A brief survey of the short story: John Updike

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A brief survey of the short story: John Updike

The longevity and prodigal output of this ‘conspicuously autobiographical writer’ give his complete works – and especially his celebrated stories – the shape of an entire life

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In his 1960 story, The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother’s Thimble, and Fanning Island, John Updike’s narrator expresses the challenge of capturing life in words. “[W]e would-be novelists have a reach as shallow as our skins,” he writes. “We walk through volumes of the unexpressed and like snails leave behind a faint thread excreted out of ourselves. From the dew of the few flakes that melt on our faces we cannot reconstruct the snowstorm.” In a lecture given 16 years later, Updike described himself as a person “whose chemistry must daily secrete a written page or two”, and the expression of writing as a natural process was wholly appropriate: for him, living was writing. In fact, the thread he secreted was enormous: 63 books in 50 years, including more than 20 novels and more than a dozen short-story collections.

William Maxwell, Updike’s first editor at the New Yorker, described him as a “conspicuously autobiographical writer”, a trait that, coupled with his longevity and prolificacy, gives his complete works the shape of an entire life. Teenage narrators in semi-rural Pennsylvania give way to young professionals in New York, marital strain, the death of parents, child-rearing and adultery in suburban Massachusetts, ageing and affluence, wistful longing for the energies of youth and, finally, an obsessive return to one’s beginnings (half of the stories in the posthumous collection My Father’s Tears are set in Olinger, Updike’s fictional version of his childhood home).

He was aware of his mother and himself, laying each in bed, as survivors of a larger party that had once occupied this house. It was as if, on a snowy pass, they had killed and eaten the others, and now one of the two remaining must perish next.

In the morning, to my relief, you are ugly. Monday’s wan breakfast light bleaches you blotchily, drains the goodness from your thickness, makes the bathrobe a limp stained tube flapping disconsolately, exposing sallow décolletage. The skin between your breasts a sad yellow. I feast with the coffee on your drabness. Every wrinkle and sickly tint a relief and a revenge. The children yammer. The toaster sticks. Seven years have worn this woman.