My Father’s Tears by John Updike

Since College, I have been a big fan of Fantasy and Science Fiction books but every so often I come across the works of realist fiction writers and I get hooked. John Updike is one of those realist writers whose works I have come to enjoy. They make me think about God, religion and the foibles of the human being whose spirit is willing but whose flesh is weak.

It’s just sad that John Updike died at the ripe age of 76 earlier this year. He will be best remembered as one of America’s greatest writers, poet and critic. But he is best known for his short stories. Thankfully, before he died, he completed one last collection of short stories–My Father’s Tears and Other Stories.

My Father’s Tears and Other Stories include eighteen stories arranged in the order of their writing as was Updike’s wont. These stories explore the own psyche of the writer as he comes toward the closing journey of his human life. They delve into the frailties of old age, the fear of old men and women, unfulfilled desires, frustrations, the demise of close friends and classmates, wrestling with Alzheimer’s disease and a whole lot more.

According to Ron Hansen of the Washington Post,

In general the characters are flush New Englanders with children and grandchildren, who have the wealth for exotic travel and the luxury of time for reminiscence or, as Updike calls it, “personal archaeology.” Hints of death and dying faintly tinge every story, but there is no pathos or urging to not go gently into that good night; there is just the realist’s ironic shrug over the way things are and a healthy appreciation for the largely unrecognized heroism of facing life’s decline, as when a character remembers that “for two years he had lain beside Irene feeling her disease growing like a child of theirs. He had stayed awake in the shadow of her silence, marvelling at the stark untouchable beauty of her stoicism. In the dark her pain had seemed an incandescence.”

The story “My Father’s Tears” begins with a narrator very much like Updike recalling how his father cried as his son left Pennsylvania for Harvard, having foreseen “that the boy I had been was dying if not already dead, and we would have less and less to do with each other. My life had come out of his, and now I was stealing away with it.” Contrasted with that memory are those of his first wife’s father, a serene Unitarian minister in St. Louis who vacationed in a Vermont farmhouse each summer and invited the newly married couple there.”

Here’s another excerpt of a review from Amazon.com:

MY FATHER’S TEARS is the last in a sterling lineup of stories from the master storyteller John Updike, who passed away in January 2009. With 18 tales in all, the book has a wide range of characters, themes, times and settings. But all of them have a common thread — that of delving into the human spirit and capturing the emotion of the moment. And they were previously published in various magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s and The New Yorker.

My Father’s Tears and Other Stories is a book on the twilight of one’s life and an attempt to recapture the past while making sense of the present. The collection presents the excellent narrative skills of Updike although readers who have come to love his novels may be put off by the short length and the fast pace of these stories. Nonetheless, old age did not diminish Updike’s talent and his stories are still as striking as his previous ones.

My Father’s Tears and Other Stories is available in Hardcover and in downloadable format at Amazon.com.

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