Divorce is the tonic note of this volume of new Updike stories, his first in seven years. True to form, each story here hugs a particular stage in a man's life—and whether Updike makes him an engineer, potter, or an archaeologist, he's the same sensitive man. Children now are almost fully grown; one wife has been left, another taken. Guilt, skin disease, and other "problems" visit these narrators. Some of the pieces are weed-slight: travelogues of Reno and Ethiopia and a highway vacation with children. The attempts at humor—"Minutes of the Last Meeting"—are predictably lame; also a bit tired are the religious/sexual communions. Strongest, probably because most deeply, passionately felt, are the stories of a divorce in the making: "Separating," about Updike's famille de plume, the Maples, is one of his best. But the surprise of the collection is a story called "Transaction": a married man in a strange city contracting for the services of a street prostitute. Edge and light are contributed here by the straining, word-staining extra inch that Updike goes in order to capture an experience and sensation that's newly shaming; his stories lately have so strongly become personal essays, stacked-up catalogues of reactions, that this departure into nervous newness absorbs, as a risk taken, a stepping out into shaky ground. Otherwise, it's an uneven volume, falling in sum a bit short of prime Updike—but the best stories here are among the best anywhere.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1979
ISBN: 0449211037
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1979
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
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.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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