John Updike: Collected Early Stories (LOA #242) (Library of America John Updike Edition) Hardcover – September 12, 2013

Excellent collection of stories.

Here are what stories are included in this volume:Ace in the HoleFriends from PhiladelphiaA Game of BotticelliTomorrow and Tomorrow and So ForthDentistry and DoubtThe Kid’s WhistlingToward EveningSnowing in Greenwich VillageWho Made Yellow Roses Yellow?His Finest HourSunday TeasingThe Lucid Eye in Silver TownA Trillion Feet of GasIncestA Gift from the CityIntercessionThe AlligatorsThe Happiest I’ve BeenWalter BriggsThe Persistence of DesireStill LifeFlightShould Wizard Hit Mommy?Dear AlexandrosA Sense of ShelterWife-wooingPigeon FeathersHomeArchangelThe Sea’s Green SamenessYou’ll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love YouThe AstronomerA & PThe Doctor’s WifeLifeguardThe Crow in the WoodsThe Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother’s Thimble, and Fanning IslandPacked Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded CarUnstuckIn Football SeasonThe IndianA MadmanMy Uncle’s DeathSolitaireLeavesThe StareMuseums and WomenAvec la Bébé-sitterFour Sides of One StoryThe MorningAt a Bar in Charlotte AmalieThe Christian RoommatesMy Lover Has Dirty FingernailsEclipseHarv Is Plowing NowThe Music SchoolThe RescueThe DarkGod SpeaksThe Bulgarian PoetessThe Family MeadowMan and Daughter in the ColdThe HermitDuring the JurassicThe WitnessesThe ProThe SlumpUnder the MicroscopeThe CornerThe Day of the Dying RabbitI Am Dying, Egypt, DyingCemeteriesThe DeaconI Will Not Let Thee Go, Except Thou Bless MeOne of My GenerationThe HilliesThe Orphaned Swimming PoolPlumbingThe Carol SingMinutes of the Last MeetingThe BaluchitheriumThe Tarbox PoliceWhen Everyone Was PregnantThe BelovedThe Invention of the Horse CollarJesus on HonshuCommercialThe Gun ShopBelieversHow to Love America and Leave It at the Same TimeNevadaSonDaughter, Last Glimpses ofEthiopiaTransactionAugustine’s ConcubineKillingThe Chaste PlanetA Constellation of EventsThe Man Who Loved Extinct MammalsProblemsLove Song, for a Moog Synthesizer

Updike is no Cheever (the master of this subject area), but in his youth he had zip, panache, nerve, and verve (all learned from Nabokov). Light fun reading of a night. Easy, breezy, uncomplicated, entertaining. The New Yorker level of writing, which is where virtually all of this work first appeared. If you want something more substantial, more nutritious, more challenging, try any or all of the authors in my title. They are geniuses of the short story form. And, to reverse the cliche: Perfection IS the enemy of the (merely) good. More power to it.

I finished the 876 pages and 102 stories in the first volume of The Library of America edition of John Updikes’s Collected Stories eager to take up the second volume. I had read many of the stories when they originally appeared in The New Yorker, as early as when I was an undergraduate at the beginning of the 1960s, but enjoyed coming to them again and experiencing their overwhelming cumulative effect.You (and Mary McCarthy) can have the Rabbit novels. For this reader, the greatest gift from Updike is his short stories. With the exception of a rare few decided duds, even the stories that don’t ultimately work keep you reading with interest and reward. They may occasionally disappoint in the end, but they almost never disappoint along the way.How to explain this? Well, for one thing, from the beginning of his career Updike had an uncommon way with arresting and memorable detail. From his 1957 story “Intercession”: “The man was freckled and iron-haired, except for red eyebrows; they stood out from his forehead like car-door handles.” How’s that for vivid?Here”s the opening to his 1961 “Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car”:“Different things move us. I, David Kern, am always affected — reassured, nostalgically pleased, even as a member of my animal species, made proud — by the sight of bare earth that has been smoothed and packed firm by the passage of human feet. Such spots abound in small towns: the furtive break in the playground fence dignified into a thoroughfare, the trough of dust underneath each swing, the blurred path worn across a wedge of grass, the anonymous little mound or embankment polished by play and strewn with pebbles like the confetti aftermath of a wedding. “From his 1965 story “The Stare”: “When she laughed, her teeth were bared like a skull’s, and when she stared, her great, grave, perfectly shaped eyes insisted on their shape like a statue’s.” (The dates I’m citing are the dates of first publication. This 1965 story was actually submitted to The New Yorker in 1962.)Updike also has the signature ability to illuminate the deepest and most basic human emotions and thereby strike a strong chord in a reader. In the 1959 story “Home,” one of his most moving early works, a young man is returning to the home of his childhood: “… he was intensely excited, and grew more so as in folds of familiarity the land tightened around him.” “Folds of familiarity”— Yes, yes, that’s our Updike, a master who was never afraid to court loveliness (or shy about often locating it in the erotic.)In his 1965 story “The Rescue,” a brief appearance by a young member of a ski patrol team gets this sharp assessment: “His red ears protruded and his face swirled with freckles; he was so plainly delighted to be himself, so clearly somebody’s cherished son, that Caroline had to smile.” So has a reader.As early as the late 1950s or early 1960s, Updike more or less announced in his work that he was aiming for greatness. Hey — Joyce could do that; why not Updike? He named his forbears and set out. Well, by God, the fact of the matter is that he delivered.An anthologist, able to include only one story by Updike, might go crazy trying to make the choice.Updike’s keen eye ever informs the work. From his remarkable 1969 story “The Corner’: “He was a stocky young man, with hair combed wet, so the tooth furrows showed.” That story, a strong contender if I were the anthologist, closes with this:“The driver’s story had been strange, but no stranger, to the people who live here, than the truth that the corner is one among many on the map of the town, and the town is a dot on the map of the state, and the state is a mere patch on the globe, and the globe is invisible from any of the stars overhead.”From the 1972 “The Gun Shop”: “Ben noticed in the dead grass the rusty serrate shapes of strawberry leaves, precise as fossils.”Later in that same story, an old man has “the erect carriage of a child who is straining to see.”In the closing to his 1973 “Daughter, Last Glimpses Of”, the narrator is still adjusting to having a rooster in his yard. Of its morning crowing: “He never moderates his joy, though I am gradually growing deafer to it. That must be the difference between soulless creatures and human beings: creatures find every dawn remarkable as the ones previous, whereas the soul grows calluses.”Updike never scrimps on language, and why should he when he has so much of it at his disposal? From his 1970 story “The Deacon”: “They go to drive-in movies, and sit islanded in acres of fornication.” (Every writer might do well to occasionally venture a word that Spell Check does not recognize.)Yes, it has to be said that Updike’s language sometimes becomes cluttered, precious or overwrought, but just when you’re thinking that, he’ll do something that takes your breath away, brings you to tears or makes you smile and lets you forgive: All right, Updike, go on.If purchased together, the two volumes of The Library of America edition, with their archival pages bound in full cloth with a sewn-in ribbon bookmark, come in a protective slipcase featuring a striking reductive portrait of the author by the late Alex Katz. (Updike’s own early training was in the visual arts.) Edited by Christopher Carduff, each volume also comes with a chronology that amounts to a succinct biography, as well as a record of previous publication and helpful endnotes. (Going through the publication record, I agreed with New Yorker editor William Maxwell on the handful of stories — particularly “I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying” and “The Beloved” —that he declined.)

As great as Updike's best novels were, to my mind, he was truly at his most consistent best in the short story medium. This volume and its companion volume II (Collected Later Stories) contain all of his published stories, as well as a few rarities/variants, and is the first to be arranged chronologically by date of publication. As much as he did in the Rabbit tetrology, in his short fiction Updike seems to capture the full range of pleasures, contradictions, and deeply felt passions of the American middle class (and more often upper middle suburban), as its warriors, lovers, and often warring-lovers negotiated the shoals of married life from the era of Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower, through the era of the Clintons. Since Updike's work is clearly self-recommending, I need not say more, except to those who know him mostly through the Rabbit books: the short stories offer Updike at his most delicious -- and precise -- best. Please note, that LOA also offers Vol I & 2 in a handsome box set at a lower price than if purchased individually John Updike: The Collected Stories