Product 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15320 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-02
• Released on: 2009-06-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780307271563
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Updike compresses the strata of a life in his delicately rendered, tremendously moving posthumous collection. In Free, the memory of a life-affirming affair buckles against a man's loyalty to his deceased wife: he recognizes that becoming a well-bred stick offers more consolation in old age than the sluggish arousal of his sensuality. In The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe, the retired protagonist, depressed by what he perceives as the universe's indifference to human affairs, is done in by the accumulated detritus of his life. Many characters are haunted by a sense of isolation, such as the protagonist of Personal Archaeology, who roams his Massachusetts estate, searching for traces of previous ownership while sifting through his own petty contribution, or the emotionally stranded absentee landlord of an Alton, Pa., family farm in The Road Home, who returns after 50 years and finds himself lost in his hometown. From Kinderszenen, which depicts the anxious time of smalltown late 1930s, to Varieties of Religious Experience, in which a grandfather watches the twin towers fall, time ushers in brutal changes. With masterly assurance, Updike transforms the familiar into the mysterious. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Starred Review. In the title story of this miraculous final collection, the aging narrator admits, "I have never really left Pennsylvania, that is where the self I value is stored, no matter how infrequently I check on its condition." Most of these stories evoke Updike's Olinger and environs at least in passing, nicely complementing the 2003 retrospective collection The Early Stories, 1953–1975, with its tantalizing hints of autobiography. In "Personal Archaeology," a restless retiree uncovers several distinct strata of rusty junk on his small piece of suburban land and realizes that his own lost golf balls will form yet another such layer. In "The Full Glass," an elderly man takes pride in his efficient bedroom routines, such as filling a glass with water before opening the pill bottles. In "Free," a recent widower starts to miss the wife from whom he had longed to escape. A few of the stories take place at high school reunions, where conversations resume midstream after 50 years. Like his ancient characters, Updike rambles on at times, but no one will complain. Recommended for all collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/09.]—Edward B. St John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Ron Hansen In January, John Updike died of cancer at the age of 76. The 20th century's preeminent man of letters, Updike was equally at home with the novel, essays, criticism and poetry, but he will probably find his most lasting fame with his short stories, some of which were already classics in his lifetime. So it is fitting that we have as a fond valedictory this, John Updike's 12th collection of short fiction, the last one he completed before he died. Eighteen stories are included in "My Father's Tears," arranged, as was his habit, in the order in which Updike wrote them. I have rarely encountered fiction that so genially recounts the frailties of old age. "Afraid of appearing senile," a professor revisiting his hometown fails to ask a motel clerk to repeat her hurried driving directions and gets horribly lost. A former floor refinisher considers the pleasure of having a full glass of water on the bathroom sink to "sluice down the anti-cholesterol pill, the anti-inflammatory, the sleeping, the calcium supplement . . . along with the Xalatan drops to stave off glaucoma and the Systane drops to ease dry eye." And a high school reunion prompts one character to note that "the list of our deceased classmates on the back of the program grows longer; the class beauties have gone to fat or bony crone-hood; the sports stars and non-athletes alike move about with the aid of pacemakers and plastic knees, retired and taking up space at an age when most of our fathers were considerately dead." In general the characters are flush New Englanders with children and grandchildren, who have the wealth for exotic travel and the luxury of time for reminiscence or, as Updike calls it, "personal archaeology." Hints of death and dying faintly tinge every story, but there is no pathos or urging to not go gently into that good night; there is just the realist's ironic shrug over the way things are and a healthy appreciation for the largely unrecognized heroism of facing life's decline, as when a character remembers that "for two years he had lain beside Irene feeling her disease growing like a child of theirs. He had stayed awake in the shadow of her silence, marvelling at the stark untouchable beauty of her stoicism. In the dark her pain had seemed an incandescence." The story "My Father's Tears" begins with a narrator very much like Updike recalling how his father cried as his son left Pennsylvania for Harvard, having foreseen "that the boy I had been was dying if not already dead, and we would have less and less to do with each other. My life had come out of his, and now I was stealing away with it." Contrasted with that memory are those of his first wife's father, a serene Unitarian minister in St. Louis who vacationed in a Vermont farmhouse each summer and invited the newly married couple there. Whereas his own much-loved father "enacted the role of an underdog, a man whose every day, at school or elsewhere, proceeded through a series of scrapes and embarrassments," the father-in-law was aloof and magisterial, a confident man who moved among his houseguests "like a planet exempt from the law of gravitational attraction." "He was to be brought low, all dignity shed, before he died. Alzheimer's didn't so much invade his brain as deepen the benign fuzziness and preoccupation that had always been there." It was a heart attack that felled the narrator's father, in an era in which there were no options like open-heart surgery and angioplasty. Yet, facing the finality of his loss, the narrator finds himself unable to cry. "My father's tears had used up mine." Updike at his finest can be seen in "Varieties of Religious Experience," which considers four wildly different characters and their reactions to the events of 9/11, "when, as abruptly as a girl letting fall her linen gown, the entire skyscraper dropped its sheath and vanished, with a silvery rippling noise." A lawyer watching on television loses his faith in God and is later "aggrieved by the grotesque and pitiable sight of a great modern nation attempting to heal itself through this tired old magic of flags and candles -- the human spirit stubbornly spilling its colorful vain gestures into the void." The story then shifts to Mohamed, one of the Muslim perpetrators, who thinks of America as an "unclean society disfigured by an appalling laxity of laws and an electronic delirium of supposed opportunities and pleasures." Jim Finch has an office high up in the World Trade Center and is on the phone with his wife when he realizes the enormity of his predicament. And a fourth character is Carolyn, onboard the flight that a scrum of passengers forced to plow into the earth of Pennsylvania rather than the White House. "Mercy, Carolyn managed to cry distinctly inside her pounding head. Dear, Lord, have mercy." "Kinderszenen," which is German for "child scenes," records a little boy's careful observations of farm and family life in the 1930s, and "The Walk with Elizanne" elegiacally considers the 50th reunion of the graduating class of Olinger High School, Olinger being the fictional stand-in for the Shillington, Penn., of Updike's youth and of many of his finest stories. Even the protagonist's name, David Kern, is one that habitual readers of Updike's fiction will connect with, for these stories are acts of affectionate recapitulation, not wondrous exploration. Like his earlier novel "Villages," this book holds up to the sunlight and gently turns objects Updike has considered before, seeing glimmers and refractions that are slightly different from those he had formerly put down on paper. As such, "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. And its last line is all Updike: "If I can read this strange old guy's mind aright, he's drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned."
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

All Readers Should Cherish This Latest Collection
MY FATHER'S TEARS is the last in a sterling lineup of stories from the master storyteller John Updike, who passed away in January 2009. With 18 tales in all, the book has a wide range of characters, themes, times and settings. But all of them have a common thread --- that of delving into the human spirit and capturing the emotion of the moment. And they were previously published in various magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's and The New Yorker.

Most of the main characters are male, but there are some of the female persuasion. Themes include aging, reminiscing, love lost and religion, among others. Times range from the Depression era to that of the modern-day world. Updike uses some fictional places in Pennsylvania to mirror those of his hometown of Shillington. The settings also include the state of Florida and such exotic locales as India, Spain, Italy and Morocco

The first story, titled "Morocco," takes place in that country and is based on a true story from events that occurred there in 1969. "The Walk with Elizanne" revolves around a high school reunion where two former high school sweethearts meet up after 50 years. A young child is the main character of three entries: "The Guardians," "The Laughter of the Gods" and "Kinderszenen." Love and its imperfections are the themes of "Free," "Delicate Wives," "The Apparition," and "Outage."

An interesting and sobering piece, "Variations of Religious Experience," explores the concept of religion and how it affects our thoughts and actions. The story centers on the horrific events of 9/11 and is told from the perspectives of a man watching the Twin Towers collapse from a distance as he looks out an apartment window, one of the hijackers who flies his jet into a tower, an office worker who is trapped in one of the towers and leaps to his death, and a passenger on the doomed plane that crashes in Pennsylvania. Each views his religion (or lack thereof) differently, and their reactions are varied as the events unfold.

Prior to reading this volume of short stories, my exposure to Updike's writings had been limited to a couple of volumes from the Rabbit series. Dedicated fans will enjoy MY FATHER'S TEARS, while newcomers can expand their enjoyment by perusing the many other short stories and novels he has produced. All readers should cherish this latest collection as it will be the last by this renowned and prolific author, unless new ones are discovered posthumously.

--- Reviewed by Christine M. Irvin

Endings
I'm more of a fan of Updike's short stories than his novels so "My Father's Tears" is tailor made for me.

Updike's last three published works- the novel "The Widows of Eastwick," his collection of poems "Endpoint" and this short story collection- all have the air of finality to them. They were musings on growing older, losing friends and coming to the end of one's life journey. But rather than being depressing, they are melancholy without being maudlin.

"My Father's Tears" is, with the exception of the first story, a collection of tales published after 2000. "Morocco," first published in the 70s, is a travelogue of the small, but not catastrophic, pitfalls that befall a family as they travel in a foreign land. The book then fast forwards through the decades; the characters in these late tales are trapped by their own personal histories, facing the dilemma that occurs when they realize that there isn't much more time ahead of them and the past weighs them down even though they realize it's futile to mourn the mistakes they once made.

One of my favorite tales in this collection is "Personal Archaeology," which manages to be affecting and sad while making me realize that once we're gone, things just continue. "My Father's Tears" is a great final story collection. I feel guilty for wanting anything more from Updike as he was more than prolific in his long career. RIP.

My Father's Tears
Updike left us readers of his fiction with a final volume of short stories and poetry. "My Father's Tears" takes us on his final decade through the medium of the short story. This is a must read for his fans and highly recommended for a fiction reader wanting to discover one of the great masters of fiction in the past fifty years.