The stories [in Too Far to Go] are consecutive,… and the same characters, Richard and Joan Maple, and the same themes—love, domesticity and infidelity, permanence and evanescence, blood and death—appear throughout. Together the stories form a single unit, rather like an Updike novel, rather like the Maples' marriage, a luxurious slow slide from grace, a 20-year trajectory from innocence to decadence.

The Maples begin, certainly, in innocence…. But they end, like the students in the butchers' school next to the church—two emblems that figure in the first story, "Snowing in Greenwich Village"—"all bloody and laughing." (p. E1)

Richard Maple is stubbornly determined to hold on to the aura of innocence while embracing the pleasures of decadence, rather like a spoiled child….

Updike's protagonists always get the housewife up the street. It turns out she is much like the wife at home: intelligent, pretty, vaguely...