My Father's Tears - by John Updike (Paperback)

About the Book

Updike revisits his people, places, and themes--Americans in suburbs, cities, and small towns grappling with faith and infidelity--in vivid portraits of the aged, people for whom the past has become paramount.

Book Synopsis

A sensational collection of stories of the American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11, by one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series.

John Updike mingles narratives of 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."

Review Quotes

"Classically Updike . . . written with fluidity and humor, intelligence and wit about the elusiveness of happiness, contentment, grace."--Newsday

"Here . . . one last time . . . are the cardinal virtues of a writer who bestrode the American literary landscape for more than a half century: a virtuosic talent for sensual description, the seemingly effortless weaving of image and theme, and an almost Proustian capacity to absorb the reader in the quiddities of childhood and adolescence."--San Francisco Chronicle

"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."--The Washington Post

About the Author

John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.