John Updike is an éminence grise of the short-story form. I imagine him writing them almost in his sleep, determined to retain a scrap of dream even as he dreams it. In Problems … Updike once again demonstrates how circumscribed his world is and how good he is within its limits.
Updike's style—his finicky choice of words, his love of adjectives—is a linguistic fence. The very mastery of it insures order, guarding certain subjects and keeping others out. Guilt, for instance, is a topic that nestles inside his dazzlingly-wrought sentences: "A guilt-gem is a piece of the world that has volunteered for compression. Those souls around us, living our lives with us, are gaseous clouds of being awaiting a condensation and preservation—faces, lights that glimmer out, somehow not seized, save in this gesture of remorse." ("Guilt-Gems") Crisis and tumult, on the other hand, are topics that are indirectly shut out by Updike's unremittingly attentive and courteous language. His stories seem to begin at a well-constructed distance from the immediacy of the emotion—hurt, anger or sorrow—that generated them. There is, in fact, something curiously closed about his vision; everything—children, wives, ex-wives, egg-races, sex, conversations—tends to get drenched in the pale-gold light of nostalgia…. Like Cheever, Updike is a sucker for poignancy; somewhere along the way all of his stories evoke that sense of "irrecoverable loss," even when the source of the feeling isn't entirely clear.
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