, 2013 Liam O'brien rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Men and tolerant women

From the man who "never had an unpublished thought" comes some more collected stories. It's a real trip reading these, and I'm beginning to realize how much of an ambivalent process Updike will always be for me. On one hand, brilliant prose. On the other hand, gut-achingly boring subject matter, and repetitive as fuck. (Man is middle aged or elderly WASP. Man is married. Man considers the women around him with weird comparisons.) On one hand, this is the fucking master. On the other hand, unfort...more

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Jan 03, 2012 Edward rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Updike, John, MY FATHER’S TEARS, and other stories (2009), read 12-2011

A wonderful and moving collection of short stories which appeared the same year that John Updike died at age 77. They are told from the point of view of old men who both look back on their lives while simultaneously living in the present and in the last story, “The Full Glass”, appropriately enough, look forward to their demise. Victorian writers, someone said, wrote only about sex and death, and that could as well describe...more Updike, John, MY FATHER’S TEARS, and other stories (2009), read 12-2011

A wonderful and moving collection of short stories which appeared the same year that John Updike died at age 77. They are told from the point of view of old men who both look back on their lives while simultaneously living in the present and in the last story, “The Full Glass”, appropriately enough, look forward to their demise. Victorian writers, someone said, wrote only about sex and death, and that could as well describe Updike’s concerns. Never far from the consciousness of his characters are memories and relationships with the opposite sex, and with death. Wives, ex-wives, and old love affairs are at the heart of the former. Deaths are those of parents, friends, and more generally, experiences of his youth, which are now “dead” except in his memory. As Les comments in “Delicate Lives”, thinking back about an old girlfriend, “For what was majestically more intimate even than sex but death? He imagined her motionless profile, gray with collapsed blood pressure, cradled in his arms.”

But there’s nothing morbid about any of these stories. More than anything, they celebrate experience, experience that only reveals its beauty and value in retrospect. In the title story, for example, the narrator says he only saw his father cry once in his life. It occurred when he left for college and said goodbye to his father at the train station/ He reflects,, as an old man, “My father did foresee, the glitter in his eyes told me, that times consumes us – that the boy I had been was dying if not already dead, and we would have less and less to do with each other. My life had come out of his his, and now, I was stealing away with it.” They had always been close and the inevitable distancing between parent and child that comes with maturing was making itself felt. The story ends with the father’s fatal heart attack, and only then does the circle close and he and his father are close again.

There is hommage to Marcel Proust in these stories. In “The Apparition” “Milford felt himself towering as if literally mounted on Proust’s figurative stilts of time.” Memory allows us to rise above events, to see their significance, to see through he lens of time having passed. In several stories, grandfathers now view their adult children as parents themselves and wonder how their long ago actions influenced these children, two generations removed from themselves. They live in different worlds and communication about these things is tentative and uncertain. In "The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe" a grandfather questions his hold on the past, things that had belonged to his mother “survivors of a life of which he was the last caring witness, remnants that he lacked the will to discard. There is a sweetness in the memories that these things evoke, but a danger, too.. At the end of the story some old doors that he had been saving, topple over on him. Symbolically, then, an obsession with the past can be deadly. It’s this openness to the meaning of experience that makes these stories so good, and make a reader appreciate short fiction at its best. Each story is a satisfyingly captured experience.

The last story ends on this note, a kind of epitaph for old age and its glory which a reader can't help but feel is a valedictory for Updike himself. “My life-prolonging pills cupped in my left hand, I lift the glass, its water sweetened by its brief wait on the marble sink top. If I can read this strange old guy’s mind aright, he’s drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned.”
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Jul 19, 2011 Ryan Adair rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: short-stories, fiction

I like Updike's writing style and the way he crafts his short stories. Yet these were just the musings of a sexually charged old man. I couldn't finish them because every story I read contained some sort of sexual overtones; needless to say that it wasn't particularly delightful to my particular taste. I obviously didn't finish the book because I wasn't sure it was going to get any better (also took a note from other reviews written about this work that suggested the same thing).

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Oct 10, 2009 Dylan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A fitting tribute to the man who was once called "a penis with a thesaurus" (no disrespect). This collection offers readers an intimate window into the aged man. It is almost as if one can tell that he knows that he's in the last chapter of his life. The stories range from the reflective and ponderous, to the jovial and redemptive. All in all, the book is not a bad read if it is viewed as a celebration of an author who will be poured over for many years to come.

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Mar 09, 2013 Fred rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I've finally accepted the fact that I rarely enjoy short stories. They seem to end just before I fully buy in and leave me wanting. However, Updike proves evermore his mastery of the written word. This collection of short stories is wholely enjoyable if not almost bittersweet in the knowledge that we will recieve no more original works from a living John Updike. As always his prose is elegantly facile and his insights razor sharp. I recommend this book.

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Jan 10, 2010 Joe rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I found these stories, usually from the viewpoint of an older narrator looking back at his life or particular times in life, really close to my heart. The stories of death and loss were especially strong for me.

I've never read any updike before; maya told me she didn't like him because of his elite-white-male point of view. Maybe these stories, written when he was near the end of his life, avoid this elitist viewpoint and show more empathy.

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Jan 09, 2011 Jeffrey rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

There are many "coming of age" books but very few "growing into age". This is a wonderful collection of stories from an older person's memory. With the aging of the baby-boomers, we need more books like this. It's as if John Updike was saying goodbye.

I saw a bumper sticker once that said: "Inside every old person is a young person asking 'What the heck happened!.'" Ain't it the truth. I know I'm getting older when I find myself saying things my parents said.

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Apr 06, 2013 Tom Ferguson rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Updike had an interesting view of the world. He lived in a world of trolley cars and old houses in the midst of suburban transformation. His writings often look back to the 30's and 40's and he likes his protagonist to be an older man remembering his childhood. I am especially drawn to some of his sharp commentary on life - "It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you." An interesting set of stories and a nice read.

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Jul 12, 2011 Lyvia added it · review of another edition

Much to my surprise, I enjoyed this collection of short stories. I don't usually like the short story format because I prefer to get inside the characters over time. In a short story, by the time you remember the various characters' names, the story is over. But there is a warmth and cyclical nature to this collection that is very endearing. Now I would like to try one of his novels.

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About John Updike

John Hoyer Updike (born March 18, 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania) 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 hi...more

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“It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.” — 55 people liked it

“Her hair had been going gray as long as he could remember; she bundled it behind in a bun held with hairpins that he frequently found on the floor when he lived boyishly close to the carpet.” — 1 person liked it

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