My Father's Tears and Other Stories (Hardcover) ~ John Updike (A... Cover Art

My Father's Tears and Other Stories (Hardcover)

By: John Updike (Author)

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Review

"[T]he ache of knowing and celebrating how we've lived, what it all may mean and where we're going give this final testament a beauty and gravity that crown a brilliant, enduring life's work and legacy." (starred review)

"September songs from an American master....These marvelously wrought stories should not be regarded as a career summation, but, rather, as evidence of a career interrupted....[S]avor this swan song...to be reminded of how splendid a writer Updike was." (starred review)

"Like many of [Updike's] stories over the decades, the best of these last ones don't read like 'stories' with a beginning, middle, and rousing end, but like reflective essays that explore a feeling, an inclination, in the direction of a clarifying moment."

"MY FATHER'S TEARS is a self-conscious salute to a grand career of imagining and gorgeously describing our America, along with a wink of gratitude to those readers who have shared the journey."

"[The] testimony of an individual and recollective consciousness as t relives and reviews the matter of a lifetime and grapples with the effects of aging, disease, decline and death is the focus of Updike's final collection of new fiction....Among all the writers of our time, he was the most gifted in illuminating the phenomenological world."

"Mr. Updike writes in these stories and poems with the quiet assurance of someone in complete control of his craft....[H]e sticks here to what he does best: memorializing the mundane, the ordinary joys and sorrows and confusions of suburban middle class life, the quiet ticktock of human life as the 20th century unfurled..."

Publisher's note

A collection of short fiction from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author includes tales set in his native Pennsylvania, the New England suburbs, and foreign countries, all depicting different facets of the American experience from the Depression through the aftermath of 9/11.

John Updike's first collection of new short fiction since 2000 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 "Fiftieth" 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.

Annotation

John Updike's first collection of short stories in nearly a decade will unfortunately also be his last completed new work to be published. These compelling tales serve as a fitting finale to his legendary career, but they serve as much more than a mere sentimental remembrance of a once-great writer, as Updike effortlessly weaves vibrant ideas into sentences which disguise wisdom as simple observation. Many of the subjects are appropriately autumnal, as aging men confront a present time and place that seems out of sorts with their memories of youth. In "Morocco," a man remembers a harrowing trip when he and his family were alienated in the title country, unable to discern between genuine threats and their own xenophobic paranoia. In the book's title story, a young man sees that his identity is composed solely of an endless series of agreements and disagreements with his father's way of life, a realization that comes to him refracted through his memory of seeing his father cry for the first and only time. This collection assures that, as he passes from presence into memory, John Updike will forever remain a relevant and revelatory writer.

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