Both deep and dazzling

Rivalled only by the Rabbit novels, John Updike’s early stories — the 100 or so pieces of short fiction he wrote for magazines such as the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine and Playboy between 1954 and 1975 — now seem very close to being the best things he has written, surely placing them among the finest 20th-century writing by anyone. This 800-page book is a collection rather than a selection (Updike suggests the winnowing is better left to others after he is gone), but the stories are, to a surprising and satisfying degree, all of a piece. For the most part, they are organised chronologically according to the age of their hero or narrator. So we follow, down however refracted and fictionalised a path, the young Updike as he moves from boyhoood into adulthood, from husband to father, from marriage to separation.

A sort of horror vacui suffuses everything Updike writes. His young narrators’ self-love, which spills over into a world-flooding engagement with everything around him, is sporadically punctured by intimations of mortality and godlessness. Already by the fourth page of this tome, one of Updike’s autobiographical narrators, a young boy, is lamenting ‘the immense, tinted pity, the waste, of being in one little place instead of everywhere, at any time’.

There is a sense in which the following 800 pages constitute one long getting to grips with this ‘pity’. At times, all Updike can do is to acknowledge it, sorrowingly. But more often one finds him ecstatically compensating, boldly proclaiming that ‘one little place’ — Olinger or Tarbox or whatever other American town it might be — as a place of divine, teeming fecundity. ‘I had in those years,’ he writes in the foreword, ‘the happy sensation that I was mailing dispatches from a territory that would be terra incognita without me.’