Autumn sonatas: Updike’s last stories

FICTION

Toward the end of his life, John Updike, who had been the voice of suburbia for four decades, turned away from middle-class angst and desire to explore darker matters. In his last published novel, "The Widows of Eastwick," Updike, who died in January at the age of 76, returned to the magic-wielding heroines of a previous book and found them robbed of youth, beauty and even, at times, hope.

Updike's posthumous short-story collection, "My Father's Tears and Other Stories," often dwells ruminatively on aging and death, too, and it occasionally glances back to the past with a wistful longing.

Even the collection's only story to be written before the new millennium, "Morocco," looks back on the past with an older man's pained sense of loss. An account of an American family's off-season travel in North Africa in 1969, it first saw print in the November 1979 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, more than two decades before Updike wrote the collection's other 17 stories.

Its narrator is painfully aware of what he has lost since taking that trip. "We had achieved, in Morocco, maximum family compression, and could only henceforth disperse," he says. "Growing up, leaving home, watching your parents divorce -- all, in the decade since, have happened. But on a radiant high platform of the Eiffel Tower I felt us still molded, it seemed, forever together."

Life's brevity is a constant theme in these stories. In "Personal Archaeology," an elderly man peruses his 10-acre property for the past lives it conceals, all the while knowing that his own place in its history is fleeting. "Our bodies," the man realizes, "are a ponderous residue the spirit leaves behind."

Inevitably, the book's meditations on death lead to doubts and grim conclusions. In "The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe," the protagonist is disheartened by scientific research suggesting "that deep space showed not only no relenting in the speed of the farthest galaxies but instead a detectable acceleration, so that an eventual dispersion of everything into absolute cold and darkness could be confidently predicted."

Robbed of "[t]he old hypothetical structures -- God, Paradise and the moral law within," the protagonist slips into a depression that, in turn, drives him further from friends and family, "n his universe of accelerating expansion."