My Father’s Tears and Other Stories by John Updike

(Knopf, 304 pages, $25.95)

It’s hardly a surprise that John Updike kept writing right up until the end, said John Freeman in the Los Angeles Times. From the beginning of his half-century career, this gentlemanly author was so prolific that it seemed as if he “believed that all the beauty and strangeness of a life could be captured, and that to do so might mean he could live forever.” Two new books have appeared in the five short months since the author’s death—a collection of recent poems and a collection of recent short stories. But My Father’s Tears and Other Stories, the newer of the posthumous titles, is “a demoralizing book.” Despite marvelous moments, the collection bears “a leaden, ceremonial weight.” It is too literally the author’s fictionalized look back at his own quiet suburban life.

With Updike, the wonder was never in the material he chose but in what he did with it, said Julian Barnes in The New York Review of Books. In My Father’s Tears, we’re again revisiting his rural Pennsylvania childhood, his escape to Harvard, his two marriages, and his “serial” participation in high school reunions. But we’re also getting fresh news on the great theme that elevates all his work. “Just as Hemingway, the supposed hymner of masculine courage, writes best about cowardice, so Updike, delineator of conventional, continuing America, is incessantly writing about flight.” Updike’s male characters always yearn “to be away, and yet to be safe.” For the protagonists of his final stories, even their preferred self-prescription, adultery, “loses its thrall.” One of the author’s stand-ins concludes that his freedom never really existed except as a fragile state of mind.

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Fittingly, My Father’s Tears supplies a study in both the “cardinal sins” and cardinal virtues of Updike’s art, said Adam Haslett in the San Francisco Chronicle. To enjoy his “virtuosic talent for sensual description,” one has to put up with “his indifference to plot,” the “repetition of subject matter, and the pervading solipsism” of his always-male protagonists. It must be said, though, that Updike’s final book completes the task he set for himself, said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. Across 50-odd years, he masterfully mapped “a narrow but fertile slice of American life.” Shouldn’t that be enough?