The Afterlife and Other Stories by John Updike

From one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Rabbit series: twenty-two stories that explore life beyond middle age. To Carter Billings, the hero of John Updike's title story, all of England has the glow of an afterlife: A miraculous lacquer lay upon everything, beading each roadside twig, each reed of thatch in the cottage roofs, each tiny daisy trembling in the grass. All twenty-two of the stories in this collection--John Updike's eleventh--in various ways partake of this glow, as life beyond middle age is explored and found to have its own particular wonders, from omniscient golf caddies to precinct sexual rumors, from the deaths of mothers and brothers-in-law to the births of grandchildren. As death approaches, life takes on, for some of these aging heroes, a translucence, a magical fragility; vivid memory and casual misconception lend the mundane an antic texture, and the backward view, lengthening, acquires a certain grandeur. Travel, whether to England or Ireland, Italy or the isles of Greece, heightens perceptions and tensions. As is usual in Mr. Updike's fiction, spouses quarrel, lovers part, children are brave, and houses with their dcor have the presence of personalities. His is a world where innocence stubbornly persists, and fresh beginnings almost outnumber losses. Editorial Reviews As Updike himself edges into his 60s, so do the narrators and protagonists of most of these 22 beautifully crafted stories, all of them meticulously honest and gracefully ironic. ``In the winter of their lives,'' most of these aging men have been married more than once-adultery is endemic in their social sphere (sophisticated communities up and down the Eastern seaboard). They have not achieved the happiness they expected, however, and they have reason to think back wistfully to the women they first married, when life seemed full of promise-especially since their second and third wives carry a ``weight of anger'' and resentment, augmented by feminism. These men are chillingly aware that even intimate connections prove superficial; the protagonist of ``Grandparenting'' perceives that ``nobody belongs to us, except in memory.'' Sometimes insight is healing: in two stories concerning George, a beset older man married to Vivian, a contentious woman 20 years his junior, George achieves the serenity of acceptance: ``his used old heart cracked open and peace entered.'' And in two of the most powerful tales, the title story and ``Baby's First Steps,'' a minor accident gives a man a glimpse of his mortality, yet existence is henceforth tinged with sudden magic. The relationships between sons and mothers-elderly, dying, dead-fuel many of these tales, which are rendered with a brave candor. Inspired whimsy and a touch of the supernatural invest a standout story, ``Farrell's Caddie,'' and ``Cruise'' is a modern-day Greek myth cloaked with wit. This volume marks the 42nd of Updike's books to be published by Knopf; one looks forward to the changing perspective (though not changing themes) that each decade brings to this masterful writer's work. BOMC and QPB club alternates. (Nov.) - Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly In Olinger Stories (1964), Updike wrote knowingly about the pangs of adolescence. In Too Far To Go (1979), he focused with equal insight on the family and material crises typical of middle age. Now, after publishing more than 40 volumes of fiction, poetry, and essays, he concentrates on aging protagonists and the abundant evidence of mortality that surrounds them. In these mellow, reflective stories, where parents die and grandchildren are born, Updike's heroes are acutely aware of lost glory yet discover the strength to persevere. In Short Easter, for example, the start of daylight-saving time cuts an hour off the holiday, and this odd truncation evokes for the central character larger personal losses. As usual, Updike's narration is masterful, but a few stories seem to be reworkings of the same basic plot. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/94.]-Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville - Library Journal As Updike ages, so his characters age. That's not to say, though, that he's over the hill; if anything, he's king of it. He's never been keener in observing our motivations, particularly how we love and lust. His style is more sharp-edged while not losing any of its famed sensuousness. This latest collection contains 22 stories, most of them previously published in the New Yorker. The title story introduces the general theme and tone of the collection with its first line: The Billingses, so settled in their ways, found in their fifties that their friends were doing sudden, surprising things. One of the couples they know move to England, and three years later, the Billingses visit them. The trip bears witness to Carter Billings that life in its second half has a different tenor. This same theme is also expressed in the two-part George and Vivian. In part one, Aperto, Chiuso, we meet George, nearly 60, and his third wife, Vivian, nearly 40, during a trip to Italy. The difference in their ages and the consequent difference in their reactions to their Italian experiences tax the marriage and George's understanding of it. In the second part, Bluebeard in Ireland, they're on vacation again two years later, now on the Emerald Isle, and their marital strain compels George to ponder taking a fourth wife. No one can write descriptive passages as beautifully as Updike, and no one senses the pressure points in relationships as surely and sensitively as he. - Brad Hooper Marvelously moving . . . These tales evoke a certain peace and a definite wonder at what an astonishingly graceful writer Updike is.--USA Today Quintessential Updike . . . These tales are elegies for lost youth and receding passions.--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times If one trait can account for John Updike's staying power, it is the man's exquisite grasp of ordinary miracles. . . . With his small mirages, his puddles left by both the heroic and the damned, Updike can turn the simple, misguided efforts of a man into a signature of song.--The Boston Globe - From the Publisher