My Father's Tears: And Other Stories [Paperback]

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

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.

I found this work a more deeply moving one than many other Updike works I have read. Updike is always the supreme artistic craftsman, the master of the precise observation, the surprising definition of a familiar reality which throws it into a new light. He is the master of description of the mundane world. And his capacity for creating beauty in incredibly complex sentences is perhaps unmatched by any other contemporary writer.

Yet in all his detailings of small- town everyday life, and all his chroniclings of the passions of his always strongly individuated characters there has seemed to me a level of feeling missing, which made me less than fully `sympathetic' to his work.

In these stories however which focus on aging and death, memory and its connecting together of various stages of life a certain poignancy enters which I anyway, did not feel before. Strangely it is less for the fictional characters themselves , so many of whom are essentially altar egos of Updike, than it is for the figure of the master - maker Updike himself.

For in this set of stories there often seems an even closer than ordinary connection between the writer's own personal experience and the fictional work he makes of it. Surely the title story `My Father's Tears' which describes the one time the protagonist has seen his father cry echoes Updike's own life- experience His father cried for the son moving away from him into other worlds he will not understand. The end of the story will have the son unable to cry at the news of his father's death, as his father's tears have `used up' his own.

So too this closeness is felt in a story like `The Guardians' in which the young child grows to perception through observation of the four adults who he has been raised by, mother and father, grandfather and grandmother. So there are also stories in which the elderly protagonist not simply meets with friends from childhood, or lovers from another time of life but in a sense recreates the experience of the early time in such a way as to throw it into a wholly different perspective. The metaphor of putting one's own life into perspective through seeing it as one layer of a series of layers lived in one place is at the center of the long story `Personal Archaeology'.

These stories give a persistent sense of what a deeply thoughtful and smart person their narrator is . Updike's writing provides his readers a kind of pleasure in knowing the world better. This of course is reflected in the writing about material things, but also in a certain wisdom about human relationships. Even in the opening piece of the work which is more straightforward memoir than any other, the account of a family vacation in Morocco shows a kind of subtle psychological understanding, in which one senses that the story is written by a divorced father longing for the time when his world and family were balanced and whole, in a way they might never exactly be again. In `The Blue Light' there is at another stage of life an aging father and grandfather's reassessment of his whole family world, and his discovery of the odd distance there is between himself and all that is closest to him.

There is then too in this work a sadness and longing which is greater than in any other work of his that I know. It is of course the longing for powers one no longer has, in love and even in lust. But it is also longing for those times which are gone, and those people transformed by time into nearly unrecognizable caricatures of their former selves. It is too a longing for the experiencing of the richness of the world , an experience Updike in his omnivorous curiosity `covered' in his writing- an experiencing which will disappear with death.

The longing the reader has is surpisingly less evoked by any of the characters than it is for the consciousness of Updike himself. This consciousness which so plentifully `preserved' in all that he has given us in past, has ceased creating and will do no future work. The reader in a sense longs for all the works Updike could have and would have written in response to the unfolding reality of America.

In a sense this longing connects with a different one , one which finds expression in a number of the stories of this work. This is the longing for and affirmation of a higher emotional and spiritual meaning within everyday experience. One such instance of this is the 'Varieties of Religious Experience' which retells the story of the Terror Bombing of the World Trade Center in 2001 from the perspective of four different parties. There the character Dan who at the opening shock of the explosion becomes atheist in the end makes a conversion back to a comfortable communal Christianity. Another is in powerful story "The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe. Here the focus is on how Science has given us a chilling picture of a Cosmos whose parts are moving away from each other at accelerating speed. Fairchild the protagonist suffers depression at own increasing isolation and declining powers. He longs for contact and intimacy , even if it comes through some kind of violation and injury. As the pine doors of an unbequeathable much-treasured family heirloom suddenly fall on him Fairchild in the `split second that he sees it coming' is not depressed." The consciousness of 'understanding' if only for a brief moment renews his sense of his life's meaningfulness.

Updike was a master in writing about worlds of Art and Culture. He was also the rare fiction - writers who had solidly informed picture of worlds of Science and Religion.

In this he was a seeker of knowledge and meaning whose writing gave sense and Beauty to whatever he experienced.
The world of American Literature is of course incredibly richer for his having lived and written.His farewell gift to us is another evidence of how deeply he will be missed.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 28 reviews  4.4 out of 5 stars