Raising the last glass

My Father’s Tears, by John Updike

Although an air of valediction inevitably hovers over this collection of short stories, the last of John Updike’s more than 60 books and published in the wake of his death, it is in no way a depressing read. On the contrary: there is something exhilarating about finding him maintaining to the very end not just his brilliance of observation and narrative but his passionate appreciation of life.

Updike’s writing has often been unapologetically autobiographical; his biographer will not have to decode the life from the work. These stories, apart from the first, a tale of an uneasy family holiday in North Africa in 1969, were all written and published during his last decade, and all of them reflect the preoccupations of an aging man; health, family difficulties, the waning of sexual passion, the continuing search for love. But in Updike’s hands these trials are not so much tiresome as heroic, and irradiated by bright gleams of memory, humour and wisdom. When Henry, recently widowed, impulsively drives to Florida to find Leila, the woman he had been thrillingly unfaithful with decades before, he finds ‘a tiny woman, her nut-coloured face criss-crossed by wrinkles’, with whom he has nothing in common; but he also realises that their affair had been a gift to them both, a setting free, or ‘as free as things get’.

Freedom, in Updike’s writing, is a mixed blessing. His heroes (he writes more, and better, about men than women) need to escape from their parents, their home towns, their regular jobs and, often, their wives; but in these stories he demonstrates over and over again, in loving, precise detail, how there neither can nor should be any escape from memory.