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Journalism of Courage
When John Updike passed away this past winter,obituary writers struggled to encompass all of his work into their appraisals. Most did not manage. Updikes output as a poet,essayist,reviewer and short story writer was mostly eclipsed by assessments of his amazing novels,especially the Rabbit series. This posthumously collected volume of short stories,most of them published over the last few years,is therefore valuable for more than the stories it contains. It offers that unique pleasure gained while reading the very best and long established writers of fiction: finding a space on the periphery with their lesser works to be returned to a sense of awe that somehow will not come while rereading their big books.
These are stories about ageing,about confronting the deaths and departures of old loves and acquaintances,and looking back and finding that in the strange disorientation of loss,one is returned to ones younger self for an inner compass to get a measure of ones life.
As a tool to reflect on what the characters once were and how much those old selves define them,Updike predictably resorts to high-school reunions. There is often,equally predictably,the consideration of freedom offered by disentanglement from family ties. But it is the title story that is the most expansive. The narrator takes stock of the deaths of his loved ones,of his divorce from his first wife,and also of the changes that have come to the urban geography of his native town. The old Alton station was his kind of place,savoring of transit and the furtive small pleasures of city life. I had bought my first pack of cigarettes here,with no protest from the man running the newsstand I lit up a block from the station,as I remember,and even though I didnt know how to inhale my nerves took a hit; the sidewalk seemed to lift toward me and the whole world felt lighter. From that day forward I began to catch up,socially,with the more glamorous of my peers,who already smoked. Years later,passenger service has ceased to the town,and the station is padlocked. But the narrator is still defined by the tear he saw in his fathers eye glistening in the sunshine,at the station,and of the shove that early passage to cool intellectualism that station gave him.
Updike,for a small subset of his readers,will always be treasured most for his book reviews,his undiminished capacity to inhabit a book so as to tell of its worth from within. In a breathtaking way,these stories so obviously not Updikes best attest to that capacity.
