Trust Me
By John Updike
Knopf, 302 pages, $17.95
The Ideal Bakery
By Donald Hall
North Point Press, 138 pages, $14.95
Inventing the Abbotts And Other Stories
By Sue Miller
Harper & Row, 180 pages, $15.95
I have been reading three short story collections by three fine writers at far different stages of their careers. Of the three, John Updike is clearly the master of the short story form (Hall is a poet/critic, Miller a novelist). Updike writes with so much grace and precision that it is impossible not to delight at least to some degree in everything he writes. No contemporary writer has done so much to enrich the genre. If John Cheever was the Dean of the American short story, Updike is surely the crown prince.
But ”Trust Me,” his newest collection, is an amalgamation of too-small bits and pieces; not a single fully satisfactory story among them. This will come as no great shock to readers who have been following his recent work in the New Yorker and elsewhere; still, it is a disappointment. His prose is almost as beautiful as ever–I say ”almost” simply because Updike is a particularly intuitive and orchestrated kind of writer. When one part fails, the rest falls a little, as if in sympathetic adjustment.
Since it`s the first four stories of the book that come closest to success, it is here that Updike`s legendary lapidary prose most shines, in lightning-fast metaphor: ”The chemical scent of a pool always frightened him: blue-green dragon breath.” Aristotle wrote that the great gift of genius was the gift of metaphor; it is one Updike has in abundance. He is also inventive, as is clear from a hospital scene in which a man awakens from anesthesia:
”Earlier, he had found himself in an underground room full of stalactites. His name was being shouted by a big gruff youth. `Hey Bob come on Bob wake up give us a little smile that`s the boy Bob.` There were others besides him stretched out in this catacomb, whose ceiling was festooned with drooping transparent tubes; these were the stalactites.”
Updike has, among other talents (”Hey Bob come on Bob wake up give us a little smile that`s the boy Bob”), the gift of perfect pitch. But all these gifts amount to little without the knack of story-telling, of getting the story right.
Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Updike has maintained the freshness, callowness and urgent shine of youth. It is his material that seems exhausted. This may be because he has lost the center of his fiction: his heroine. In Updike`s early masterpieces (”The Centaur,” ”Pigeon Feathers” and others) the fictional mother was almost always the heroine. Later she was usurped by the fictional wife, but certain characteristics remained the same–the Updike heroine was sharp-tongued, vulnerable, brave, reliably, even brutally, honest. Now Updike has lost that wife; his recent fiction has charted the course of this loss. Nor do I mean to confuse the biographical with the literary; he has lost his fictional wife, and without her the work feels vague and unfocused. The new wife/girlfriend in this collection is sometimes poignant, but never heroic–and heroism, as we all know, is the stuff of great fiction. If God didn`t exist, wrote the philosopher, we would have to invent him, and Updike is bound to invent a new heroic figure for his fiction. The loss otherwise to American short stories is too great to imagine.
Donald Hall`s ”The Ideal Bakery” is an ambitious book, and once in a while a breathtakingly successful one. Among the several fine stories are: the downfall of an aging Don Juan (”The First Woman”); a Christmas remembrance lovely enough to put on the shelf beside Dylan Thomas` ”A Child`s Christmas in Wales” (”Christmas Snow”); a sad love story (”Keat`s Birthday”); and the powerful, earnest, flawed, philosophical last story of the collection,
”Argument and Persuasion.” I think no one can ask consistent success of any book of stories, and this is already high scoring.
It leaves, nonetheless, the problem of more than half the remaining stories of the book, which are to varying degrees less accomplished, and create a strange sense of imbalance in the book. I wish that Hall, a perfectionist in theory, had been just a little harder on himself. A few of the stories are pleasant, if slight (”Widowers` Woods,” ”Mr. Schwartz”)
but ”Revivals” is an ugly, angry, sordid little story whose bitter aftertaste lingers a long while, and ”The Figure of the Woods” is no better than any well-crafted workshop story, and as predictable.
Still, as a first book of stories by an established and talented poet, the collection is a worthy debut. The best of these stories are haunting, a few may even prove to be enduring. No one has the right to expect more from the jigsaw amalgamation that is a book of short stories. In addition to his poetry and essays, Hall has proven himself a fine hand at children`s stories and now at adult fiction as well. His work shows his high craftsmanship, his ability to think and feel deeply on a wide range of subjects, and these are not small virtues.
Like Hall`s ”The Ideal Bakery,” Sue Miller`s ”Inventing the Abbotts And Other Stories” has a less then ideal title story, and I hope it will not put too many off this strong first collection. Miller`s main concern–I would call it an obsession, if that didn`t sound pejorative–is the love (and hate and what-have-you) between men and women. In this sense, ”Inventing The Abbotts” is an even more truly thematic book than Updike`s, and more clearly the work of a novelist, one who wants and needs to look at all sides and facets of a question.
”Tyler and Brina,” for instance, is a wonderful, dark story of betrayal and infidelity; ”Leaving Home” is about old and young love; ”Calling” is about a destructive love and compulsive obsession. But two of the finest stories are love stories of a different kind altogether. ”Appropriate Affect” is about an old woman who briefly, terrifyingly breaks free of the usual constraints that confine her behavior and make her ”loveable” to others. The last and best story of the book, ”The Quality of Life” is a family love story, and it shows everything Miller can do best–tenderness and humor, clear-sighted observation, suppressed passion and celebration.
Miller is not always at her best in these stories. She sometimes leans too hard on her material, and she can over-write like nobody`s business: ”The punch and cookies . . . tasted irrevocably foreign.” A few of the stories, like the title story, are predictable, not fully accomplished, and others feel like exercises. But the good of the best work far outweighs the bad; what Miller shows, above all else, is promise. If she will follow her own best instincts and steer away from anything that is easy or trendy in her work, she may well write something first-rate someday. ”Inventing the Abbotts,”
meanwhile, may be taken as a promissory note.
