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Title: The Early Stories : 1953-1975 by John Updike ISBN: 1-4000-4072-8 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 21 October, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.8 (5 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Only Human
Comment: I think that in many important ways, John Updike is America's best living writer, with a long history of unmatched insights and integrity, complex and believable characters, and a range that stretches (with great success) from criticism to essays and from poetry to prose.
The Early Stories is a testament to and a forum examining the fiction side of Mr. Updike's talents, including every short story (every one!) he ever published up until 1975, when he was 43 years old. This book is more than 800 pages long, and so I assume that the post-1975 stories were held out both in order to make sure the book could be lifted without strain or (more likely) as the stuff for a second mammoth volume of this great writer's work.
Most of us already know at least a few of the 102 stories in this thick book (I read one, "A & P," when I was in high school, long before I became a fan of Mr. Updike's work, and I didn't even realize he had been the author of it until I saw it again here), and many of the ones we don't know will reveal themselves as gems. But also -- fortunately or unfortunately -- many of the stories here simply don't work: the plots are either dated, or the characters or their motivations are too thin.
Curiously, I am unsure about whether this is positive or negative. I dismiss the possibility that the uneven quality here is natural when examining the work of a young writer not yet fully in control of his powers. After all, Mr. Updike had already created his two most memorable characters -- Rabbit Angstrom and Henry Bech (who appears in this book) -- before most of these stories came to life.
Instead, I see this as welcome proof that Mr. Updike is human, that he doesn't produce something awe inspiring every time his pen touches paper. That's the same realization I had when I saw my boyhood sports hero, quarterback Bob Greise, in a live game for the first time and all he seemed to do was get sacked and throw interceptions and incomplete passes all afternoon. In both cases, it's not the way I would have written the script, but perhaps it makes the truly great performances (and they are here, too) seem even better.
Rating: 4
Summary: Updike's Big Themes
Comment: I don't normally write Amazon reviews, but I agree with a previous reviewer that the hoopla for this book is not what it should be. Yes, yes, there are stories in here that don't work; but Updike is extraordinary in his Big Themes, and those come through wonderfully in this volume. I wanted to highlight three of them in this review.
(1) The recurring Richard and Joan Maple stories: Updike has a gift for peaking in on a set of characters every 5 years or so without skipping a beat. This, of course, is what the Rabbit Angstrom books do in novel form. In The Early Stories, Updike does this with the Maples in short story form. In each case, he captures their dialog and sarcastic exchanges as if he is writing their stories at the same time; when in fact they are stretched over twenty years.
(2) Prescient name-dropping: In the Rabbit Angstrom books, Updike fortuitously has the auto dealership affiliated with Toyota in the 1960s, which comes to great use in the 1970s. Here in The Early Stories, there is frequent reference to names which will recur in the future in American history; most interesting, Senator Al Gore (Sr).
(3) Love triangle dynamics: To Updike, the party that loses in a married man/married woman/woman mistress triangle is the woman mistress; he plays out this theme in various scenarios. I would suggest Updike's thesis is different than the norm, but one he writes about repeatedly.
Rating: 5
Summary: Updike Redux
Comment: This one-volume collection of virtually all of Updike's short stories published before 1975 gives older Updike readers yet a third bite at the apple. The majority of these stories could first be encountered as they were published in the New Yorker; most were then reprinted in the occasional story collections Updike interspersed between the appearance of his major novels; and now, with this collection, faithful readers can re-encounter these stories for a third time, in their (perhaps) final form and context, where they form a dense if fleetingly glimpsed narrative, recognizably autobiographical at points, which collectively has the heft and span of Updike's novelistic ambitions. More than one reviewer has likened the experience of reading these stories in their present form to that of reading an extended novel. The stories have different heroes with different names, and different narrative voices; but from the earliest (the "Olinger Stories"), through the periods of early marriage, years abroad, work, family, raising children, and divorce, to the later stories of loss and impending middle age -- throughout, an unexpectedly vast and coherent narrative territory emerges, one that is recognizably Updike's but surprising in its consistency over such an extended period of work. Who could have suspected, encountering these dispatches from the suburban marital front in the New Yorker, where they had to wend their way through defiles of sybaritic advertisements, that the wars they reported on were going to last a lifetime, or that the author of those dispatches, on the evidence of this volume, was committed to giving us the whole story, seriously and lyrically, from beginning to end? They can now be read shorn of all their contingent New Yorker baggage. Some of those collected here ("A&P," "Pigeon Feathers," "Eros Rampant," "The Gun Shop," to choose only a few) are surely some of Updike's best work in any form. Updike appears now to be in a summing-up mood; the subtitles, like this one, turn retrospective. This is fit and proper, and opens up the pleasant prospect of hefting in one's hand a future collection entitled "John Updike: The Middle Stories" -- and beyond. "The Early Stories" can now be seen as the earlier work of one of the very few American writers for whom the phrase "life's work" still has its old, honorable, heroic connotation.
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Title: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Edith Grossman, Harold Bloom ISBN: 0060188707 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 21 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Old School by Tobias Wolff ISBN: 0375401466 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 04 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edith Grossman ISBN: 1400041341 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 04 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: The John Updike Audio Collection CD by John Updike, Updike John ISBN: 0060577215 Publisher: HarperAudio Pub. Date: 14 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Rabbit Angstrom : The Four Novels : Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, Rabbit at Rest (Everyman's Library) by John Updike ISBN: 0679444599 Publisher: Everyman's Library Pub. Date: 17 October, 1995 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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