Compelling and revealing and brought off with superb control of language and theme, [Problems and Other Stories] confirms Updike's growing position as the foremost master of the genre in our time.

The stories … appear in chronological order and together form an unusually lucid record of many of the social themes and influences of the decade just past. From the smooth perfection of the television commercial to the increasing gains of the psychoanalyst as the mythical father of being for the modern psyche, Updike's telling prose captures images of the recent past with a kind of comic sadness which gives the reader a needed perspective and a sense of his own place in the spectrum of time.

Updike's central subject in these stories is the impact of the sexual revolution on the American family and particularly on the male psyche. Probably no other writer of the present generation has...