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| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  | | Home » My Father's Tears and Other Stories | | | | | | | Description: | | John Updike’s first collection of new short fiction since the year 2000, My Father’s Tears finds the author in a valedictory mood as he mingles narratives of his native Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel.
“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: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| John Updike | | Hardcover:
| 304 pages | | Publisher:
| Knopf | | Publication Date:
| June 02, 2009 | | ISBN:
| 0307271560 | | Product Length:
| 8.04 inches | | Product Width:
| 5.6 inches | | Product Height:
| 1.13 inches | | Product Weight:
| 1.02 pounds | | Package Length:
| 8.0 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.6 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.3 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.0 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 22 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
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 LateAug 24, 2010
There are eighteen stories, all published previously, mainly in THE NEW YORKER, in this meritorious collection. One is about a fiftieth high school reunion. "The Walk with Elizanne" is an Olinger story. The chief character realizes that the society he had inhabited in Pennsylvania was a theistic society.
In "The Laughter of the Gods" the birth of the son redeemed the misery of the marriage of the parents. "Varieties of Religious Experience" speaks of cosmic indifference. Brad and Leonora, a late middle-aged couple, are vacationing in Spain in "Spanish Prelude to a Second Marriage". The couple is stuck with each other for six days. They had saved Madrid for the second week.
Martin Fairchild, "The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe," had had an old family cupboard shipped from Pennsylvania to him in Massachusetts. Since his wife found no room for it in his house, it was put in the barn. In the time he investigated it, before it fell on him, he was not depressed.
In the seventies, the bloom of the sixties having worn off, Ed Trimble enlisted for German lessons, ("German Lesson"), at the Language Institute at an ordinary wooden house in Central Square. The teacher's husband had been a POW in Russia during WWII. The teacher had been in the League of German Maidens.
In Pennsylvania David Kern felt the tracks of his ancestors, "The Road Home". The first person narrator in "My Father's Tears" had already found Harvard more familiar than his hometown, Alton. His father foresaw that time consumes. The "Blue Light" protagonist noted that it is a surprise to see one's child with gray hair.
For us, with John Updike, dying in January 2009, this is the end, so to speak.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Meeting MortalityAug 07, 2010
Updike's final offering of 18 short stories reflecting on the transience of existece,what residues we leave behind us to be remembered by and-most subtly-how the solid structures of our childhood;parents, Grandparents, friends school and place, all slowly vanish and change as does our own roll in the scheme of things.
Updike is perhaps the first to make note of how technology has rapidly changed relationships and the society we live in.
'Personal Archeology' 'The Guardians' 'Kinderszenew' all stand out in exploring the themes of aging,of change.
Also in this collection is 'Varieties of Religious Experience' viewing 9/11 from each perspective;perpetrator,witness,victim.This will surely become THE 9/11 literary story.
This is my first encounter with Updike and I am left very impressed. He's been often reccommended but I was always put off by the awful 'Witches of Eastwick' film, though I should have kept to my own belief that films are no more than edited highlights of a book-dumbed down highlights at that-and decided from reading.
'My Fathers Tears' is a wonderful parting gift from Updike.Do read;you wont be disappointed.
My Father's TearsAug 02, 2010
The book was beautifully written with very descriptive text and metaphors. Updike was truly a great craftman in his writing once he got out of the Rabbit series, rivetting as that series might have been to many readers.
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
Writing Of Those Reflections Which Come When A Long Life DwindlesMar 31, 2010
If The Afterlife (the mid-1990s collection which was my introduction to him) was John Updike's thesis on old age, then My Father's Tears is his dissertation.
While themes of autobiography, old age, of looking back at youth and the times and places of its setting (with either sentiment or anguished hyper-comprehension) punctuate these stories, I found them both meaningful and less dismal than it seems so many others do. Travel stories leaven the book and are a nice accompaniment to heftier fare, with India, Spain and Morocco visited among other locales. The title tale and Personal Archaeology are the two best pieces in the book, with the latter story being as good as anything Updike ever penned. (Living as I do in a nearly ninety-year-old house surrounded by "artifacts" of past occupants, many of them bearing a family origin, Personal Archaeology struck me in a very confronting way, and skillfully speaks of the push of time against us all, those alive now and those who came before us. I read the story twice, the second time immediately after the first.)
While charges that "Updike repeated themes in My Father's Tears" have validity, the short stories in this collection also present us with a clear window into their author's mindset in the final decade of his life, and in so doing grant us his wisdom. My Father's Tears is an anthology that possesses a weight that presses in against the spirit of a reader in such a way that these are often anything but simple (or at times enjoyable) reads, but in their complexity, their honesty, their creator's telepathic mastery at transforming thought to word, they bestow much on those who make time to give them the understanding they deserve.
Despite his age we all thought we'd have John Updike, the greatest American short story writer of his generation, with us for many more years---we all hoped for another decade---instead we have My Father's Tears, and it is a poignant goodbye from a man whose literary capability we are not likely to see again in our times.
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.
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