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SHORT STORIES:My Father’s Tears and Other StoriesBy John Updike Hamish Hamilton, 292pp, £18.99
IT IS THE strangest feeling. Usually the arrival of a new book from John Updike is cause for celebration; somehow, perhaps, all may still be well with the world. But this time it’s different; the volume appears – and it is a beautiful book – but you find yourself swallowing hard. This time the book seems to have come complete with a wryly ironic shrug from Updike confirming with that familiar half-knowing, half-embarrassed clever schoolboy smirk: “this time it really is goodbye.” And so it is – the untimely passing of John Updike, a literary man who wore his love of language and story and life as lightly as his wide ranging erudition, continues to shock. Even at 76 it came too soon. Never as intense or as self-absorbed as his peers, Bellow and Roth, Updike the detached, playful Wasp patrician was alert to the respective nuances of Jewish and Black America, and was the laureate that Obama needed. Here was a writer content in enduring a life-long skin complaint, who loved his country, acknowledged its flaws and its glories and always understood people for what we are because he never forgot he was one of us, a dreamer and a sinner, a lover and a liar. His gracefully fluent, shimmering prose evokes individual lives, and with them the relentless passing of time.
