A Holiday That Lasts 038; Lasts

"Books are at best a beacon in the darkness, but at second-best a holiday that lasts and lasts," said John Updike once while accepting a Nat...

8220;Books are at best a beacon in the darkness, but at second-best a holiday that lasts and lasts,8221; said John Updike once while accepting a National Books Circle award. The Early Stories, a collection that brings together his short stories published over two decades, is both of these. It is a sturdy flame lighting up the relative gloom of contemporary short fiction, and it is also a long, delicious and unending weekend on the beach. The volume, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction this year, brings together all of Updike8217;s short stories written in the course of the first two decades 8212; twenty-two years, to be precise 8212; of his writing career. All one hundred and three stories, that is, except four. Four! And those, he tells us, he left out reluctantly. Just think 8212; while writing all these stories, he was also writing poetry, reviews, humour and, of course, all those novels. How ever does he do it, we wonder, even before we open the pages.

But the greatest wonder of all, of course, is when we do open the pages: for it is a luminous collection. Beginning with Ace in the Hole, his first story, written when he was a married Harvard senior, for a creative writing class; although The New Yorker first rejected it, they accepted it the next year. The last story, Love Song for a Moog Synthesiser, was published in 1975. The stories are presented here not in the chronological order of their publication, but thematically, in eight sections: Olinger Stories, Out in the World, Married Life, Family Life, The Two Iseults, Tarbox Tales, Far Out, and, finally, The Single Life. They seem to follow the trajectory of Updike8217;s own life: a Pennsylvania childhood, a Harvard education, marriage and children, a stint in Manhattan followed by a return to suburban life.

The stories are sometimes very male, even annoyingly so; but on the whole, this is a tremendous enterprise. There is not a detail left out, not a moment unrecorded or as David Foster Wallace remarked less charitably of Updike in general, not a single unpublished thought. Here is an example of this 8220;everythingness8221;, at once American and essentially human, in a reflection from an Olinger story, The Happiest I8217;ve Been: 8220;There was the quality of the ten a.m. sunlight as it existed in the air ahead of the windshield, filtered by the thin overcast, blessing irresponsibility 8212; you felt you could slice forever through such a cool pure element 8212; and springing, by implying how high these hills had become, a widespreading pride: Pennsylvania, your state 8212; as if you had made your life.8221;

By 1975, Updike8217;s first marriage was coming apart, and this is where the collection ends. The Maples, Joan and Richard, have separated. They have lovers. And yet, a simple gesture of hers, as Joan tells Richard something, catches his attention: 8220;The motion was eager, shy, exquisite, diffident, trusting: he saw all its meanings and knew that she would never stop gesturing within him, never; though a decree come between them, even death, her gestures would endure, cut into glass.8221;

The stories owe a great deal to the existence of magazine pages for short fiction: in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper8217;s and so on, but most notably in The New Yorker, where eighty of the stories first appeared. Without The New Yorker, as he puts it, he wouldn8217;t have been able 8220;to describe reality as it had come to me 8212; to give the mundane its beautiful due8221;.