I have rarely encountered fiction that so genially recounts the frailties of old age … In general the characters are flush New Englanders with children and grandchildren, who have the wealth for exotic travel and the luxury of time for reminiscence or, as Updike calls it, ‘personal archaeology.’ Hints of death and dying faintly tinge every story, but there is no pathos or urging to not go gently into that good night; there is just the realist's ironic shrug over the way things are and a healthy appreciation for the largely unrecognized heroism of facing life's decline … My Father's Tears is a self-conscious salute to a grand career of imagining and gorgeously describing our America, along with a wink of gratitude to those readers who have shared the journey.
Of these 18 stories, all but one (an odd travelogue called ‘Morocco,’ dating from 1979) were published in the last decade, and their themes and situations hark back to the author’s earliest autobiographical fiction … Here lies both the triumph and the limitation of these stories: the obsessive recollection of detail for its own sake … Best of all, though, is the knowing resignation of the final story, ‘The Full Glass,’ in which the first-person narrator, approaching 80, takes us through the reduced rituals of the old as they both savor and prepare to give up forever even the simplest animal pleasures.
Superficially, it may seem that Updike has covered this terrain before – unfulfilled parents, aging grandparents, high school reunions, wives, lovers, and children forsaken in the suburban game of musical beds, disoriented American tourists. But Updike keeps it fresh, periodically checking in on the condition not just of the self he values but on racially mixed grandchildren and post-9/11 religious beliefs … The overarching theme of Updike’s last stories is the family diaspora that is a natural but painful passage of man – a dispersal whose final stage is death but whose most effective antidote is memory.
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