by John Updike
First published 2004
In small-town Olinger, Pennsylvania, a ten-year-old boy walks the grid streets that bend around the central avenue. He grows older through these stories, moving from childhood games to teenage awkwardness to adult complications. The boy becomes a man who marries, has children, and watches his family fracture. He encounters two kinds of love, two kinds of women, in the fictional town of Tarbox, Massachusetts, where Puritan history collides with modern morality. Some stories follow him into experimental territory at the edges of domestic life. Others show him single again, unmoored from the certainties that once anchored him. Through 103 stories published between 1954 and 1975, mostly in The New Yorker, this man traces the common American path from small-town boy to suburban husband to something more uncertain. Each story captures the texture of ordinary moments and the weight of transient experiences that shape a life.
Genres: short-stories, literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: character-study, slice-of-life
Period: 1953-1975
864 pages · Hardcover · Knopf