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John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. Since 1957 he has lived in Massachusetts. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Howells Medal.
Updike has written 50 books. This collection contains a new Bech story, a number of reflective, longish stories and a novella about Harry 'Rabbit' Anstrom's family, ten years after his death. As in his whole career, Updike's honesty and frankness comes wonderfully well written. His eye for the detail of American life, from the streets of his native Pennsylvania to the art galleries of New York, is as sharp as ever. Perhaps sharper. For this collection has a very distinct theme: looking back on an America which is passing, from the innocent habits of childhood to the more complex memories of past love affairs. Updike is, in a quiet way, in a frenzy of remembrance, and the result is very moving, as if a master wants to capture and define his sense of America, to leave a literary memorial. For my money, the Rabbit books are his great masterpiece. Where Bellow writes about himself, thinly disguised and Roth is best on his own family, Updike, the third of the trilogy of great American male writers, has invested to soul of Harry Angstrom with all the conceits, trickery, indulgence and lovable failings of a generation. But it is also a vivid literary creation which will live forever. The great success of the books is that Updike has created a character who, although familiar with the part of the world where Updike grew up, is unlike his creator. Angstrom is uneducated, crass, a schoolboy hero gone to seed, a poor father, and fatally self-indulgent. Yet he is so vividly alive on the page that I, for one, have missed him since Updike killed him off in 1989. Now, through the memories of his wife and children and the appearance of a daughter born as the result of an affair, he comes back to trouble his family. In the end, they side with him against his detractors, perhaps Updike's generous valediction. The other stories, including Bech, are mostly about forgotten lovers, from high school to early adulteries. Some of these come from the other great swathe of Updike's output, the Tarbox novels; others from his memories of his family. All are new stories; all are full of intelligence and frankness. A wonderful book. Review by JUSTIN CARTWRIGHT (Kirkus UK)
