Book Review: 'My Father's Tears and Other Stories'

The party line on John Updike is that, while his novels are pretty good, it’s his short stories that will be his true legacy. I’ve always resisted this notion, not because there’s anything wrong with Updike’s short fiction but because his novels are so good. It’s in the longer fiction that we see the extent to which, contrary to some critics, Updike had something to say—given 300 pages to stretch it out, he moves beyond his famous descriptive skills and endows characters like Rabbit Angstrom or Roger Lambert with real philosophical import. The stories, on the other hand, are over in a flash, and more than any idea, you remember the turns of phrase and the images their author packs in.

The problem is that Updike didn’t release a good novel in the last thirteen years of his life. His last winner was 1996’s In the Beauty of the Lilies, which took everything he was good at and expanded it throughout four generations of would-be saints. It somehow hits all the things you associate with Updike—sex, death, popular culture, and religion—and puts them in an unfamiliar context, far from the dulleries of suburban wife-swapping that plagued late-period novels like Villages.

I’d mostly written Updike’s final decade off, in fact, after spending the first few months of 2009 reading Gertrude and Claudius, an interesting but not particularly successful “prequel” to Hamlet, and Terrorist, which tried its best to present a sympathetic portrayal of an Islamic radical but came out weak and flaccid. (It’s not quite as bad as everyone says it is, but it’s at best a noble failure.)

So reading My Father’s Tears and Other Stories, Updike’s final book, was a revelation. (I should say that it’s his final book as far as we know—one might imagine a Prince-esque vault full of unpublished fiction and poetry in Updike’s recently sold Beverly Farms estate, but given that the man published at the rate of 1.3 books per year, I find that prospect, however titillating, unlikely.) Updike had not lost his powers; he’d only lost the ability to express them in spurts of 300 pages. Indeed, the eighteen stories in this volume rank among his most effective work, bolstered by a new sort of melancholy one does not find in the best of his novels.

It’s impossible to read My Father’s Tears and Other Stories without thinking of Updike’s death, which followed the last story in the volume (“The Full Glass”) by eight months and which preceded the publication of the collection by five. With a few exceptions (“Morocco,” first published in 1979 and dealing with events a decade earlier, being the most obvious), Updike creates shadow-selves in these stories only to watch them decay or destroy them outright. There’s thus an air of suicide here, coupled with an obvious grasp at immortality, since Updike knows people will be reading his fiction long after his body has decayed.

The selves he presents us with are familiar—most of them could easily be Rabbit Angstrom or Piet Hanema or Roger Lambert, or for that matter, the Updike we discover beneath the fiction in his memoirs, Self-Consciousness. But, presented as they are in the winter of their lives, they are simultaneously unfamiliar. They’re aware of what awaits them in months of years, aware that the life they have drank so eagerly from for decades is about to slip through their fingers.

Their reactions vary; some, like our old friend David Kern, who shows up in two stories, do everything they can to recapture the past and make it part of whatever small future they have remaining for them. In “The Walk with Elizanne,” Kern meets his first girlfriend at his high-school class’s fiftieth reunion, discovers the secret meaning of life in male-female relationships:

Elizanne, he wanted to ask her, what does it mean, this enormity of our having been children and now being old, living next door to death? He had been the age then that his grandsons were now. As he had lived, he had come to see that for a man there is no antidote to death but a woman. Yet from where, he wanted now to ask Elizanne, does a woman draw this antidote, her cosmic balm? And does it work for her as well?

The story ends with a lovely description of the titular walk, one that redeems David’s sadness at the ravages of age and makes a sacrament of their innocence and exploration. David’s spiritual brother is the unnamed narrator of “The Full Glass,” who spends the story reminiscing on his attempts—successful and otherwise—to grasp life by the horns, to truly live it, to drink from a full glass.

Other characters can’t muster this effort. Martin Fairchild, the protagonist of “The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe,” finds himself faced with a cruel and uncaring universe, devoid, the scientists tell him, of a benign or benevolent divine presence. He can transcend it only through the violence that is done to him, as when he is injured by a purse-snatcher in Seville.

But this strangely pleasing incident only goes so far, and Martin finds himself alone when he returns home. He retreats to his barn, the home of an ancient cupboard owned by his mother before her death, a home for “Souvenirs of a life of which Fairchild was the last caring witness” (151). The story’s Flannery O’Connor-esque ending allows him a final moment of transcendence of his memory and of the universe’s blind watchmaker.

Some of Updike’s protagonists finally learn morality in their final years. Updike has always been a frustrating novelist for his steadfast refusal to judge any character or to present any clear moral; combined with his own antinomian sexual history and his continued profession of belief in Christianity, he and his autobiographical characters have always been an enigma. But in several of these stories—“Free” and “Outage”—they finally learn to love their wives and submit to a conventional sexual morality. I can’t say much more without giving away the ending of the story, a move that violates Updike’s own rules for reviewing books—but it’s nice to see their author taking a stand for once.

The true gem of My Father’s Tears and Other Stories, however, is “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” written shortly after the events of September 11, 2001. Updike takes the point-of-view of four participants in the terrorist attacks—an Episcopalian who, like Updike, watched the towers crumble from Brooklyn Heights; Mohamed Atta, who hijacked Flight 11 and spends his section of the story in a strip club, drinking whiskey and trying to fit in; an elderly woman who witnesses the heroism of those aboard Flight 93, who prays for mercy seconds before hitting the ground outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania; and a bond trader on the top floor of the North Tower, who has his final conversation with his wife before jumping out the window.

Writing about such a horrific event, especially so soon after it happened, must be one of the very hardest thing an author can do, and numerous others—Don DeLillo comes to mind—have failed to produce compelling work out of the wreckage of the towers. But Updike succeeds largely because he refuses to draw conclusions; he presents these four stories without sentimentality and therefore succeeds in moving the reader. His use of religion is understated but effective; the Hand of God doesn’t appear in the wreckage, and the characters who maintain their faith in the face of tragedy do so for reasons even they don’t understand, which strikes me, at any rate, as accurate.

Aside from a few stories about his childhood—these have never particularly interested me—and a few that go nowhere (“Spanish Prelude to a Second Marriage,” for example, is overwhelmingly boring and detracts from the overall mood of the collection), My Father’s Tears and Other Stories is a moving end to the career of the person who may be the quintessential fiction writer of 20th-century America. Anyone disappointed by Seek My Face or The Widows of Eastwick would be wise to turn here before writing off Updike’s final decade.

The Ties That Bind

Maybe it’s because I’m getting married in a few weeks—that event you think about since you hit puberty but never imagine will actually take place—or maybe it’s because I want to take my mind off of the horrific murders that happened here in Athens this afternoon, but Adam Kirsch’s 2002 book of poetry, The Thousand Wells, hit me really hard today.

I’m not much of a poetry person, honestly, but Kirsch’s work is free from the excesses of modern poetry—the pretension, the nonsense, the “found objects,” etc., etc.—and the whole book is wonderfully crafted. It won the New Criterion prize the year it was released, and that makes sense. It’s classical and modern in the way that Roger Kimball would appreciate.

It’s the third section (out of four untitled divisions) that really interests me. None of the other sections appear to be more than loosely themed, but the third presents us with what is more or less a narrative arc. We begin with the cutesy “Autobiography,” in which Kirsch presents us with his romantic history as translated into ethnicities. That’s all fine and good, but the section really gets off the ground with the second poem, “One Weekend.”

The poem is harrowing, a picture of life in Kierkegaard’s aesthetic sphere. The narrator wanted to get out of his small town, wanted to go where he would “have a choice” (I.6). He wanted existential freedom, and what he got was spiritual emptiness, life in the city where “though you would hold / Fast to some things, you blink, and they are lost” (I.15-16). His supposed freedom encompasses him, smothers him:

the tide
Of option and ambition washes us
So far apart that we can barely see
The outline of the face that used to be
The morning’s first sight, peaceable and precious. (II.8-12)

Life in New York drives people apart, puts between them the palpable space of their freedom. People become Walker Percy’s Will Barrett, working underground (at night!) and blacking out for days at a time. And forget about sex; it’s an empty gesture never shared by only two people, not with the choking presence of the ghosts of everyone else they’ve slept with hanging around. At the moment of supposed closest intimacy, the narrator “know[s] I’m alone” (III.16).

And I don’t see a way out of it. At the end of the poem, the two sexual partners could conceivably commit to each other and enter Kierkegaard’s ethical sphere. The narrator sees this scenario playing out in the movie in his head. But they won’t let go of their precious freedom, the freedom that kills them: “I promise love, and faithfulness, and you / Say you are mine; and somehow it is true, / And we part weeping. No, that’s not for us” (V.10-12). This is an empty world of empty lives and empty sex. Even the laughs are cheap.

Even after the inevitable breakup, things remain in the air. In “Post-Mortem,” Kirsch bemoans his ex and the fact that “the final consummation is not hate, / Nor growing up and past to indifference, / Nor even love, but this thought of you tonight” (ll. 10-12). Everything is indefiniteness.

“A Love Letter” is clearly in a line with these two. It’s a fascinating poem, in that it seems to respond simultaneously to “Post-Mortem” and to “One Weekend,” making both of those poems somehow positive. Specifically, it brings them more explicitly into the philosophical realm. We get a vision of deconstructed emotion; the expression I love you “loses / All obvious meaning, so that when we’re through / We can’t be sure of ‘I’ or ‘love’ or ‘you’ ” (ll. 30-32). We see an attempt to break the binding nature of love, as in “One Weekend.”

But the issue is not with the word love—it’s with the lover himself. The Self has been so radically destabilized by the life it has attempted to lead that the narrator cannot be sure that he’s even the same human being who made that vow all those years ago.

But there’s hope, in that Kirsch says that “a word, we’ve learned, is an arbitrary sound / Yoked to a meaning, and will never do / To describe what’s essential, necessary, true” (ll. 118-120). That’s not what the deconstructionists would have us believe. They tell us that there is no “essential, necessary, true”—it’s not merely that words can’t describe those things, it’s that those things are completely bound up in words and thus do not exist. Kirsch maintains the existence of the thing that our words (I, love, you) cannot reach.

As such, he can find something undeconstructible—if language can’t touch something, then it can’t “explode its binaries,” no matter how many pages of unintelligible prose someone spills trying. And that something, predictably enough, is love:

Love becomes for [the lover] the Unmoved Mover
No logical proof explains or justifies;
He rejoices that in love at last he’s found
The self-evident good, the all-sustaining ground. (ll. 101-104)

It’s this “sustaining ground” that allows promises to be made and to be kept; it’s what allows the narrator and his beloved to cling fast to their vows even as the river of time flows on past them, water they can never see again. His language is important here: “That night we were pledged . . . / To love and each other” (ll. 73-74). That commitment is the solution both to the empty sex of “One Weekend” and the crushing longing of “Post-Mortem”; it’s what holds the universe together.

The next poem, “Epithalamium,” takes it even further; Kirsch blesses “the form that marriage gives to love” (l. 14). More significantly, he claims that

only the modern couple, freed
From sexual and financial need
That anciently condemned
To bondage without end,
Without embarrassment can choose
To give themselves, so serious,
Serene and dignified,
Like this groom and bride. (ll. 25-32)

It seems as though true freedom is required for commitment; only when we are given the options of empty sex and crushing longing can we truly commit ourselves to the undeconstructible Unmoved Mover that is love. Let's hope my marriage has that commitment.

Bury Me

Hello, you few readers who are left. I know it's been a bad semester in terms of posting, but I'm now done with the bulk of my coursework and will (I hope) be posting more, especially now that I've begun reading in earnest for my comprehensive exams. Be ready for months of very tiresome posts on Existentialism.

In the meantime, here's the basic plot of the two papers I wrote this semester.

"'The Snake Was There Before Adam': Faulkner's Inversion of Augustinian Ponerology." I build off of my earlier post on Quentin Compson as a failed St. Augustine but recast it in much more theological terms. In brief, I argue that Faulkner's Sanctuary presents us with a ponerology that's the exact opposite of St. Augustine. Here, good is a privation of evil, and it is the male element that most clearly signifies nothingness. As femaleness is biologically a lack of maleness, so good is a lack of evil. This is a bleak worldview, especially since the mingling of female and male is necessary for the race's survival.

"More Art with Less Matter: Anxiety of Meaninglessness in 'Gertrude and Claudius.'" I examine Updike's much-neglected "prequel" to Hamlet and argue that, in its inversion of "good" and "bad" characters and its influx of religious and theological references--Claudius at one point or another represents just about every religion ever conceived--Updike turns Hamlet from a mere tragedy to something much, much darker: a negation of all meaning, be it interpersonal, religious, or philosophical.

I guess it's been a dark semester, you might say. More later.

Judge Vilhelm Replies

I've been reading noted literary critic James Wood's first and only novel, The Book Against God and am enjoying it as much as I enjoy his criticism in The New Yorker. It's the story of Thomas Bunting, who's a seventh-year PhD student in philosophy who can't finish his dissertation because of a much more pressing and elaborate project, the Book Against God, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

I'm not too far into the novel just yet, but I suspect what we've got here is a portrait of the Kierkegaardian religious sphere removed from believe in God. (I doubt Wood, who I think is an atheist, intended such a meaning, but thank the Lord or evolution for the Death of the Author.) Thomas Bunting is, in my early analysis, a sociopath, a man who lies compulsively and feels no remorse, who can't find a philosophical difference "between lying to one's wife and lying to a corporation." This statement horrified me at first, but upon further analysis, it's akin to what I was taught growing up in a Southern Baptist church: No hierarchy of sins exists, and theologically if not practically, they are all the same. (I am interested to know if other brands of Christianity teach such an idea.) At any rate, Thomas ends up as a moral absolutist of sorts, even though he rejects morality.

So it makes sense that he describes Nietzsche as "one of my favorite philosophers," since his views echo the German's, specificially the essay "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense." Nietzsche, a consummate atheist, argues that since consciousness "has no further mission that might extend beyond the bounds of human life," truth is

A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjective to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike people as firmly established, canonical, and binding; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions.

Morality is therefore irrelevant to Nietzsche, and the prohibition against lying is a social construction and has no intrinsic value.

(I've often said that Nietzsche is the atheist I respect the most because he is the one who is unafraid to face directly the logical conclusion of materialism, that is, that there is no such thing as right and wrong or as value. We have no reason to do "the right thing," and further, we have no grounds on which to condemn anyone for doing something we find horrifying.)

Wood's book has value not just on its own terms, then, but because of what it suggests about Nietzsche, i.e., that he exists in the religious sphere without belief in God. But first: What on earth do I mean by the religious sphere? I wrote my thesis using this schema, so please bear with me as I ramble on . . .

Kierkegaard posits three spheres of existence, each of which telescopes and contains the one that precedes it. He does so chiefly in three books: Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, and Stages on Life's Way. The first sphere, the sphere in which most of us exist, is the aesthetic. The aesthete defines himself entirely by himself. He lives in his own head and has little genuine connection to the outside world. His relationships are thus necessarily strained, and indeed, the aesthetic resembles what Heidegger would later call the being-against-one-another (exactly what it sounds like). The aesthete believes himself to be happy but is deeply alienated--his sole goal in life is pleasure and more specifically, to avoid boredom, which after all is "the root of all evil."

A person enters the ethical sphere when he commits to a particular idea or theory, when he attaches himself to something outside of himself. Kierkegaard's example is of marriage, but the ethical could be any belief system--most religious folks are in the ethical sphere rather than the religious. (We shall see why in just a moment.) Walker Percy says that the great ethicists of our age are the artist and the scientist, and he suggests that both of them are in quiet despair, especially the artist. Reason and logic also belong to the ethical sphere.

The religious sphere is entered only when a person lays aside the ethical sphere in what Kierkegaard calls a "teleological suspension of the ethical" (later theologians would call it the "leap of faith," a term which Mr. K never uses). Kierkegaard's famous example is Abraham, who turned his back on the laws of society when God told him to sacrifice his son. One lays aside the ethical not to serve oneself but to serve God, and it's very important that this is not a teleological abandoning of the ethical but merely a suspension--Abraham is a knight of faith not because he was willing to sacrifice his son but because he knew that God would restore him. The religious sphere is a realm of pure subjectivity, and a person is enthralled only to God. Not very many people make it, and Kierkegaard says nothing, as far as I know, about what a person stuck in the religious with no belief in God would look like.

But I think Wood gives us just that, and here's why: Thomas Bunting's wife dislikes people "for only two reasons: it's either something murkily musical, or something elusively ethical." But he is unable to understand her system of demerits and demotion, and this failure to understand suggests a failure to understand both the aesthetic and the ethical. (The reasons for the ethical should be obvious, but Kierkegaard suggests that music belongs to the aesthetic sphere.) With those two spheres eliminated, Thomas has only one place to live, the religious, and given his affinity for Nietzschean thought, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that Nietzsche, too, exists in this sphere.

This connection explains the similarities between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche--I have often said that their ideas are basically the same, although they start from opposite places. They may meet here in the religious sphere, even if Nietzsche is unaware of it.

Chay-BONE!

I don't remember actually buying Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, although I suspect my purchase was prompted by my viewing of the Michael Douglas film Wonder Boys, adapted from an earlier Chabon novel. But I remember reading it at a fever pitch, including one long, hot October afternoon in which I sat on my back porch, smoked an entire pack of Camel Turkish Golds, and polished off the last 300 pages of it.

Kavalier is a contemporary masterpiece--it takes that whole "hysterical realism" thing you see in people like David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Jonathan Lethem, in which the books are incredibly long and peppered with legitimate historical research and facts, and takes it to its artistic peak. Chabon seamlessly integrates a fictional story with real characters and events from the 1940s and 1950s comic-book world, and it does so so well that when I watched a history of superheroes on the History Channel a few weeks ago, I was a little surprised not to see The Escapist included.

(Note: I've not read Wallace, so I suppose I'm not really qualified to call Kavalier and Clay the artistic peak of hysterical realism. I've read Franzen, though, and I enjoy both his nonfiction essays for The New Yorker and his massive, Oprah-approved novel The Corrections. I've also read Lethem's horrible The Fortress of Solitude.)

At any rate, when I went to Jackson Street Books on Monday, I poked around for awhile and found a relatively inexpensive first edition of Chabon's 2002 follow-up to Kavalier, Summerland, and of course I bought it. It's an odd book so far (I'm about 50 pages in), and not odd the way Kavalier was. For one thing, it's written on the level of juvenile fiction, not too far removed from the Harry Potter books and similar to them in that it speaks on an eleven-year-old's level without talking down to him at all. And there's magic here, too--a talking fox/monkey who can jump from branch to branch on the Great Tree of Existence; a mystical corner of the earth where it was always summer and now isn't; an evil coyote. And the list goes on.

Summerland was apparently written as a piece of juvenile fiction, but I'm waiting to see if it's meant for adults as well, if it utilizes the form and conventions of that genre in order to make its point. I'm not sure what that point is just yet, but I know it's deeply immersed in American mythology: baseball, an innocent small-town stuck in the 1950s, people making a living through the imagination--even Native American tricksters. In the meantime, I'm not enjoying this the way I enjoyed Kavalier and Clay. It lacks that book's sense of urgency, of deep existential need. It's replaced by whimsy, which isn't bad, but it's never the same.

It may be that I've moved past the point where I can enjoy young-adult literature--I've never really liked the Harry Potter books either. I hope my readers don't take that as some sort of proclamation of my maturity and a statement on how I've moved beyond your vulgar tastes. I'm pretty sure it's really a self-indictment.