Most of his stories, like his novels, have been set geographically and emotionally close to home, which for him was always the towns and suburbs of Pennsylvania and New England. In this collection, though, several of the strongest stories move onto different territory. ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’ takes four people caught up in the huge drama of 9/11. Dan Kellogg, visiting his daughter in Brooklyn, sees the towers collapse; through
the myriad pieces of what seemed like white cardboard fluttering within the smoke’s dark column … as abruptly as a girl letting fall her silken gown, the entire skyscraper dropped its sheath and vanished, with a silver rippling noise.
Only Updike, one feels, could pull off this exquisite, terrifying, suggestive image. As well as the mounting fear of a woman caught on the plane brought down by its passengers, and a businessman on the phone to his wife from inside one of the towers, Updike enters the mind of one of the Muslim perpetrators, a feat he extended in his ambitious novel Terrorist, published in 2006. Of all the attempts to deal with the national trauma in fiction, Updike’s is the boldest and the best.
Two other stories take his characters on journeys abroad, where they find they are not too old to be galvanised by encounters with danger and sex. Fairfield, visiting Seville with his dominating wife, is laid low by a mugger, but finds the experience curiously pleasing: ‘Everything in Spain had felt closer. There had been contact.’ In ‘The Apparition’, a man on a group tour of India, stirred by steamy heat and erotic temple sculptures, finds the bronze hair and lithe body of a fellow traveller disturbing his dreams. In bed with his wife, ‘he rejoices to be tasting lust’s folly once more, though the dark shape he was lying upon, fitted to him exactly, was that of his body in its grave.’
It is hard not to see the last story of all, published in The New Yorker in May 2008, as a farewell wave by Updike to his readers. In ‘The Full Glass’, an old man reflects on why he always needs to fill his bedtime glass of water to the brim. It is not, he decides, just because he needs it to take his pills or because water is good for him. He thinks back over the drinking fountains and ice-cold springs of his youth, that made him ‘eager for the next moment of life, one brimming moment after another.’ That eagerness is what all John Updike’s writing, not least this final volume, so wonderfully celebrates.
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