The Maples Stories [Hardcover]

How wonderful and how poignant to have the tragicomic saga of the marriage of Richard and Joan Maples appear at long last in one slender and beautifully bound volume. Wonderful because when read together, these individual short stories, authored by John Updike over a period of almost 40 years, emerge as something considerably greater than the sum of the parts. Poignant because they are appearing now, in the year when Updike, America's foremost and perhaps last man of letters passed away, leaving us to remember, to miss, and to celebrate him through his humane and witty short stories, novels, and essays.

The stories in this book trace the brief rise and prolonged fall of a quintessentially American marriage that begins with a "Snowfall in Greenwich Village" early in the age of Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower and ends with "Grand Parenting " (1993) just before the dawn of the Bill and Hillary Clinton era. In between, the Maples experience most of the joys and all of the sorrows of modern middle class marriage, playing catch up with the 60s sexual revolution, navigating the tides of easy divorce and painful reconciliations, second families, lovers who just won't stop calling at home (Your Lover Just Called), and almost everything else that undercut but at the same time energized American marriage and family life in the latter half of the 20th century. Not all the stories are pretty, and some of the scenes are downright ugly (and all too realistic), and yet through it all, the Maples, as they drift apart, reconcile, separate and finally divorce, show more vitality, joy in living, and yes, true love for each other, than many "happily" married couples ever achieve.

As a richly documented narrative of the American Century, or least the post-WWII part of it, viewed through the lens of one marriage and two lives, the Maples stories collected here are, in my opinion, second only to the the four volume Rabbit tetralogy (Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest) in achieving a moving fictional reality. In a way, I feel I got to know the Maples as well or better than I knew the Angstroms, and while I felt that the dangerously over-educated Maple's problems were far more their own fault, often arising out of their own superficiality and over intellectualizing of basic human emotions and erotic urges, I cannot help being drawn to to them by their often misguided, but heroic attempts to find some sort of accommodation between the life they were leading and the life they wanted to lead, or at least thought they wanted to lead if they could only move on. The path was strewn with loneliness tears, and misery, but in the end, the Maples, like Rabbit Angstrom, achieved something more than just a life -- -- they achieved lives lived, if not well, at least lived fully, in some sort of love with each other, and finally, as we leave them, surviving to the rueful joys of shared grand parenthood.

In short, this collection of stories, while too brief and ending long before we would like it to, turns out to be more than the sum of its parts, and despite its brevity, immensely worthwhile. A lot like the Maple's marriage, in fact.

In the introduction to this collection of stories about the disintegration of the marriage of Richard and Joan Maple, Updike says their moral is that "nothing is perfect." That is of course true in a sense, but such a trivial one that we hardly need Updike to tell us so. The real message is that nothing is even good, as most of these stories are simply about how poorly his fictional couple treat one another without giving us more than a glimpse at any other side of their characters, making it almost impossible to sympathize with them---though there are a couple of exceptions that almost make the rest of them worth slogging through. And they are, for the most part, beautifully written, which is of value in and of itself.

This is collection of stories of one middle class couple from the fifties to the eighties, written and published through these years, but more it is the story of us and our marriages and loss.

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