My Father's Tears by John Updike

In my late 20’s, I read the first two novels of John Updike's Rabbit Run novels. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is a former basketball star bouncing between youth and adulthood in post WWII America. At age 26, Rabbit abandons his wife and young son and moves in with a prostitute. Updike depicts a world of immature characters, endless lust, serial adultery, and permanent personal isolation.

Though Updike’s writing captivated me, his characters angered me. They were neither wise nor mature. Updike did not seem to offer any insight for transcending the hollowness he describes. The books depressed me and I did not finish the series.

Twenty years later, I read The Maple Stories, published in 2009. Over three decades, Updike had written 18 stories about Joan and Richard Maple’s marriage and divorce. His detailed, clear sentences still amazed me. In these stories about the painful unraveling of the Maples’ marriage, Updike’s pen seemed less pointed. His characters were more appealing and there was a softer, gentler acknowledgement of their suffering. The story Separating, in particular, moved me.

The Maple Stories were on my mind when My Father’s Tears was published after Updike’s death in 2009. Unlike many authors I admire, Updike doesn’t focus on developing his characters’ psychological etiology. Clues about childhood development or traumatic experiences are not scattered in his stories. His books are not psychological in the ways that I appreciate.

Yet, in this last collection of stories, he beautifully captures the ruminations of an older man reflecting on his life. Yes, Updike’s constant themes of unfaithful spouses and sexual restlessness become irritating.  However, these final stories focus more on his parents, grandparents, kids, and grandkids. He looks back where he came from and tells the stories that made him who he is. He describes recognizable events and makes them feel sacred.

In the title story, My Father’s Tears, Updike evokes the deep unspoken love of a father for his college bound son. They are saying good-bye at a train station. The son says, “…I was going somewhere, and he was seeing me go. I was growing in my own sense of myself, and to him I was getting smaller. He had loved me; it came to me as never before. It was something that had not needed to be said before, and now his tears were saying it.  Before, in all the years and small adventures we had shared, there was the sensation stemming from him, that life was a pickle, and he and I were, for a time, in the pickle together.” This father knows that his son will not return home except to visit. The son continues, “But my father did foresee, the glitter in his eyes told me, the time consumes us--- that the boy I had been was dying if not already dead, and we would have less and less to do with each other.  My life had come out of his, and now I was stealing away with it.”  

My favorite story is Walking with Elizanne. It is the best story I have read about a high school reunion; in this case, that of David Kern, Updike’s alter ego. “Though the year 2000 inevitably figured in yearbook predictions and jokes, nobody had really believed that a year so futuristic would ever become the present. They were seventeen and eighteen; their fiftieth class reunion was impossibly remote. Now it was here, here in the function room of Fiorvante’s, a restaurant in West Alton, a half-mile from the stately city hospital where many of them had been born and now one of them lay critically ill.” Updike captures the determined denial of young people toward the inevitable passing of time.  But would it have changed anything if David Kern and his classmates understood that their 50th reunion would quickly be upon them?

The most poignant line is when David encounters a woman at the reunion named Elizanne. She reminds David that he had once walked her home from their date and kissed her. As she describes that evening to him, he can’t recall it. Later he reflects on their conversation and remembers their date of 50 years ago.  He says, “Elizanne, he wanted to ask her, what does it mean, this enormity of our having been children and being old, living next door to death?”

Updike’s ability, in a few sentences, to evoke emotion, capture places, and stimulate empathy is stunning. He does not offer a transcendent moment or resolution, but he offers his readers a moving experience. He is like a hiker who runs ahead to the top of the mountain and comes back to tell the rest of the hikers about the view from the peak. It’s not a perfect view, there are clouds in the sky and obstacles on the trail, but if we are lucky, that is where his readers are heading. His clear and haunting prose invites his readers to ponder the meaning of their lives before they reach a point where they cannot change paths. Updike does not have the answers, but he points out the signposts along the way.