The Afterlife and Other Stories

By John Updike and María Luisa Balseiro

Book Overview

From one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Rabbit series: twenty-two stories that explore life beyond middle age.

To Carter Billings, the hero of John Updike's title story, all of England has the glow of an afterlife: "A miraculous lacquer lay upon everything, beading each roadside twig, each reed of thatch in the cottage roofs, each tiny daisy trembling in the grass."

All twenty-two of the stories in this collection--John Updike's eleventh--in various ways partake of this glow, as life beyond middle age is explored and found to have its own particular wonders, from omniscient golf caddies to precinct sexual rumors, from the deaths of mothers and brothers-in-law to the births of grandchildren. As death approaches, life takes on, for some of these aging heroes, a translucence, a magical fragility; vivid memory and casual misconception lend the mundane an antic texture, and the backward view, lengthening, acquires a certain grandeur.

Travel, whether to England or Ireland, Italy or the isles of Greece, heightens perceptions and tensions. As is usual in Mr. Updike's fiction, spouses quarrel, lovers part, children are brave, and houses with their d?cor have the presence of personalities. His is a world where innocence stubbornly persists, and fresh beginnings almost outnumber losses.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679435832
• ISBN13: 9780679435839
• Release Date: October 1994
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.5" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

A master at work

These stories are signature Updike. They are masterworks in description of the material things of the world, of settings , scenes, locales. They too are masterful in presenting and probing problematic human situations. Many of the stories focus on post- middle- age discontents and desires, with adultery usually being somewhere in the background. The protagonists have often been married more than once. To my mind the most powerful story in the work simply because it seems to touch the deepest layer of human feeling is ' A Sandstone Farmhouse'. This is a story it seems to me Updike has written many times. It is the story of going home again , the story of the late middle- aged man who in telling the story of visits to the home of his dying mother tells again the story of his own childhood. It is the weak father and the frustrated more energetic mother and the single child whose precociousness and sensitivity in observation are that of the future Updike himself. It is remarkable as many of these stories are in its exemplifying Updike 's magical metaphorical descriptive style. But it has a strength most of the other stories lack in that it seems to truly express Updike's deepest feeling. It is not simply a master artist's manipulation of fictional characters whose fate doesn't seem to be of truly vital interest to anyone. As a long- time reader of Updike I also find in it many wonderful passages in which he expresses 'life- wisdom' of his own.

Updike's older life style

I am a beginner in Updike writings. I have started with the Rabbit series and I loved them. This collection of stories has a different style. One still sees and sense the playfulness of Updike, however, there is too much nostalgia and melancholy which made me down from time to time. I especially liked 'the Rumor'.

Updike At His Most Sage

This anthology was my introduction to a man who was one of my favorite authors back in the 1990's. The play on words in the title refers not to the literal afterlife of cosmology, but that period of human life when one is past a certain age, and all is done but one still lives, children raised, career finished, premature death no longer a possibility. The tales Updike tells work out like spokes from the hub of this theme. From a set of old married couples vacationing in England during a rare hurricane, to a twenty-something husband from Cincinnati whose wife informs him he is the victim of a mildly-funny but disturbing rumor that he is a homosexual, these stories are well-worth the few days it takes to read through them.

Updike is the Man!

Updike is the greatest English prose artist after Colonel Sirin's great North American campaign! To that reader from Seattle: what do you mean you appreciate good writing?...if one's social squabbles get in the way of loving art, then one is a philistine!

Too good to be true

Too good to be true. Updike's work has never been better, which is to say much. I am an intelligent small-town teenager-turned-man and I look up to Updike quite a bit. Also check out everything else he's written, especially "Toward The End Of Time," which unfairly got bad reviews.