FAIRCHILD, THE HERO OF ONE OF these fine, elegiac stories by John Updike, who died in January, is an elderly gent, who is mugged and slightly injured while travelling in Spain. He finds the whole experience oddly invigorating.
Why? "It was, he su
pposed, the element of contact. In his universe of accelerating expansion, he enjoyed less and less contact. Retired, he had lost contact with his old associates, full of sociable promises though their partings had been." His children were grown up and far-flung, and his grandchildren had only "polite interest" in the treats he could offer. His old poker group had difficulty mustering five players, and his old golf foursome "had been dispersed to infirmity and Florida if not to the grave".
Indeed, Fairchild realises that he has been "islanded": "If a heart attack or a catastrophic downturn in the market were to overtake him, he would be left clutching the telephone while shimmering streams of Vivaldi or, even more insultingly, soupy instrumental arrangements of old Beatles standards filled the interminable wait for the next available service representative."
The same might be said of all the protagonists in these stories: precariously balanced on the precipice of old age, facing the nearing prospect of death and grappling with the growing isolation that comes with the centrifugal forces of time flinging family members apart and casting an already dwindling number of friends out of reach.
The hero of "Personal Archaeology" finds himself filling the growing allotments of free time that swaddle his days investigating the lives of prior owners of his land. The hero of "The Road Home" visits the small Pennsylvania town where he grew up, only to realise that he no longer recognises the landscape, that his old classmates are going to have to lead him "like some out-of-town moron" right to the parking lot of his motel. And the hero of "The Apparition" rejoices "to be tasting lust's folly once more" when he flirts with a pretty member of a tour group he and his wife have joined in India, only to realise that at his age "the dark shape he was lying upon" fitted him exactly, and that was the shape of his own "body in its grave".
Though these heroes have different names and different occupations, they – like the narrator of many of the poems in Endpoint – are clearly variations on the author himself. Many share biographical details with Updike: a small-town boyhood as a cherished only child; escape to an elite New England college; an early marriage, followed by children, separation, divorce and eventually another marriage.
And many share the same existential outlook and preoccupation with mortality evinced by Harry Angstrom, Henry Bech and so many of Updike's other characters. These men yearn for some religious or spiritual assurance that they are more than "a fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust". They worry that "life's a shabby subterfuge", while "death is real, and dark, and huge". And they find themselves, even at an advanced age, torn between domesticity and freedom, responsibility and self-fulfilment, between the "love-beast" of sex and solitary rumination.
In fact, this final volume of new Updike stories is, in many respects, a perfect bookend to Pigeon Feathers, the precocious collection of stories that nearly five decades ago announced their 30-year-old writer's discovery of his own inimitable voice. The same themes are sounded in both volumes: re- creations of a boyhood and youth in Pennsylvania; remembrances of former sweethearts and unconsummated crushes; worries, as the author put it in that 1962 collection, that death is rushing toward us "like an express train". And these same themes are reprised, with minor variations, in the more personal poems in Endpoint.
The main difference is that in My Father's Tears and Endpoint Updike is looking back on his past from an even greater distance – through a telescope, not a magnifying glass. His musings on his childhood love of drawing, his schoolboy friendships, his girlfriends, wives and mistresses feel less like efforts to recapture the past than day-trip excursions into the past – memory arpeggios, played by an elderly man, reminding himself of the passion he once felt for a girl, the regret he felt over an opportunity missed, or the realisation, as he writes in a poem, that "all a writer needs" really was back there in his Pennsylvania hometown with "its trolley cars and little factories, cornfields and trees, leaf fires, snowflakes, pumpkins, valentines".
Towards the end of his life, John Updike wrote in the poems and stories gathered here with the quiet assurance of someone in complete control of his craft. Instead of pushing himself awkwardly into new territory or indulging in creative writing exercises (as he'd done in earlier tales), he sticks here to what he does best: memorialising the mundane, the ordinary joys and sorrows and confusions of suburban American middle-class life, the quiet ticktock of human life as the 20th century unfurled, from the somnolent 1950s through the turbulent 1960s and 70s, into the complacent 1980s and 90s and the violent contortions of the millennium.
He charts how small towns – where people played canasta and croquet and took their girlfriends to ice cream parlours – gave way to suburban shopping malls and identikit detached houses, where young marrieds gave cocktail parties and played at adultery, and finally, to a more moneyed suburbia, populated by couples who take yearly trips abroad, keep tabs on the stock market and squabble with their children, who have themselves advanced deep into middle age. In doing so, Updike has mapped a narrow but fertile slice of American life, his own instantly recognisable "chunk of the planet".
Back in the early 1980s, Updike said in an interview that "there's a crystallisation that goes on in a poem, which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't", that he wrote fewer poems than he used to and that he no longer wrote short stories with "the same ease – that sense of just being like a piece of ice on a stove".
These two volumes demonstrate that his skills in these two genres remained undiminished to the end. That, in pouring his life "into words", he not only preserved "the thing consumed", but also offered a lasting "toast to the visible world", which he commemorated with such ardour and precision.
The full article contains 1114 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
