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“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 man’s bedtime routine. High-school class reunions, in “The Walk with Elizanne” and “The Road Home,” restore their hero to youth’s commonwealth where, as the narrator of the title story confides, “the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition.” Exotic locales encountered in the journeys of adulthood include Morocco, Florida, Spain, Italy, and India. The territory of childhood, with its fundamental, formative mysteries, is explored in “The Guardians,” “The Laughter of the Gods,” and “Kinderszenen.” Love’s fumblings among the bourgeoisie yield the tart comedy of “Free,” “Delicate Wives,” “The Apparition,” and “Outage.”
In sum, American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11 finds reflection in these glittering pieces of observation, remembrance, and imagination. | | | Features: | |
• ISBN13: 9780307271563
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
•
| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| John Updike | | Hardcover:
| 304 pages | | Publisher:
| Knopf | | Publication Date:
| June 02, 2009 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 0307271560 | | Package Length:
| 7.9 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.6 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.2 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.0 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 18 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
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 Poignant and NostalgicFeb 13, 2010
Updike is the ultimate storyteller and weaves a delicate and bittersweet thread through all these stories that will stay with you long after you close the book.
 A lovely, lyrical collection of storiesJan 31, 2010
One of the common "knocks" against John Updike is that he seemed incapable of finding a "perspective" and a "voice" that was not in lock-step with his own process of aging. And so, as a young man, Updike wrote from youth's perspective; as a middle-aged man from the perspective of a middle-aged man, and--most recently--having entered his 8th decade--from the perspective (and with the--at times--world-weary voice) of advanced years. Much as some have criticized that aspect of Updike's writing, I personally believe it lends to his stories and novels an unmistakeable aura of authenticity.
That is certainly the case with "My Father's Tears", a collection that is presumably (unless there are unpublished works awaiting an editor's loving attention), Updike's final collection. With the exception of the first story in the collection ("Morocco"), all of these stories were written during the final decade of Updike's life. But while these "late-in-life" stories share a similar "late-in-life" perspective, many of them deal with childhood events, now viewed through the lens of experience rather than that of innocence. Nor is the terrain covered here all that different from the terrain readers of Updike will have come to expect: broken marriages, strained relationships between parents and their children, the changing face of the natural and human landscape, all of it depicted with nuance and attention to detail, but with little that would count as heroic. And yet, as is so often the case with John Updike, these finely wrought observations and minute details yield a beautifully (but by no means sentimentally) rendered portrait of our life and times.
This reader was particularly touched by the final story in the collection, "The Full Glass". Its title well captures not only this particular story's tone, but the lasting legacy of a writer who had the marvellous capacity to render life as it truly is lived (headaches, heartaches, digressions, disappointments and all the rest) and yet somehow leave his readers with the unmistakeable affirmation that life's glass is unexpectedly full. If you are an Updike fan, you need not hesitate: this one comes highly recommended.
My Father's TearsNov 29, 2009
Updike's Last Stories and some of his best. A great American Voice has been quieted but not silenced. We'll always miss what might have been.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Famous last wordsOct 21, 2009
My Father's Tears is Updike's last book of short stories, published a few months after he died. That it is a posthumous work is poignant: a collection of fictional memories and old age anecdotes, it exudes a before-the-grave redolence, a sense that the author knew these were his last moments in this world. The stories are unconnected, but they all have aging men as protagonists, they all are about looking back or dealing with one's declining years.
My Father's Tears' tone and style is not, say, that of a Raymond Carver, made of tiny crucial twists and hinging on odd but telling details and situations. Rather, these are pedal-tone codas, sepia pictures of remembered depression and war-era childhoods, ruminations on a changed world. The lens is turned towards long-buried relationships only evoked again thanks to a glimpsed suburban alley, a school reunion; or, kaleidoscope-like, it sees dissolved family bonds reconfigure under new, variegated patterns.
Most of the stories are set in small East Coast towns, and the reader could be forgiven for believing the divorce rate in New England is 100%, with everyone having affairs the whole community knows about, but fair enough: painful emotional choices make for more engaging fiction. In the middle of the book is a piece about 9/11: slightly eye-rolling, but I suppose American authors felt they had to do that. Nor is the collection devoid of an autobiographical air. I found the stories got better towards the end, that their pace became more varied and their lessons richer. Perhaps it is just that one gets into their slow, nostalgic stride, or that the message sinks in that old age, the approach of death, are manageable prospects after all. Maybe, retrospectively, this is a book best to be read after the age of forty.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
My Father's Tears - UpdikeOct 14, 2009
I haven't finished this book yet; but am enjoying the colorful description of characters and places in this collection of short stories by John Updike. He is a master of description.
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