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MY FATHER’S TEARS

Name: MY FATHER’S TEARS
Author: John Updike
ISBN: 978-0-307-27156-3

AND OTHER STORIES

by John Updike ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 5, 2009

A fine final act.

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Reflection and reconsideration abound in the late (1932–2009) great author’s final finished collection of stories.

The mood is unmistakably autumnal, as we encounter elderly males who explore familiar surroundings and simultaneously consolatory and troubling memories (“Personal Archaeology,” “The Road Home,” “My Father’s Tears”); straying husbands burdened by conflicted remembrance of long-ago thrills (“Free,” “The Walk with Elizanne”); and seniors abroad, adapting timidly yet eagerly to the promises and threats of cultures that are foreign in a dizzying multiplicity of ways (“Morocco,” “Spanish Prelude to a Second Marriage”). Just as a representative Updike youngster intuits that he “can never be an ordinary, everyday boy,” so do his counterparts at the far end of the aging spectrum clearly foresee their own absorption into the universal and infinite. Among the more telling examples: the victim of a mugging while vacationing in Spain, who understands that—like the physically universe ultimately reducible to the prophecies of “cosmic theory”—he is simply wearing out (“The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe”); the psoriasis patient helped by an innovative treatment (“Blue Light”) which reconciles him to his place as an integral part of an ever-changing world; and the near-octogenarian who relives his early years as a prelude to surrendering their continuation in his senescence (“The Full Glass”). There are missteps: stories too discursive to bear much dramatic weight, and a gathering of involved perspectives of the 9/11 catastrophe that seems a test run for Updike’s 2006 novel Terrorist. But the 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.

A fine final act.

Pub Date: June 5, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-307-27156-3

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

- BOOK REVIEW
ALWAYS LOOKING
by John Updike edited by Christopher Carduff

- BOOK REVIEW
HIGHER GOSSIP
by John Updike edited by Christopher Carduff

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WIDOWS OF EASTWICK
by John Updike

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THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990

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It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.

Pub Date: March 28, 1990

ISBN: 0618706410

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990

Categories:

SHORT STORIES

- BOOK REVIEW
DAD'S MAYBE BOOK
by Tim O’Brien

- BOOK REVIEW
JULY, JULY
by Tim O’Brien

- BOOK REVIEW
TOMCAT IN LOVE
by Tim O’Brien

- SEEN & HEARD
Portugal. The Man To Send Banned Books to Students

- IN THE NEWS
Alaska School Board Reverses Book Ban, for Now

- SEEN & HEARD
Tim O’Brien Joins Ali Velshi for Banned Book Club

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THINGS FALL APART

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

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Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.

Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.